La Monte Young, now 86, has released a lot of music in recent years.
In 2018, this composer and multi-instrumentalist, famous as the precursor of minimalism, released a six-hour and 24-minute version of his gigantic work ‘The Well-Tuned Piano’. Last year, a significant portion of its lean back catalog, some of which is long out of print on CD, reached the digital platform Bandcamp.
Recently, Young finally released a recording of his breakthrough composition, “Trio for Strings,” which he originally wrote in 1958 while he was entering a stint at the University of California at Berkeley.
All this activity is a bit of a surprise, because the student composer who shocked colleagues with “Trio” — a nearly hour-long piece that used almost exclusively long, sustained notes — is known for not release albums. For decades you had to track down a bootleg of the piece to experience it.
The series of official unavailability finally ended late last year, when the Dia Art Foundation released a four-LP box set of a 182-minute live performance of “Trio” recorded during a concert series in 2015.
Over the decades, Young wasn’t alone on the material; he constantly worked on it, even devising a new tuning with proper intonation, to better express some of its harmonic content. Speaking to William Robin for DailyExpertNews prior to the live performance captured on the new release, Young said of the newly tuned and extended version: “It’s as it really should have been, and can be and will be. “
By this time “Trio” had been conceived for an enlarged string quartet with two cellists, to avoid having to tune double registers on impractically long pieces. The new box set lists the compilation dates as “1958-1984-1998-2001-2005-2015”, a 57-year pregnancy.
The new release is undeniably pricey, $196. In addition to the four LPs, the box also includes download code for a single-track, CD-quality file of the three-hour work, via Bandcamp. (Young’s other digital albums on Bandcamp range between $14 and $49 — the most expensive being the price for an audio version of that six-hour performance of “The Well-Tuned Piano”.)
Is this “Trio” worth it? I got my copy for free — but as someone who paid second-hand prices for fledgling bootlegs and sold-out discs in my pre-critic days, I can’t imagine not saving up to buy it if I had to.
The journey begins with a 33-minute exposition portion, which very gradually enumerates Young’s organizing 12-tone sequence. Compared to the recap of these notes around two hours and nine minutes, the input of certain notes is harder during the exposition.
But the players – Charles Curtis and Reynard Rott on cellos, with Erik Carlson and Christopher Otto both doubles on viola and violin – have such a precise sense of intonation that the material retains its blissfully harmonious profile. That’s true even during the most exciting passage of the exposition, a pompous tetrachord of B, F sharp, F and E coming out in the 16th minute. (The lack of any dissonant acoustic beats is due to the correct intonation tuning and the precision of these players.)
About two hours later – after the serial transformations of the exposition have run their course – the same chord reappears during the recap. But it’s beautiful in a different way now, thanks to changes in intonation.
Otto, the violinist, wrote in an email that this is his favorite passage in the performance, citing “how the whole sonority fuses and resonates” and added: “We also stagger the bow changes in a way that a becomes a beautiful meditative ritual.”
This recording of “Trio” is essential in helping us understand not only Young’s growth, but minimalism as well. Otto, himself a composer, has taken Young’s insights and used them in his own writing practice, such as with the recent release on the Greyfade label “rag′sma” and in his dizzyingly throbbing drone composition “Violin Octet”.
“I was interested in just intonation and making connections with mathematical structures, especially influenced by Babbitt and Xenakis,” Otto said, “and Young’s music really made me aware of the richness in apparent stillness.”
Let that be a warning to anyone who is impatient. If you try to move forward to a supposedly dramatic climax, it won’t pay off. In Young’s work, you cannot feel the peaks of intensity without absorbing the whole.
And besides, you miss a lot more that transports. During the long developmental portion of “Trio,” I love a few shorter groups of notes that reflect Young’s early enthusiasm for the Second Viennese School—particularly Webern’s epigrammatic style. That you can also hear bluesy Americana in some harmonies speaks of the world’s broad stylistic synthesis.
However, an essay by Young in the accompanying booklet expresses his thoughts on the limitations of serialism. “Composers like Webern, Pierre Boulez and Karlheinz Stockhausen wrote small, time-distributed points,” he writes. “The tonal aspects of the system were underexposed and the democratic aspects of the system were emphasized, probably because it was so inharmonious within the equal temperament system to hold the tones for a long time.”
That is a keenly observed insight into 20th century music. But while I was processing this expanded new recording of ‘Trio’, I also had to think about recent long-running works in the film world. After watching Paul Schrader’s latest film, “The Card Counter” – a hypnotic slow burner starring Oscar Isaac and Tiffany Haddish – I picked up Schrader’s book “Transcendental Style in Film”.
This text from the early 1970s reflects Schrader’s thoughts on directors who move slowly and resolutely, yet unpredictably. Even more intriguing is a new foreword he wrote for the last edition of the book, in 2018. Here Schrader distinguishes the “transcendental” style of Ozu and others from what came after, namely the “slow cinema” movement – think directors like Apichatpong Weerasethakul and Hou Hsiao-hsien — that’s well known to film festival visitors.
“They push the viewer away from the ‘experience’, that is, from immediate emotional engagement,” Schrader writes of slow cinema, adding, “This differs from modernist remote devices in the other arts to the same degree as cinema differs from earlier art forms. ”
I underlined my copy and made a note: “Paul Schrader must hear ‘Threesome for strings.’”
With this latest version of “Trio” with clean intonation, Young has perfected his response to the serial tradition. And in doing so, the composer has taken a reverse route from what Schrader has seen in the film world: Young began with works that confronted audiences with slow, conceptual provocations, and has since steadily shifted his insights to even more expressive, transcendental endings – be it for his final performance of “The Well-Tuned Piano”, in his thumping blues rock album “Just Stompin'” or in this new “Trio”.
Or at least that’s my opinion. The composer may have a different analysis. But now that more of Young’s music is in circulation, a wider community of listeners can begin to compare our own notes. Now that I experience the final duo of G and C in the cellos, I hear an even wider sense of emotional distance traveled in the course of the work. (This conclusion could even work as an alternate soundtrack for the final shot of “The Card Counter.”)
To my ears, Young has rethought his student practice — the original minimalist Big Bang when it comes to sustained tones — and made room for more feeling and more emotional release. That he did this while extending his length to a new demanding scope makes his achievement all the more remarkable.
