Hearing in the Present Tense: On La Monte Young's Orphic Revolution
A refuge fashioned out of darkest longing
Entered, tremulo, the doorpost aquiver,
There You have fashioned them a temple for their hearing.
—Rainer Maria Rilke, Sonnets to Orpheus
In the years between my 2008 essay on drone music & today, little has changed in the art form. As if frozen in time, my argument then stands still—that drone music has not developed as an art form since Young's Dream Houses, & has mostly been barbarized into a muddy ambience and cheap theatrics. This may come as a surprise to many who've witnessed the growth of ambient & experimental music through cottage industries & into the mainstream. And yet, contrary to lazy conflations, ambient music is not drone. In many ways, the innocuous background character of ambient is counter to the clarified, ecstatic, & acute beauty of drone as Young conceived & practiced it, which sharpened instead of convoluted listening perception. Not to mention that the continuation of classical or ancient practices of modal music, north indian raga, & organum that drone’s partly founded upon, is more often than not subject to barbarization instead of fulfillment, as often happens elsewhere in contemporary art’s interpretation of history. With the recent death of Catherine Christer Hennix, there are now scant few musicians in the world who comprehend and can transmit the true conceptual significance of dronal form, let alone its tricky implementation in practice. For artists—& as a sectarian avant-garde school Dream House is for no one but musical artists—the state of the art becomes historically sedimented into the introspective practices of scattered initiates.
The original idea of drone music in the dream houses—aka “composite sound waveform environments”—was that the listener be exposed to novel harmonies constructed with sine waves that are tangible as physical standing waves. It would serve at least a double purpose—the standing waves create a palpable sensory experience as the listener mixes parts of a massive vertical chord via their own bodily movement through differing wavelengths, while the subjectively evocative musical harmonies prevented it from being merely a science fair experiment. But Young had also stated that in order to achieve a “drone state of mind,” the tonality needed to be constructed with rational number relationships (just intonation) so that the ear has constant reference to truly repeating waveforms that reinforce pitch relationships in a way compatible with auditory perception. While this is potentially the absolute zenith of rationalization of art & reified music—a music constructed on ratios is literally rationalized music—the resulting “paradisiacal” listening experience kept “living music,” and what Adorno called the “wakeful ear” alive, paradoxically pointing beyond the calculated mode of music perfected by e.g. Stockhausen and the mid-century avant-garde, as well as commercially rationalized culture elsewhere. In many ways, Young’s work with ratios and numbers is an art that explores the possible beauty of proportion, like a Mondrian of music. In many ways, Young, who considers himself an “American Mystic,” a kind of Terence Malick of music—continues a very modern practice of auditory invention that is perhaps best framed as American ingenuity, historically in tune with e.g. Benjamin Franklin’s inventions of novel instruments like the glass armonica, which also pursued a more ethereal sonority before it was relegated to the dustbin of history. There is a story of early Americans holding hands in a circle while a current of electricity runs through them, thus stimulating a spectacle of phosphenes in their closed eyes. True or not, using the modern magic of electricity to induce a colorful fantasia is an aspect of Young’s work, which also has tuned to the electrical grid’s 60Hz hum.
More explicitly and deeply musical, Young is an Appolonian or Orphic musician, the extent to which Orpheus was in pursuit of halcyon beauty, “by orderliness and grave earnestness” (Plutarch) [1]. Young seems to grasp this Orphic aspect, judging by the explicitly Orphic themes concluding The Well Tuned Piano, and of course Apollo was the god of dreams. Dream House is clearly in Apollo’s estate. While Young is generally considered a Pythagorean, his character runs a bit deeper: the lyrical qualities of his music render him more an Orphic character. Orpheus was a reformer of primitive, ritualistic music, transforming it via intellectualism and gracefulness; there has always been something reformist, or perhaps revolutionary, about Young's project, which is why it is galvanizing. Young's reformation has also necessitated the rescuing of scholarship and intellectual music from academia, returning to music education a sectarian Orphic scholasticism that was perfected in the Pythagoras school. Young has shown in practice that to be an intellectual artist is very different from being an academic one. Musicians either love or hate Young. Those who dislike him the most are the ones with a more ritualistic value of music, e.g. the Dionysianism supposedly embodied in pop and experimental music. However, what the skeptics are allergic to in Young’s revolution and purification process is the asceticism inherent in Orphic or Pythagorean music, and this aversion is not something that can be easily ignored. After all, there was always something sadistic and resentful about Apollo, judging from his flaying of Marsyas. Yet it is not without its analytical gaze, studious interest and immersiveness that is beyond cruelty. The slaying itself is beautiful, because it is likely for science and healing. There is truth in the appeal of drone music to healing forms such as sound baths and binaural beats—which is exactly why it’s so important to sincerely do it right, and not merely fake it like an actor.
