music clip of the day

La Monte Young, The Well-Tuned Piano

Part 1

***

Part 2

***

Part 3

***

Part 4

***

Part 5

**********

lagniappe

Minimalism proper begins with La Monte Young, the master of the drone. He was born in 1935 in a tiny dairy community in Idaho, and spent his childhood listening to the secret music of the wide-open landscape—the microtonal chords of power lines, the harsh tones of drills and lathes, the wailing of far-off trains, the buzzing songs of grasshoppers, the sound of the wind moving over Utah Lake and whistling through the cracks of his parents’ log cabin. In 1940 he moved to Los Angeles with his family. As he later said, he fell in love with California’s ‘sense of space, sense of time, sense of reverie, sense that things could take a long time, that there was always time.’

—Alex Ross, The Rest Is Noise: Listening to the Twentieth Century (2007)