Jeremy Grimshaw, Draw a Straight Line and Follow It: The Music and Mysticism of La

Monte Young (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), pp. 99–113.

Divergent Dreams

Despite working closely together for several years during the 1960s, the core
members of The Theatre of Eternal Music seem to have disagreed in certain
fundamental ways about the nature of their collaboration and the significance of
just intonation. Young and Zazeela saw their work as deeply, if eclectically, spiritual
and even religious in nature and considered just intonation a kind of esoteric,
acoustical alchemy with an ultimately cosmic purpose. They also asserted that the
group's improvisations comprised realizations of compositions, to which Young
alone could claim authorship and ownership. Conrad and Cale found that Young's
neo-Pythagorean mythologization of number (as embodied in sound by just
intonation), combined with what they saw as a tendency toward authoritarianism,
turned what was supposed to have been a communal activity into a cultish one.
They felt that Young's assertion of musical authorship over the group's work, and
the spiritual authority implied by that assertion, challenged Young's supposed
reputation as a radical, and, more important, directly contradicted the ideals of
equality and resistance to authority (musical and religious alike) that the
countercultural movement ostensibly embodied. This fundamental
disagreement even manifested itself in the names by which the two camps
preferred identifying the ensemble. As Tony Conrad later wrote,

At the time, the numerical frequency ratios we used for the microtonal
intervals . . . appeared so intimate with ancient Pythagorean numerology that
it was easy for us to be seduced into fantasizing that our system of pitch
relationships was "eternal;' as in La Monte Young's preferred designation,
"The Theatre of Eternal Music:' For my part, I preferred "Dream Music;'
which was less redolent of a socially regressive agenda . . .

The nascent idealism of the early 60s made it easy to fall for Pythagorean
number mysticism without having a clear perception of the anti-democratic
legacy which Pythagoreanism brings with it.38 This terminological disagreement,
and the ideological divide it reflected, fueled a bitter war of words that continued for
decades. In 1987 Young tried to interest record labels (including Gramavision, with
which he had an established relationship) in releasing some of The Theatre of
Eternal Music's recordings from the early and mid-1960s, but Conrad and Cale,
insisting on the collectivity of the group's work and asserting rights of ownership as
coauthors, foiled Young's proposals by threatening a lawsuit. Conrad also even
publicly voiced his grievances to concertgoers arriving for Young's appearance at
the 1990 North American New Music Festival in Buffalo, New York, by passing out
leaflets outside the venue stating that "Composer La Monte Young does not
understand 'his' work:'39
In 1995, with the release of Slapping Pythagoras, a drone-based recording
for amplified strings, guitars, bass clarinet, accordion, and various found sounds,
Conrad offered his most vitriolic, if indirect, critique of Young. The liner notes to
the recording offer a lengthy diatribe ostensibly against Pythagoras's ancient
number mysticism and the cultural elitism that it fostered among his followers.
"How was it;' Conrad asks in the notes, "that the esoteric religious knowledge of
the Egyptian and Babylonian priests was transformed into an antidemocratic
force which achieved a hegemonic role in Western thought?" 40
The two movements that comprise Conrad's piece take their titles from
folkloric legends surrounding Pythagoras's death, supposedly at the hands of
an angry mob who resented his esotericism: (1) Pythagoras, Refusing To Cross
The Bean Field At His Back, Is Dispatched By The Democrats; (2) The
Heterophony Of The Avenging Democrats, Outside, Cheers Of The Incarceration
Of The Pythagorean Elite, Whose Shrill Harmonic Agonies Merge And Shimmer
Inside Their Torched Meeting House.
Conrad's liner note commentary alternates between an expository voice,
directed to the reader, and a first-person voice, directed toward Pythagoras
himself. In the former, he gives summaries of various aspects of Pythagorean
thought; in the latter, he fantasizes himself as one of the democrats confronting
Pythagoras near the bean field. As Conrad castigates Pythagoras for his
misdeeds- sometimes using derisive nicknames such as "Pythie" and "Python''-it
becomes clear to those familiar with his career that his attack on the ancient
thinker serves as a thinly disguised tirade against Young. Pythagoras's elitism,
his taking credit for mathematical innovations borrowed from the Orient or
contributed by his own students, his mystification of number, simply serve as
stand- ins for the charges Conrad himself had leveled against Young: that he had
abandoned countercultural communality for hegemonic ritual, that he had
asserted unwarranted authority over and authorship of the activities of The
Theatre of Eternal Music, and that he had cosmologized just intonation in order
to deify himself. Pythagoras reads as Young, the cult of mathematik oi that
studied with the ancient master reads as The Theatre of Eternal Music, and, in
the following passage, philosophy might read as "minimalism'' and/or "just
intonation'':