Bartolomeo Manfredi, Apollo and Marsyas, 1616-20. Saint Louis Art Museum
Yet, aesthetic experience alone is the judge. “Just intonation” practitioners are always keen to stress the euphonic excitement of its tonality against arguments that their music is more math than art. Sure, math is present, just as science holds Apollo’s dissection knife. But it is a means. This form of accurately repeating waveforms with a physiological basis, arranged into clearly related harmonies with basic sine waves is what Young called “hearing in the present tense.” And we can imagine—in the listening experience—that the halcyon music in Orpheus’s Elysian Fields was indeed the beating heart of such presence, if only indirectly because Orphism was perhaps the first aesthetic philosophy to postulate something beyond the present. Perhaps this is Young's advancement of Pythagorean & Orphic ideas—ie. it’s not simply Pythagoras continued, but changed via modern values. For example, Walter Benjamin’s modern theory of Messianic time as acute experience of the present comes to mind here, and no mere progressive-reformer artist is an artist of the present. Contrary to the inherently abstract music of almost all other cultures that lives for other times, the past & future are not really factors in Dream House experience. Young has said that “time is my medium,” and it is time—in the clarified form of pitch—that is the overarching subject of his musical experience. Not only do traditional instruments obscure this listening perception of pitch with their inherently too-complex harmonics, but most synthesizers do as well, offering non-sine waveforms with overly complex harmonics that convolute harmonic relationships. Even Young wasn’t truly able to explore harmonic relationships like this until a custom instrument was built for him in the 80s, & really it wasn’t until the late 90s with the advent of the personal computer that stable sine waves were available to today’s composers [2]. While there was a brief moment of embracing these new possibilities of stable oscillators in pursuit of harmonic order, by the mid-00s, most musicians had instead opted to go analog-retro, settling for e.g. imitating hipster middlebrow electronic music—often in a thinly veiled attempt at notoriety—more than Young’s halcyon school. Over the last decade, ambient music has emerged as a major music genre, while the “drone state of mind” has in actuality not been explored. Most musicians felt it too boring to pursue in its extreme state—blissfully ignorant of the fact that all other forms of music are just as compositionally rationalized, but not as transparently. In an anti-intellectual society, most have underdeveloped conceptual imagination to indulge Young’s ideas, let alone play or learn them musically in any practical sense. Some had tried to master the art form, but the learning curve proved too steep, especially considering the “drone state of mind” was a theoretical proposition with questionable fulfillment—to commit to such a thing is no small endeavor. Some just fake transcendence, because so many musicians today are merely actors. Not so Young.
The drone state of mind—hearing in the present tense—is an entirely unique theoretical proposition. It is a sort of attempt at something like extreme consonance, or extreme romantic music. Kyle Gann has thoroughly charted the harmonic innovations of Young's sine wave installations, considering it the “outer edge of consonance.” The sine wave installations are the most tonal pieces ever written, they are nothing but tonality. Young’s historical intervention was to reintroduce “living hearing” as Adorno had conceived it—the subjective, unquantifiable experience of listening reflection that had been choked out by serialism and further rationalizations of music in all forms. Nothing short of a new paradigm of listening is proposed. If Young is correct that we haven’t ever truly even heard harmony, because equal temperament and most available instruments have non-repeating, convoluted vibrations that the ear can’t truly process, the implications are so profound that all other music made hitherto appears like a mere sketch for music. Young’s thesis proposes a revolution in listening consciousness. It tries to take us out of most music's “this-follows-that” pathos, urging us to appreciate tonality now. Young has stated that he operates on the principle of bringing the listener to heaven—but consider it this way—his grasping of far away distant overtones and bringing them into listening range is akin to grasping stars and bringing them into the same aesthetic space. It is not the objective sound of nature or harmony of the spheres, it is an adventurous mastery over nature. The Well-Tuned Piano is like juggling with stars. It is an adventure into far away dissonant tonality and bringing it home. He makes the universe feel livable, because he’s made it visible, audible.
