Jon Catler Artist Statement TYMOTE

The Young Mountain of the East Artist Statement - Jon Catler I first met La Monte Young at a 1981 performance of his piece The Well-Tuned Piano at the Dia Art Foundation’s beautiful Harrison Street space in NYC. La Monte played a Bösendorfer Imperial Grand piano tuned to Harmonic Series pitches. The piece was more than five hours long, and began with some of the slowest playing I had ever heard. After a while his fingers were moving so fast they became a blur, and the resulting Harmonic cloud generated the sounds of violins, choirs, flutes and more. Although the music was intense, when I got a chance after the show to speak with La Monte and his wife, the late Light artist Marian Zazeela, I was surprised at their friendly demeanor and sense of humor. We began working together shortly after that. That Well-Tuned Piano concert inspired me to transition from the 31-equal tempered tuning system I had been using to a Harmonic Series fretting that I designed myself. Since then, I have been playing music in Harmonic Series tuning, which is a naturally occurring series of purely tuned pitches. The first complete scale in this series occurs from the 8th to the 16th Harmonics, and this has been the basis of my work. This recording of The Young Mountain Of The East had its genesis when Brian asked me to do a drone-oriented composition for his label, Chaikin Records. The title comes from a remark by Terry Riley, who once referred to La Monte as “the young mountain of the east.” My favorite format is a composition that leaves ample room for improvisation, where the improv grows organically from the written music. Ideally the line between improv and composition is obscured for the listener. This piece is divided into twelve Emanations of approximately equal length. Each Emanation is based on a core composition that begins with the two opening dyads of Young’s The Well-Tuned Piano, and then continues with dyads that include the 11th and 13th Harmonics from my chosen scale. This ‘ascent up the mountain’ is followed by a descent back to the unity. I chose the 8th - 16th Harmonics because I believe Nature can provide many of the answers that humans seek. This concept has motivated me to translate things like birdsong and the Fibonacci Series into Harmonic Series pitches.