Pythagoras, Pythagoras ! You've been so destructive-you and all your

ideals of Perfection! . . . What could you possibly have been trying to do
but walk all over democracy? No- it's much worse than that. It was you,
Pythaggie, it was you-who showed how to use "philosophy" to fight democracy!
 You invented the word "philosophy;' for shit's sake! And why? Why? Because
you could use it to justify your own personal sect, your cult of personality,
where everything is credited to you. Everything is run by you. Talk about
"elite" and "exclusive:' Sure, your cult is open-armed to anyone!-Anyone who
will take your shit for five years without singing out!

Near the end of his lengthy essay, Conrad becomes somewhat more explicit about
the real subject of his anger. Stepping outside the narrative for an aside to the
reader, he writes,

The number-juggling, system-building, arithmetical mumbo-jumbo, and

technical precision in which [some modern] microtonalists may be found to
indulge has inclined them toward cultural absolutism. They feel that they can
use their Western abstract (arithmetical) tools to grasp and encompass non-
Western microtonal traditions (in India, Cambodia, "Persia;' etc.), much as
Western ethnomusicologists tried to colonize these traditions with European
notational efforts.

Having located his target in the twentieth century, Conrad then jumps back into his
ancient fantasy for its final, eponymous conclusion:

This slap is to crack apart the voices that you forced to blend as "One:' And this
slap is to smack down the imperial dominion of Number. ... And here's a slap, too,
for stealing the names of all your sect members, and taking credit for their works
...
"Pythein-agora'': Filth market. The assembly of rot.

As strident as the timbre of the argument between Young and Conrad had become
by this point, its audience remained small and obscure. In 2000, however, the
dispute found its way into a feature article in the New York Times after Young
threatened to sue Table of the Elements, the label responsible for Slapping
Pythagoras, for releasing Insid e the Dream Syndicate Volume I: Day of Niagara, a
bootleg recording of a version of The Tortoise, His Dreams and Journeys from
1965. 41 This recording continued an effort on the part of Conrad and Cale to
write their version of the history of The Theatre of Eternal Music, including the
application of the name "The Dream Syndicate"-a name that Conrad had coined
in 1966, but which had not actually been used by the ensemble. Conrad and Cale
followed this with other drone-based recordings of their own works from the
time. 42 One of Conrad's projects with Table of The Elements took a particularly
brash revisionist stance: a three-disc set bearing the title Early M inimalism Vol.
1 and containing one piece, Four Violins, from 1964-and several other pieces "in
the style of " the '60s drone pieces, but actually composed in the 1990s. 43
In addition to filing a lawsuit over the release of Day of Niagara, Young
released statements on his website condemning the Table of Elements
recording on artistic grounds. Not only was the recording unauthorized, Young
complained, it also was remastered, poorly, from a low-quality dub.44 The
statement further asserted his authorship over The Theatre of Eternal Music's
recordings and chided Conrad's complaints as so much revisionist sour grapes:

Since Conrad believes there was no underlying musical composition, there is

nothing for him to have a co-copyright in, since the ©-copyright in a sound
recording applies to the underlying musical composition. Conversely, since I
recognize the structure of the underlying musical composition, it is obviously
my composition . . ..
If Conrad and Cale were so deep into music composition during this
period, why didn't they record more themselves without the encumbrance
of Big Brother watching over them? What did they need me hanging around
for? The answers appear to be simple. Without the work I had done then and
continued to do over the next thirty-seven years to make it famous, without
my name to continue to publicize it (even via a controversy), they would not
be able to sell it. And without my guidance, they must have been able to only
produce comparatively weak free improvisations without the controlled
structure and unprecedented level of compositional sophistication that
drove The Tortoise at its own slow but steady pace into music history.45

