TONES, EXTRA-LONG

The bad link is FIXED now. DL via Mediafire. I've been away for a few days, so I couldn't do it earlier. Thanks for your patience.

As stated in the comments section, this version is from 1984, performed in Cologne by the Trio Basso.

In 1958, when John Cage worked on his anarchic "Concert for Piano and Orchestra", young La Monte took off in a different direction with his composition "Trio for Strings". Inspired by Indian Ragas and Japanese Gagaku, this 12-tone piece conveys a strong feeling of musical stasis.

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"This serial piece, with its silences and long tones, paved the way for music based on tonality, drone and infinite time spans, brushing aside elaborate formal development in favor of the contemplation of pure sound."

David Paul, Seconds Magazine No. 50, NYC 1999

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"After completing UCLA, I got my BA in 1958. Over the summer I had permission to compose on the large organ in Royce Hall. I had the idea that I wanted to write something with long sustained tones. I wanted to actually hear the tones sounding. The idea to write a piece with long sustained tones came to me totally by intuition. It was not something that I calculatedly decided I should try. It wasn't an experiment. It was not a lark. It was something that came to me totally through inspiration and intuition. Something that was inspired from above, and I felt that I must write long sustained tones. I had to do this. It was my calling. I began to write them.

I had written some long sustained tones in the middle section of For Brass in 1957. These tones were so long that it prompted Lucas Foss to once say, "La Monte Young lived on Zen standard time; a second to him was just a heartbeat in the life of the Buddha." He was very supportive of me, whereas nobody else at UCLA was really understanding of this kind of work with serial composition. He was understanding of it, and he was encouraging me to continue even though I was not at the time directly having a class with him. I had previously had classes with him, and so we knew each other, and he was very supportive of me.

So, in the summer of '58 I wrote the Trio for Strings at the great organ in Royce Hall at UCLA. I actually finished writing out the transparencies, the "onion skins", on Sept. 5 after I had already arrived at the Berkeley campus. I was just finding my way around at Berkeley. I showed this composition to my new composition teacher Seymour Schiffrin, and he expressed concern about the piece. He was having these private music calls for the graduate students in his composition class at his home. It was a very interesting composition class, because not only did it include me, but it included Pauline Oliveros, David Del Tredici, Lauren Rush, Charles McDermott, and Terry Riley who was auditing the class. ... Meanwhile though, Seymour was concerned. I didn't know what I was hearing with these long sustained tones, even though I had written it at the organ mind you. He arranged to have a performance of the work at his house, which was nice. The violinist was Oleg Kovalenko, the violist was John Graham, and the cellist was Bonnie Thompson. In any case, they played it and I was very happy to hear it. Clearly I had known what I was writing and so I was able to talk about the piece. The piece became a constant topic of conversation at Berkeley forever after that, especially in that class. I venture to say that none of the people in that class would have ever gone on to do what they did had they not heard the Trio for Strings at that time."

An Interview with La Monte Young and Marian Zazeela, by Gabrielle Zuckerman, American Public Media, July 2002

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"I think that this kind of sense of time has to do with getting away from the earthly sense of direction which goes from birth to death, in other words, like developmental form, and has to do with static form and moving up into, by up I mean like vertically, as in Vertical Hearing, moving, then, up through the sound of a chord or the sound of a tamboura or the sound of an interval that's sustained, using this to create a drone state of mind as I described. By using this to create a drone state of mind, it provides a means toward achieving a state of meditation or an altered state of consciousness that can allow you to be more directly in touch with universal structure and a higher sense of order. And that once one achieves this kind of state of consciousness, in order to maintain it, one is not trying to get back down to the earthly level and get back involved with directional, climactic form, developmental form, one wants to stay in this more static state. The drone constants are very supportive and allow you to use them as positioning points of reference, to remain aloft, so to speak, in this special state of consciousness and awareness."

La Monte Young & Marian Zazeela: an interview by Ian Nagoski.

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Stasis