http://www.greenpeaness.org/2006/09/...cket-linx.html
(THIRTY-TWO MB OF UNBELIEVABLY PRETENTIOUS [yet great] DRONING WARNING) - Although I couldn't possibly count myself among the chorus of people loudly bemoaning the state of pop music in 2006, it
does strike me as significant that the album with which I've spent more time this year is, without question, La Monte Young's
The Well-Tuned Piano. I realize, of course, that using a work as insufferably experimental as
The Well-Tuned Piano as a cipher for the failings of contemporary pop music is a
little bit spurious, but I don't care how you want to phrase it - anytime you catch yourself clocking double-digit playcounts on a tuneless, droning, acyclical five-hour session literally consisting of one piano being tuned, there's a pretty powerful point about the vitality of all the music actively soliciting your attention and participation being made whether you choose to recognize it or not. I mean, we've all got friends who just can't make time for any movies that don't smack of either the
Criterion Collection or
their own perverse interests - do you pay any attention whenever these people start opining about the latest Peter Jackson monstrosity? Same principle.
My point today, however, isn't to tear down 2006 (INSERT BOILERPLATE LOVE FOR
Silent Shout AND
Through The Windowpane AND
The Trials of Van Occupanther AND
So This Is Goodbye AND
Sateenkaarisuudelma ETC), but rather to praise Young, the figure rapidly emerging as equally central to my appreciation of contemporary classical music in general and minimalism in particular as Richard X was to my
understanding of synthpop. To say that I've been on a bit of a Young kick lately would be a rather hilarious understatement; for the love of God, I've met Tool fans exponentially more receptive to pleasures outside of their chosen idiom than I've been ever since
Classical Connection started posting Young albums by the fistful a few weeks ago (TOOL FANS, people). There's just something uniquely engrossing about Young's minimal drones if you can ever find the patience and willingness to submit to the saw-toothed knife of their unforgivable pretense; you might think that it's impossible to listen actively to something like "Voice and Sinewaves", a piece whose only dynamic comes from the way it pitches up and down, and which doesn't even do
that by any compelling logic other than (maybe?) an interest in cataloguing every combination of tones afforded by the setup, but fuck, it's entirely possible to listen to "Voice and Sine Wave" in the same fashion that you'd listen to the sounds of the ocean as long as you refrain from from dwelling too long on questions of authorship - Young's music works almost as well as Music That Exists So I Should Probably Either Listen To It Or Ignore It as it works horribly as Music That Some Guy Wrote To Confront His Reality*.
Except, of course, for the fact that the loathesomeness of Young's music is precisely the component that transforms it from background music for raw-food vegan dinner parties into something worth actively listening to. That's not to say that the concepts behind Young's work hold the keys to any earth-shattering revelations into the human condition or questions of eternity; Young wisely leaves exploration of topics like these to
the professionals in favor of stripping everything down to its most formal level. I mean, what is
A Well-Tuned Piano other than a composer rolling the dice and going "Y'know, I bet there's five hours worth of engaging stuff just in the process of tuning a piano"? How about "Voices and Sinewaves" - even with the addition of an actual human voice, is there anything for the audience to receive besides any pleasures naturally derived from the collision of the two sounds that make the piece up? I'm not saying that that's
all the content in Young's minimalist work, of course - given both the debts Young's drones owe to what he learned from Ravi Shankar and contemporary classical music's mortifying proclivity for heavily coded mysticism - but I speak from experience when I say that it's certainly all that Young makes available to someone encountering his music outside of the continuum in which he placed it. Not coincidentally, the question Young's music forces tends to have almost nothing to do with any concerns about whether or not I "like" it or "appreciate" it ("Voices and Sinewaves" being a particularly beautiful, if
glacially restrained, exception) as with whether or not I respond to it in the first place, a much trickier, much more interesting proposition.
And, I think, ultimately one which goes right to the heart why I've been walking straight past most of the year's best pop records in favor of
The Well-Tuned Piano: there may not be a shortage of pop records to enjoy and take to heart, but few if any of them require (let alone
bear out) that kind of challenge. I mean, I have all the fondness in the world for
Pieces of the People We Love, but the biggest challenge it poses is getting one's finger ready in time to skip over the tracks produced by DangerMouse - an extraordinarily valuable lesson to learn, true, but not a particularly profound one if you're interested in questions of
why you like stuff more than ones of
whether you like stuff. And if Young's music has any value, it lies in the clarity he affords his audience - after all, the odds are pretty good that you can already tell with devastating accuracy whether or not Young's music is the kind of thing from which you might ever derive the tiniest shred of satisfaction, and unless you're on a OC3 line or you read ludicrously slowly, you haven't even heard two seconds of his music yet (or you're a La Monte completist who's somehow failed to add "Voices and Sinewaves" to your collection, although the smart money's on the first guess). And while this is, I freely admit, a really shitty reason to throw your support behind pieces of music, it's still a mighty tempting one in an age requiring committed soul-searching just to tell whether or not you like that Final Fantasy album or just like the idea of that Final Fantasy album. Maybe it's just another symptom of the fucked-up age we live in that I have to go to impenetrable thinkpieces to dose up on escapism before retreating back to the heady, theoretical world of stupid-ass indie-pop; in the real world, I'd be pretty hard-pressed to argue with someone asserting that right now, "Voices and Sinewaves" is playing in the background while a bunch of terrorists sit around hating America. I just dont' care anymore. La Monte does what Beirut don't, and that's all that matters to me. (Most of La Monte Young's work is emphatically out of print, but as mentioned above,
Classical Connection's got a whole bunch of it right now - I've done few more productive things with the internet lately than massacre every single link he's posted, and I heartily suggest that you do the same.)
*I suppose it also helps if you attempt to smoke your bodyweight in pot on a nightly basis, but you can pretty much stipulate that sentiment over this whole blog.