La Monte Young - Influences

Influences

His first musical influence came in his early childhood in Bern. Young relates that "the very first sound that I recall hearing was the sound of wind blowing under the eaves and around the log extensions at the corners of the log cabin". Continuous sounds—man-made as well as natural—fascinated him as a child. The four pitches he later named the "Dream chord", on which he based many of his mature works, came from his early age appreciation of the continuous sound made by the telephone poles in Bern.

Jazz is one of his main influences and until 1956 he planned to devote his career to it. At first, Lee Konitz and Warne Marsh influenced his alto saxophone playing style, and later John Coltrane shaped Young's use of the sopranino saxophone. Jazz was, together with Indian music, an important influence on the use of improvisation in his works after 1962. La Monte Young discovered Indian music in 1957 on the campus of UCLA. He cites Ali Akbar Khan (sarod) and Chatur Lal (tabla) as particularly significant. The discovery of the tambura, which he learned to play with Pandit Pran Nath, was a decisive influence in his interest in long sustained sounds. Young also acknowledges the influence of Japanese music, especially Gagaku, and Pygmy music.

La Monte Young discovered classical music rather late, thanks to his teachers at university. He cites Béla Bartók, Igor Stravinsky, Pérotin, Léonin, Claude Debussy and Organum musical style as important influences, but what made the biggest impact on his compositions was the serialism of Arnold Schoenberg and Anton Webern.

Young was also keen to pursue his musical endeavors with the help of experimental aids. Cannabis, LSD and peyote played an important part in Young's life from mid-1950s onwards, when he was introduced to them by Terry Jennings and Billy Higgins. He said that "everybody knew and worked with was very much into drugs as a creative tool as well as a consciousness-expanding tool". This was the case with the musicians of the Theatre of Eternal Music, with whom he "got high for every concert: the whole group". He considers that the cannabis experience helped him open up to where he went with Trio for Strings, though sometimes it proved a disadvantage when performing anything which required keeping track of the number of elapsed bars. He commented on the subject:

These tools can be used to your advantage if you're a master of ... If used wisely — the correct tool for the correct job — they can play an important role... It allows you to go within yourself and focus on certain frequency relationships and memory relationships in a very, very interesting way.