LaMonte Young

One of the principal architects of the minimalist aesthetic, La Monte Young was among the true innovators of 20th century music, his rejection of traditional melody and structure in favor of hypnotic drone epics influencing not only the avant-garde music created in his wake, but also proving seminal in the development of punk, Krautrock and ambient. Young was born in Bern, Idaho in 1935, beginning his studies of the alto saxophone at age seven. After the family relocated to Los Angeles, in high school he played alongside the likes of Don Cherry and Billy Higgins, continuing his exploration of European classical and contemporary composition at Los Angeles City College and later UCLA. In time, Young also began delving into the classic musics of India and Japan; the barren atmospheres evoked by the music of Anton Webern were another key influence. In 1959, Young composed Trio for Strings, regularly cited as the earliest work in the minimalist canon; the piece, with its emphasis on lengthy, sustained tones -- intercut with equally extended rests -- baffled his professors at the University of California, Berkeley, and in the wake of several other similarly controversial projects he relocated to New York City. There he studied electronic music, in time joining Fluxus, a loose confederacy of conceptual artists -- among them John Cage, George Macuinas, George Brecht and Yoko Ono -- dedicated to re-establishing the arts in new and different contexts. In 1962, Young first began to conceive of the Dream House, a continual sound and light environment related to his composition The Four Dreams of China; the project remained in limbo for some years, but was a clear forerunner of the principle to guide his subsequent career -- music with no beginning and no end. At the same time,...