In his response to Conrad, Young also solicited the opinions of other artists and
musicians who had known or worked with the members of The Theatre of
Eternal Music in the 1960s. Their responses reaffirm Young's position of
authority within the group; that is, they recognize precisely the kind of
authoritarianism that so bothered Conrad and Cale, but insist that anyone
working with Young should have recognized the hierarchical nature of the
collaboration. As Dennis Johnson, Young's former classmate, observed,

I have never seen it fail in any arrangement that La Monte had with anyone
who entered into a collaborative creative venture with him, that it was never
collaborative in terms of the conception; it was always La Monte's conception
in the first place. He always consistently guided the others so that the project
would never get too far away from his conception. ... One virtually had to see
oneself as a student.46

The poet Diane Wakoski, Young's former girlfriend, gave an even more blunt
assessment:
 The thought that anyone, including such talented men as Cale and Conrad,
could ever be collaborators or co-composers in any La Monte Young project
seems laughable to me. It simply wouldn't happen. It may be dear to John
Cale's personal vision of himself, or his aesthetic, that he was part of a
democratic collaboration with La Monte, but no one who has spent any time
around La Monte could ever perceive him as a collaborator. ... Everyone who
knows La Monte is aware of the fact that you either play his game, or he
doesn't play with you.47
The extraordinarily strident argument over the work of The Theatre of Eternal
Music transcends the bickering over a tinny secondhand drone recording and
symbolizes a much broader argument about the ideological underpinnings of
early minimalism and just intonationism. Conrad and Cale insisted that the
rejection of traditional notation and tuning went hand in hand with the
rejection of the traditional concept of the composer and the work. For Young,
these developments in compositional practice reinforced the conviction that
music came from a higher source and thus lent even more authority to the
composer: the acoustical purity of just intonation created a site of interface
between the physical, psychological, and spiritual realms, and endowed the
composer with the solemn responsibility of traversing those realms.

Discovery of a Guru

These differing efforts to ideologize just intonation and drone music reflect
something of a paradox within '60s countercultu re as well, for in the circles in
which Young, Zazeela, Cale, and Conrad moved, a resistance to traditional
authority paradigms coexisted alongside a fascination with Indian classical
music- a tradition with deeply etched hierarchies of its own. Conrad, along with
countless others of his generation, had first become interested in Indian music
after hearing Ali Akbar Khan's famous recording, with narration by Yehudi
Menuhin, that appeared on Angel Records in 1955.48 However, although Conrad
"found in Indian music a vindication of [his] predilection for drone-like
performing;' he rejected the particulars of the Indian classical tradition itself,
wondering instead "what other new musics might spring from a drone, set
within a less authoritarian and tradition-ridden performance idiom:'49 Young
traced his interest in Indian music to the same 1955 recording, and during the
ensuing years he maintained something of a cultivated exoticist attitude toward
Indian music.50 Young's interest in Indian music eventually progressed far beyond
Western stylizations, however, and, as he undertook a serious and prolonged study
of Indian music, he found a model of musical composition and musically oriented
spirituality that coincided closely with his own.
 Psychedelic writer Ralph Metzner, as it turned out, played an inadvertent but
crucial role in Young's immersion in Indian music. In 1967 Metzner took Young
and Zazeela to a concert featuring the famous shehnai player, Bismillah Khan. At
the concert Metzner introduced Young and Zazeela to Shyam Bhatnagar, an Indian
musician and spiritual practitioner. Upon making their acquaintance, Bhatnagar
played them tapes of an Indian musician, still living in India, and still virtually
unknown in the West, named Pandit Pran Nath.51
Nath was born in 1918 into a prominent family in Lahore in present-day
Pakistan, and had shown great musical promise as a young man. His family did not
approve of his musical aspirations, so at the age of thirteen he left home and set out
on his own. Nath eventually became one of only a handful of students of Ustad Abdul
Wahid Khan, cousin of the founder of the Kirana gharana, Abdul Karim Khan. As was
the tradition among gurus and their shishyas, Nath served in the household of Abdul
Wahid Khan in exchange for instruction; his duties included cleaning, running
errands, making tea for his master in the early morning, and, occasionally, sitting
before his master with a tambura for a lesson. After several years of study Nath
adopted the lifestyle of a hermit; he sang only at the temple in the Tapkeshwar
Caves, his naked body covered with ash, the current of the nearby stream
substituting for the drone of the tambura.52
After five years of ascetic isolation, Nath's guru told him to reenter public life,
marry, start a family, and take his musical gift beyond the walls of the Tapkeshwar
Temple; as expected, he obeyed.503 He developed a distinctive style and a vast
repertoire of ragas, to the point that better- known musicians would visit him to
study the nuances of a particular raga. Eventually he became an instructor in
Hindustani vocal music at Delhi University. Nath remained something of an
obscure specialist, however- a "musician's musician;' as Young put it,
increasingly at odds with the stylistic trends and institutional politics of the
Indian music scene. In fact, David Claman, questioning Young's "myopic"
fascination with Nath, points out that in several collections and listings of
musicians of the Kirana gharana Nath's name and work are conspicuously
absent.54 Ihe Oxford Encyclopedia of the Music of India does have a short entry
on Nath, but mentions only that he was a student of Abdul Wahid Khan and
that "he migrated to the U.S. [...] where he earned a name as a performer and
teacher:' In other words, it posits that his most notable work occurred after his
departure from India.55 Claman also recognizes Nath's "musician's musician"
status, however, and quotes the recollections of Sheila Dhar, who studied with
Nath in Delhi in the 1960s: "It was true that [Nath] had not received the
recognition he deserved in his own country;' Dhar writes, "except from a
handful of erratic connoisseurs:'56 Dhar also recalls from her lessons with Nath
the same emphases that initially attracted Young to Nath's style:
 Though [Nath] was fanatical about the purity of a raga, he was unbelievably
unorthodox and impractical as a performer. His entire concentration was on
the spiritual and emotive intention of music. He could spend hours
exploring and elaborating on the tonal nuances of the melodic phrase of a
raga, but had only a fleeting interest in rhythmic accompaniment. As a
result, his concept of presentation was considered wayward by all but
research-minded connoisseurs.57