In many ways Young’s art is a recognition of Schoenberg’s theory of tonality—Schoenberg described music as a kind of gaseous form in so far as every tone implies others and can cycle around indefinitely. In other words, it is close to the heart of modern aesthetics that finds form and tone valuable in itself, and not for something else. Not only that, but as an actual mastery of the form, it is exquisitely pleasurable, as music should be. It is this finest art for art’s sake beauty that postmodern and contemporary art’s socially deranged scabrousness does not care for, perhaps has no ear for, or simply is ignorant of. Yet it is music as the exuberantly euphonic essence of life, without which life itself would be a mistake. Certainly not worthy of reproducing. And this is some of Young’s Romanticism, his too late Romanticism. Part of the myth of Orpheus is that after his murder & decapitation his head kept singing beautifully as he drifted down the river. That is, we arrive after the action has ended, we are not participants in the scene that is being sung about. Like poetry, the beauty of music is due to its afterlife character. Part of the beauty is in the literally free-floating nature of it, drifting away and not towards us. It is tragic, and that is fine, it has not lost its compellingness, but gained profundity via reflection. We are almost relieved of the demand that we be actively involved, and a great expanse of other possibilities open up to the imagination. Likewise, the relieving mastery of Young’s music, paired with its lateness—late modernism—is responsible for its beauty. Perhaps this is what Apollo learns from studying Silenu’'s student Marsyas, so sincerely and competently.
John William Waterhouse, Nymphs Finding The Head Of Orpheus, 1900, Private Collection
Odilon Redon, Head of Orpheus in the Water, 1881, Kroller Muller
Young was influenced by at least two other Schoenberg insights, be it indirectly or directly. One being Schoenberg’s writing on repetition as essential to the comprehension of music, though of course Schoenberg wasn’t necessarily embracing it. Schoenberg recognized that repetition was essential to not only music’s ability to relate, but also its clarification of memory, using Strauss as an example. Young's emphasis on simple repeating waveforms is the most extreme form of repetition—for repetition is what acoustically defines tone—and the clearer that repetition is presented, the more that's available for the ear to train itself on. Schoenberg thought it would take a very, very long time for his music to repeat itself in that way, whereas Young aims to not miss a single repetition. However, they operate on the same sense of physics. The other insight being the primacy of the idea. Schoenberg thought that technique or virtuosity without a guiding idea was backwards and inessential to music. Young had criticized other artists for lacking intellectual clarity in the 60s, saying they had no guiding idea. Bear in mind it wasn’t Orpheus’s heart or hair or hips, not his actors pose, but his head that kept singing beautifully, the home of his artistic brain. An intellect was important—essential—to the greatest musician who ever lived.
But Young's evocative beauty is very appealing for those who are not fulfilled by culture as it is. In many ways, such a proposition plays on the nature of modern humans who are generally speaking alienated from the present and feel like something is not quite right, perhaps totally false—even tonality is stranger than it should be, even consonance & fulfillment is dissonant & unfulfilling. Young had also wagered that such new harmonic arrangements can instill new emotions, the extent to which harmony is in large part responsible for the emotional impact of music. Young's attempt to find musical emotions—via new harmonic intervals—adequate to the complicated and inarticulate feelings of our present continues what Trotsky called “Feeling the world anew.” For instance, the focus on harmonic sevenths in much of his music seems to play on the wandering, unfulfilled homelessness of dissonant humanity in our age, which is not likely to find easy resolution in anything. This leading, wandering tonality creates an extremely profound tension when implemented within the static Dream House drone, which is in large part why the music is so compelling. In other words, there is actually an art to the sine wave installations, which are perhaps too often reduced to acoustics. Whereas Young had postulated the ensuing generations may grow up in all kinds of differently themed dream houses, we can frame more the particularity of his theme as a reflection of our historical moment—a novel tension of stasis & wandering. But as no one other than Young has really made a drone artwork of any significance, who could judge whether it is a true shift in perception or merely an exercise in theory? By a strange turn of fate, extreme consonance has become a form of dissonance.
