When Brian first spoke to me about the possibility of composing a more drone-oriented piece for a recording, I remembered once hearing Terry Riley refer to La Monte Young as "The Young Mountain Of The East" - and I thought of the mountain of music and concepts La Monte has given us.
For this project, I wanted to go higher up the ‘mountain’ and build upon the Opening Chord section from La Monte's groundbreaking composition, The Well-Tuned Piano This composition uses what's known as a 7-limit Harmonic system; my vision was to add to this some pitches from the 13-limit Harmonic system that I have been working with for 30 years. So, I extended the two original harmonic dyads from The Well-Tuned Piano to their logical next steps This resulted in four dyad groups: 4 and 7, 6 and 9, 7 and 11, 9 and 13 * These four dyad groups function as compositional cornerstones to The Young Mountain of the East
Structurally, The Young Mountain of the East develops these pitch sets through a series of twelve movements, or, in the language of the piece, emanations In each of these emanations, there is an upward unfolding of the Harmony, followed by a downward descent - like going up and down a mountain The beginnings and ends of the twelve emanations are indicated by very brief instances of silence.
Emanations 1 and 12 form the core composition; the others add variations In the ‘Stacks’ which appear in emanations 2 and 8, the dyads keep going higher while remaining 13 limit: 11 and 15, 13 and 18, 15 and 21 * The 11th emanation features Harmonic Rhythm, which gives each Harmonic its own space in time. The resulting accumulated resonance creates a Time Chord. Here, the 7th Harmonic is struck 7 times in a bar, the 8th Harmonic is struck 8 times in a bar, the 9th is struck 9 times, etc all the way up After a maximum density is reached, these rhythms are gradually removed and the chord subsides until the section returns close to where it began The piece then concludes with the 12th emanation, a recapitulation of the first
The orchestration for The Young Mountain of the East was conceived as a double quartet and the instrumentation consists solely of electric Fretless Sustainer Guitar arranged in this double quartet format To realize the eight tracks of guitar for this recording, overdubbing was used The piece is based on a fundamental of C 528hz.
In The Young Mountain of the East, I wanted to acknowledge La Monte's pioneering work in composition with sustained tones, and add my own concepts to evolve it in a logical way - to keep going up the Mountain
*Note: the numbers regarding the dyads refer to a specific ordering of pitches called harmonics. Collectively, harmonics form the basis of Just Intonation, a microtonal tuning system which is commonly referred to as "Nature's tuning system" Please seek out explanations of Just Intonation for details concerning its technical theory and terminology Hard copy recommendations include the in-depth Genesis of a Music by Harry Partch and also my two books, The Nature of Music and The Lost Chord.