Joseph Ghosn’s La Monte Young: Minimalism and After

No style of late twentieth-century music has provoked as much controversy as minimalism. To its supporters, its directness and accessibility restores the severed link between composer and audience. To its detractors, it is maddeningly simple-minded, no better than pop music masquerading as art. And to its creator, the term itself is burdened with pejorative connotations.

– K. Robert Schwarz (Minimalists)

Speak too loudly about minimalist music and you will risk becoming the object of derision. It does not matter that some of the genre’s key composers have achieved notoriety and a certain commercial success. Minimalism, as a musical genre, remains underappreciated and misunderstood.

Kyle Gann, in Audio Culture, proposes a framework with which to approach the genre by listing its dominant musical ideas, devices and techniques. His “family of character traits” includes static harmony, repetition, additive process, phase-shifting, permutational process, steady beat, static instrumentation, linear transformation, metamusic, pure tuning, non-Western influences and audible structure. Concerning the latter, Gann writes, “part of minimalism’s early mystique was to have no secrets, to hold the music’s structure right in the audience’s face, and have that be listened to.”

Minimalist music is indeed a brutally honest form of art. And there is probably no better definition of the genre than the one La Monte Young proposes: “That which is created with a minimum of means.”

Young is generally regarded as the first minimalist composer and his importance in late twentieth-century music is difficult to overstate. Much has been written about the American composer although most of it has only been published in the English language. This situation has now been remedied with the publication of Joseph Ghosn’s La Monte Young by Le mot et le reste.

Ghosn, a former Inrockuptibles, discovered Young after skimming the back of a Spacemen 3 album. The band had appropriated a short text from the composer and it is via their 1990 album that Ghosn first experienced the profound strangeness inherent to the name La Monte Young.

And thus begins the first chapter of Ghosn’s biography of the minimalist composer. This is a personal book borne out of a deep appreciation of minimalist music. In this book, Ghosn does not uncover new critical information, nor does he offer a radical reassessment of Young’s legacy on modern music. What he does offer is an accessible and informative survey of the composer’s key life experiences and pivotal relationships. The tone is friendly and generous and this makes La Monte Young an enjoyable read.

In this book, Ghosn adroitly discusses the ambivalent rapport Young has maintained with his former acolytes and collaborators. Sensitive questions concerning the ownership and authorship of early collaborative works (i.e. The Theatre of Eternal Music) are posed once again and Ghosn is insistent that answers should come from the creators of those recordings and performances.

Ghosn also pertinently allocates a considerable portion of the biography section of the book to discussing the symbiotic relationship that binds La Monte Young and Marian Zazeela together. “Dans l’art contemporain et la musique contemporaine, parmi cette avant-garde de la fin des années soixante, ils étaient indubitablement des mavericks, des outsiders, des punks avant l’heure. ” It is clear from these lines that this is a book that refuses to limit itself to Young.

And that is why this affordable Le mot et le reste publication should appeal to both francophones and Anglophones. Ghosn’s La Monte Young includes a commented discography of the composer’s solo and collaborative works. But it also includes a 33-page selected discography of minimalist and post-minimalist music. The works of Terry Riley, Tony Conrad, Phillip Glass, John Cale and a few others are discussed in both the text and the selected discography section. The latter is further enriched by mentions of other composers and artists whose work has served to validate the importance of minimalism in the modern music landscape.

Ghosn’s radar covers an extensive territory that stretches across time and sub-genres – from Lou Reed’s Metal Machine Music to Eliane Radigue’s Trilogie de la mort or from Franco Battiato to Jim O’Rourke. Other artists mentioned include Charlemagne Palestine, Earth, Sunn O))), Keith Fullerton Whitman and Jeffrey Cantu-Ledesma of Root Strata to name but a few.

La Monte Young is, therefore, both a concise biography and a much welcomed guide to minimalist music. It is an opened door to a world that has only recently found its way to the surface thanks to the proliferation of online resources and the enthusiasm of audiophiles who have taken it upon themselves to reissue, or make available for the first time, recordings that appeared destined for obscurity.

Visit Le mot et le reste for more information.

Excerpt below :
La Monte Young – from Dream House 78′ 17″