While there a potentially very profound physiological reason for the drone state of mind, the art form is also aesthetically elegant. While many might claim it “boring” to simply arrange sine waves & let them play themselves, to others this is an elegant & poetic art form as inexhaustible in its possibilities as it is beautiful in its simplicity. Young's aesthetic values are clarity & beauty, which is anathema to today's common “experimental” musicians who value obfuscation, ugliness, muddying the timbral waters to appear profound … all in the academic pursuit of “subversion.” Consider a Young composition from 1960 in comparison to today's ethos: “Draw a straight line and follow it.” As is so often the case in our convoluted culture, simplicity is a profound rarity. Likewise, most experimental music today values what Henry Flynt once called a “militant silliness” and “scabrousness.” This “scabrousness” [3] had taken root in the post-Dada art of the Fluxus 60s & become naturalized by the anti-aesthetic 80s—militarized into a routine of post-punk irony by the 21st century. In contrast, Young shows the possibilities of sincerity—sincerity at very least regarding true musical experiments and the musical intellect—to make breakthroughs in listening experience & musical knowledge. Sincerity, clarity, & elegant beauty have generally been derided by the multitudes of artists who believe that bombast & spectacle fulfills the grand ideal of subversion, not realizing how lame & corny their spectacles actually are, and are also, it should be noted, merely expressions of cultural competition aestheticized. In truth, what much of the anti-aesthetic music experiments have amounted to is a type of crude entertainment—pseudo-theater—spanning incoherent cottage industries where ego-weak artists can become hood-famous and win accolades that mean nothing. There is an explicitly ideological counter-aesthetic being pursued—whereas in the sine wave installations Young intended to strip music of any nonmusical superfluity, to boldly experience what lay beneath, if anything. Like Beckett with language peering into non-being, artists today obsess over what nonmusical superfluities they can project over whatever music may be present, be it vocal signatures, gear, identity politics, theatrical props & costumes, political messages, flashing lights, & just about anything else that can distract from the possibility that music may well be nothing other than evanescence, a revelation which would challenge mass culture’s counterfeit aesthetes’ sentimentality about music, and the consequent way it’s reified into an object they believe they can possess. Usually it’s the nonmusical aspects the masses & their circus-art ringleaders look for and value in music. Young’s art brings us closer to the crisis of music that lay beneath all its forms. Adorno once wrote that art which doesn’t feel its necessity fails. Young feels the necessity for art’s clarification in ways most of today’s career-driven musicians don’t care to. And feeling this necessity for clarification has made his music more emotionally profound, intellectually stimulating, & musically innovative.
The compositional aspect of Young’s sine wave installations also goes against the grain of today’s academic ideologies of performance, body, & “gesture,” which is so often little more than cheap entertainment. If a musician doesn’t perform & entertain in their “act”—ie. if they aren't an actor —they are hardly considered a musician at all, by these new low-hanging standards. Perhaps it is a symptom of music in the age of narcissism. But remember: Orpheus still singing with a singular beauty while he's dead is an eternal challenge to all live performance. In truth, musicians don't need to perform these days, music can now hypothetically be experienced like a painting—live acts usually just play backing tracks anyway or mimic what they do in practice or on an album, and that only reveals the real primacy of the private, reflective listening experience of the recording, a new invention that consciousness has not yet fully grasped the significance of. People attend “shows,” & musicians obsess over how to entertain them, secretly knowing that they don’t need to. The music is compromised as a result. The recording format (as well as some sound art or music exhibitions maybe) open up a dimension of musical imagination that performance closes. If anything, the prominence of entertaining performance is a compensation for the crisis of musical imagination, and reveals its current death agony. Young’s art runs against what Adorno once called this “fun morality.” Young's early statement posted on the door outside Yoko Ono’s loft that read "This is not entertainment" stands in sharp relief