Not only did the uniqueness of Nath's style set it apart from the other Indian
music making its way to the West from India in the 1960s (indeed, Nath's
relative obscurity may have made him all the more intriguing to Young), but the
particulars of that style, with its intonational precision and relative de-emphasis
of regular, patterned rhythm, resonated directly with the compositional style
Young had developed during the 1960s. After hearing the tapes of Nath provided
by Shyam Bhatnagar, Young and Zazeela contacted Nath and eventually
arranged for him to travel to the United States. Nath eagerly accepted the
opportunity; he had three daughters who needed wedding dowries, and he
recognized the financial advantages of taking on students in the United States. A few
weeks after his arrival on January 11, 1970, Nath officially accepted Young and
Zazeela as disciples by tying red threads around their wrists in a traditional guru-
shishya ceremony.58
Young and Zazeela studied with Nath for the remaining quarter-century of his
life. Nath took on several additional American students as well, including Terry
Riley, experimental trumpeter Jon Hassell, jazz musicians Don Cherry and Lee
Konitz, and a number of other musicians and artists from among Young's New York
milieu. For several years Nath split his time between New York and the Bay Area,
where he taught at Mills College; during his stays in New York, Young and Zazeela
hosted Nath in their home, waiting on him in a manner reminiscent of Nath's own
discipleship with Abdul Wahid Khan. (Photos 5 and 6 show Pran Nath and Young in
performance together in 1977.)
In addition to the sonic affinities that drew Young and Zazeela to Pran Nath,
certain broader aesthetic ideas spoke to them as well. Nath's subtle approach to
developing a raga's rasa-its "flavor;' or its particular emotional state-was not unlike
the indelible particularity of feeling that Young associated with sustained, complex
just-tuned harmonies. This acute attention to emotional state compelled Pran Nath
to perpetuate and refine a part of the Hindustani vocal tradition that many other
musicians, in the face of a modernizing world and music industry, had neglected: the
performance of a particular raga at the particular time of day deemed most
appropriate to its character. He instructed his American disciples in this practice as
well. Midnight I Raga Malkauns, recorded in 1971 and 1976, features two late-night
performances sung by Pran Nath, with Riley, Young, and Zazeela among the
supporting perforrners.59 For a performance series at Paris's Palace Theatre in
1972, Nath, accompanied by Young, Zazeela, and Riley, sang a cycle of time-
appropriate ragas on a Friday night, Saturday afternoon, and Sunday morning.60
The interpersonal dynamic of Young's relationship to Pran Nath arguably
shaped his artistic development and self-perception as profoundly as did the stylistic
resonance between the two musicians. Alexander Keefe discerns a symbiosis in Nath's
initial encounters with Western musicians, Young in particular:

It must have come as a relief to [Nath] when a new type of student started
trickling into Delhi in the mid-1960s, seekers without the usual baggage,
looking for someone to revere. These Westerners found a stubborn middle-
aged man with a limited but oracular command of English, a voice of
astonishing power, and an otherworldly mien. Pandit Pran Nath became
gurujee, and then a few years later he was gone, leaving behind an Indian
cultural scene increasingly hostile to a performer of such suspect religious
leanings-he was a devotee of the Chishti Sufi saints, as well as a Nada yogi
and mystic-not to mention such stubbornly contrarian tastes.61

Was Young, in fact, looking for someone to revere? His career to that point had
been characterized by cycles of idolatry turning to rivalry: his serial works tried to
transcend Webern, his indeterminate works tried to transcend Cage, his jazz
improvisations sought to transcend so eminent an authority as the twelve-bar
blues itself. He was still a student when his correspondence with his mentor
Leonard Stein took on the precocious tone of counselor rather than pupil. He had
already assumed a "guru" persona of his own.62 Yet when Pran Nath arrived in
New York, Young treated his new guruji with utmost reverence, even
subservience. Perhaps what Young saw in Pran Nath, aside from the intensity of
Nath's artistic vision and its resonances with Young's own musical activities, was
a model not only for how one should make art but for who an artist should be.
Nath's extremity of style as a musician was tied indelibly, like Young's, to the
breadth and profu ndity of his cosmic vision.
Just prior to their discovery of Pandit Pran Nath, Young and Zazeela were
themselves discovered, by the wealthy and magnanimous arts patron Heiner
Friedrich. Friedrich had begun visiting Young's and Zazeela's early experimental
electronic sound environments in 1966, and hosted their first public Dream
House environment at his Munich gallery in 1969. During the subsequent
decades he granted them a level of patronage virtually unprecedented among
twentieth-century artists. This afforded Young and Zazeela the freedom to
pursue their interests without concern for the demands of the marketplace.
Nath became an additional beneficiary of Friedrich's generosity, eventually
enjoying a level of adoration likely well beyond his expectations (and in sharp
contrast with his past life as an ascetic). In 1979, thanks to the largesse of Dia Art
Foundation, which Friedrich had founded, Young and Zazeela moved operations to
the Harrison Street Dream House. The spacious building, reportedly purchased for
over a million dollars, was also generously appointed and fully staffed. Young lived
and worked there under circumstances virtually unrivaled for artistic freedom and
creative accommodation; Nath lived there as well during his stays in New York.
Visiting Nath in the early 1980s at the Harrison Street Dream House , his former
student from Delhi, Sheila Dhar, was taken aback by the elegant circumstances in
which she found her teacher. After signing in with the greeter at the door and
proceeding past numerous students and staff members shuffling quietly between
the building's numerous rooms, she found Nath in one of the Dream House's upper
studios. "He sat serenely on a divan in an enormous loft with a thick, snow-white
wall-to- wall carpet;' she observed. "At the far end, about twenty tanpuras,
obviously newly exported from India, lay side by side. The sunlight streamed in
through tall glass windows. There was no furniture. ..."63 Pran Nath used the
Harrison Street space as his New York headquarters until April 1985, when Dia Art
Foundation underwent an organizational change that resulted in the liquidation of
the Harrison Street property and Young's and Zazeela's relocation back to their
apartment on Church Street.
Young treated Nath not only as a musical master, but as a seer, with actual
premonitional capabilities bordering on the supernatural.64 Young's devotion was
such that, in 1996, when Nath's health deteriorated and his death seemed imminent,
he and Zazeela traveled to the home Nath kept in Berkeley to see him one last time.
Nath passed before they arrived; along with Nath's wife, they watched over the body
for two days in situ while waiting for one of Nath's daughters to make the journey
from India. They were joined by many of Nath's students, who joined them in
singing over the body of the deceased. In fact, the crowd of mourners grew so large
that some camped in tents in the yard. On the second day, they brought the body
down the stairs for the transport to the crematorium. Young came down the stairs
last, carrying Nath's head.65 They followed the hearse to the crematorium, and
joined the others in placing sandalwood paste and holy water from the Ganges River
on Nath's forehead before the casket entered the furnace. In the days that followed,
they reported receiving several dreams and visions from their guru.66
After Nath's death Young and Zazeela continued Nath's work through their
