The Tabula (not so) Rasa: La Monte Young's Serial Works ... - Cipa

48 Jeremy Grimshaw
Perhaps the Trio affords us a lesson in how perceived historiographic polarities
shape our perception, reception, and categorization of musical styles. How
would history have read differently, for example, if Young had composed the Trio for
Strings in the summer of 1958, but then had gone to Princeton instead of Berkeley?
What if Milton Babbitt, the teacher of the composer under such an imagined circumstance,
consequently had taken Andy Warhol’s place at the public premiere of the
Trio? Would history (to the extent that Young’s music has been chronicled) have
placed more emphasis on the work’s serial properties, and/or simply accepted the
long tones as a logical extrapolation of Webernian sensibility? Would we so readily
lump Young’s long tones together with the repeated patterns and rhythmic drive of
Reich or Glass? Would we call Young a serial composer, and the Dream House a serial
composition? Would Young have extended his ontological repositioning of music—from
the realm of the ideal to the realm of the real—into the specific sonic reality
of his own experience? That is, would Young the Serialist have been as willing to
identify the austere soundscapes of his compositions so closely with the soundscapes
of his own biography?
Works Cited
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. “Twelve-Tone Invariants as Compositional Determinants.” Musical Quarterly
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Garrat, Sheryl. “Fun With Monotony.” The Face July 1986: 37.
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Lang, David. Personal conversation. 20 April 2002.
Matthew-Walker, Robert. “Glass Roots.” CD Review Feb. 1992: 18.
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Glass. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2000.
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