to a mass culture that values music as nothing but spectacle or entertaining freak shows. Were an artist to stake such a position today she’d be laughed out of the building, if she were ever given an exhibition or “show” to begin with. The conceptual audacity & heroic implementation of a static, non-entertaining yet musically rich form confronts the constant stresses for music to entertain instead of quickening the senses or stimulating reflection. Today’s listener’s are generally not ego-strong enough to confront the subtleties of their own perceptions of tone as a distillation of the present. All signs point to a fear to face the challenging realities of listening in the present tense. The bold sincerity of drone form—doing true stasis—also comes under the pressure of values of performative virtuosity that art dispensed with over a century ago. As if one needs to play an instrument to write music today at all. Virtuosity reemerges as a form of busywork that, as elsewhere in industrial society, is merely a compulsive distraction from mortality—all the people who only considered playing music during the pandemic, and immediately dispensed with it when the new normal returned come to mind—and so virtuosic art feels as meaningless as ever. Yet the virtuosic “experts” promulgate across the vast surface of the muddy lake of culture, writing purely academic music. Certainly this isn’t to say that there isn’t a place for performance or theater in music, and Young himself is a virtuosic performer in the theater of eternal music when necessary. But it’s increasingly unnecessary. The issue is the ongoing one that Nietzsche clarified via Wagner: when cheap theatrics subsume intelligent listening and musicians are normalized into being actors, music becomes nothing more than postures and affectations that evade the musical present, the demands of which are much more intellectual than performative.
The beauty of Young’s work is also in part due to the social alienation of his approach to art—he has said he’s only interested in writing masterpieces. Indeed, he has written the only musical masterpiece of the last half-century with The Well-Tuned Piano, but also Dream House, the extent to which is even more tonally adventurous & socially ambitious. This sensibility has only met with resistance from scores of postmodern artists who pull out the same dogma about masterpieces being traditional or conservative and so forth. This aversion to sincere aesthetic ambition by the ironic and often narcissistic young art world is not restricted to music alone, but all the arts. Here’s for instance Fred Camper noticing the phenomenon in film:
My essay’s central claim is that, since 1966, few great new “avant-garde” filmmakers have emerged. The thinking behind this idea was already being critiqued at the time of the essay’s writing. Replying to a one-page statement that helped give rise to the essay about a year earlier, one filmmaker objected to the whole idea of the “masterpiece,” saying that it reflected “authoritarian value systems” and served the interest of critics and curators… It always seemed very much to the point to speak about cinema at its best; it was, after all, the power of masterpieces that first attracted me to the medium, and that I still consider its foremost justification; a great film, or a film that is great in part, through its very greatness has pushed the medium to its limits. [4]
Certainly, the dogma inherent in academic art—by no means restricted to art made by schoolboys and teachers—has prevented composers from achieving anything of ambition or originality. Young composers are instead taught—and often by themselves!—that anything which is not in pursuit of “new music,” and dogmatically ugly must be systematically removed from their art, ignorant of the fact that youthful calls for “new music” have been in vogue for well over a century. Indeed, Schoenberg critiqued this very pathology of newness by an academic mentality that it in fact, and ironically, very rarely leads to anything new, in part because it doesn’t truly understand the old, not even basically. Young’s genius was to actually show that one can write new masterpieces in the late 20th century, masterpieces that fulfill all the criteria of western classical & beautiful romantic art music as well as the new standards of acoustic experimentation, and some other yet to be identified aspects. Young was the first to unify modern beauty and experimental acoustics, and in the process of the work itself pointed beyond each. It is a synthesis that should be regarded as the holy grail of all music today, and exemplary of its attainment. Yet most young composers and so-called avant garde experimentalists are unable to rise to the aesthetic task.
It should also be noted that Young was perhaps ahead of his time in one more respect: the social situation of art, specifically the disintegration of avant-garde art’s historical consciousness into sectarianism. By art’s sectarianism I don’t mean art’s separation from church and state but rather that the overgrowth of art combined with the disintegration of historical consciousness means that art breaks down into myriad different practices aimed at and for distinct communities that rarely can or want to move beyond themselves. No flimsy “public art” or compromised pop artist, usually state-sponsored and so sectarian in its own way, can counter this situation. This quite meaningless public situation of art is more apparent every day in the vast culture industry, to such an extent that even famous pop artists can slide under the radar of many, and former metropolitan centers for art like New York City bear no cultural torch whatsoever any longer. Young was perhaps the last avant-garde composer to influence any popular music in any concrete sense (Velvet Underground). When his minimal compatriots like Terry Riley & Philip Glass had become popular in the 70s, Young adopted a guru and went underground, developing a sectarian kind of school. This isn’t a mere resistance to commercialization—though that may be a part of it—nor is it an eccentric anti-social withdrawal a la JD Salinger, but rather implies an instinctual sense that art doesn’t live a meaningful public life, that power in numbers and market success means absolutely nothing for aesthetic experience, and if a particular art practice is to live any meaningful life whatsoever, it will only be through other artist’s passion for advancing it it. Like a modern Pythagoras developing a coterie of secret initiates, Young inherently accepted that art in a disintegrating society and the death of the public means that it lives a particular social and not mass social life. It is meaningful only for those who have an active producer’s role in a given practice, students and teachers, and is not aimed at a public—or even other art sects—who don't really care. Even today's culturati and religious art-goers don't really attend art events for the art, but are mostly just scenesters whose interests are more often than not careerist and not artistic. While embracing the sectarian reality of art may indicate a social regression of art in general, it is perhaps a necessary step for artists today to develop their sectarian school as a way of preserving particular aesthetic knowledge and protecting it from barbarization by the academicized masses. Metaphorically, it is like the process of pulling ones outer limbs closer to the heart during times of freezing to stay alive. Of course, it is questionable whether or not most artists today—so desperate for market success that will always evade them anyway—even have any artistic content or knowledge to preserve and advocate.
With the impending death of Young, it seems the “drone state of mind” may also disappear. It’s a potentially tragic end to a revolutionary practice. Young had early on hypothesized that future generations would grow up in dream houses of various themes & forms, yet not a single sustained dream house has been composed since. Perhaps the dream house form will be a late-coming form, explored in the ensuing century the way sonatas are today. As for now, the decrepit Dream House standing amongst the culture industry in NYC today is the only one in existence. And a precarious existence it lives. It’s quite surprising, considering that perhaps more than any other living artists, Young values & has built a school to transmit his musical knowledge. And yet, hearing in the present tense, an idea so fundamental that one would think we do it every day, is usually eclipsed. Listening today is more about not being present, programmed for expectations for future events, be they chord changes or love lost and yet to be regained, or are misdirected towards identity politics and lifestylism. Sentimental music lovers listen for words & familiar melodies that salve the open wound of time instead of experiencing the suffering and ecstasy that listening in the present tense might open. As elsewhere in society, listening today is futuristic and trend-obsessed—the present is eclipsed, hundreds of times a second—before being experienced as a moment pregnant with possibility. To experience the present as a moment aquiver with possibility, where the spectral wisdom of the ancients makes contact with the telos of moderns, and perhaps renders it all irrelevant, where we glimpse all sorts of dreams previously undreamt, is the true new music. The challenge of music, for those bold enough to accept it, and be it drone or otherwise, is to hear the heart of the present. All else is affectation. Perhaps it is only a task for the few initiates of some modern Orphic art. And it may end in tragedy, as ever in antiquity, with the death of Orpheus by the resentful hands of other lesser musicians. Just as Orpheus posed a challenge to the prevailing tradition of Dionysus, Young poses a challenge to all music as we know it. But the ultimate test will continue to be the dreams that are stimulated, the lucidity of the listener’s dream that is evoked by the drone state of mind. What do listeners dream in the dream houses, and how will such dreams be interpreted?
//
La Monte Young, Composition 1960 #10, 1960, Whitney Museum of American Art
1 See Jane Harrison's Prolegomena to Greek Religion for a discussion on the connection between Apollo and Orpheus
2 I am not arguing for or against specific instruments or technologies per se, but rather noting the contradiction wherein musicians longed for something (stable oscillators) for decades or centuries, only to ignore them when they were actually available.
3 La Monte Young in New York, 1960-62, in Sound and Light, La Monte Young and Marian Zazeela. Bucknell Press
4 See Camper’s The End of Avant Garde Film, republished at https://caesuramag.org/posts/fred-camper-end-of-avant-garde-film