stewardship over the Kirana Center for Indian Classical Music, the instruction studio
Nath had founded in New York City in 1970, though they did not yet begin giving
public raga performances. A few of their students observed some of the traditional
protocols of the guru-shishya relationship; one insisted on arising to make them tea
at 3:00 A.M., as Young and Zazeela had done for Nath, and as Nath had done for his
guru.67 Young continued his other (non-Indian) musical projects, but gradually
devoted more and more of his musical efforts to singing raga. In June 2002, Young
was pronounced Khan Sahib by Ustad Hafizullah Khan Sahib, the only surviving
child of Pandit Pran Nath's teacher, Ustad Abdul Wahid Khan Sahib, and the Khalifa
of the Kirana gharana.68 This apparent honorific is mentioned in all program notes
for Young's subsequent raga concerts.
Arguably, however, the mantle had already been passed from guru to disciple
even before Young's attainment of Khan Sahib status. A few years before, during a
period in which Young had stopped singing raga altogether-first in mourning over
Nath's death, and then because of a serious illness that subsequently befell Zazeela-
Nath purportedly appeared to Young in a dream and urged him to take up singing
again. According to Young, Nath also indicated the great promise of a young artist
who had recently asked to be taken on as a student. Jung Hee Choi thus became a
disciple of Young and Zazeela in 1999. The three of them became the core, founding
members of what would become The Just Alap Raga Ensemble, and gave their first
performance together in November 2002; a few months later, Jung Hee Choi became
joined to Young and Zazeela in the ceremony of the red thread-the same ceremony
that had formalized their discipleship with Pran Nath. The Just Alap concerts
eventually became Young's primary mode of musical performance and creativity,
and took on a decidedly ritual air; promotional photographs from performances in
2003, 2005, and 2008 all show Young at the center of the performance space, an
illuminated circle from Zazeela's light installation hovering above him like a
magenta halo, his hand reaching into the air above his head.69
Throughout his years of study with Nath, Young had continued his own work
with sound environments and also brought to fruition The Well-Tuned Piano
through a commercial recording and numerous public performances. Young
consciously established a separation between his performance of Indian music with
Pran Nath and his own compositions, however, and initially maintained that
distinction quite clearly. While singing raga, for example, he deviated very little from
performance practices as taught to him by Nath: namely, his performances focused
overwhelmingly on the alap sections of performance, the improvisatory melodic
development in which the facets of the raga are unfolded. The tabla players enlisted
for his performances might wait over an hour for the alap to end and the rhythmic
tala of the drums to begin.
After Pran Nath's death, perhaps emboldened by the visions of his guru and his
attainment of the status of Khan Sahib, Young not only began leading public
performances of raga but also began to take some license with North Indian
performance practice. In the improvisatory alap sections of the 2003 performance
described at the beginning of this chapter, for example, Young introduced a novel
harmonic technique: arriving at a particular note in the raga, Young would signal to
one of the accompanying vocalists (his wife, Marian, or his assistant-disciple, Jung
Hee Choi) to sustain the note. This created a kind of sustained vocal harmony
quite outside traditional raga performance.
 Young's boldest deviation from Indian classical practice occurred in March 2009,
in a pair of performances with The Just Alap Raga Ensemble given at the Guggenheim
Museum in New York. Before the beginning of the concert I attended, a prerecorded
tambura drone filled the performance space. It was clear from the moment the
musicians entered the venue that Young's ensemble had taken further liberties with
North Indian tradition. Instrumentation was the most immediately apparent area of
experimentation. In addition to the prerecorded tambura drone, the voices of Young
and Zazeela, those of their disciple Jung Hee Choi and fellow Pran Nath disciple John
Da'ud Constant, and the spare tabla playing of Naren Budhkar, the ensemble also
included Young's longtime interpreter Charles Curtis on cello and former Forever
Bad Blues Band member Jon Catler on fretless sustained electric guitar. The visual
novelty of the cello and guitar were not matched by any stark musical incongruity,
however; both instruments followed the same subtle melodic contours and sustained
tones that had characterized the Just Alap performances I had heard on earlier
occasions. Soon after starting the performance Young initiated the series of sustained
tones emphasizing certain notes in the raga, sometimes passing the responsibility
around to different members of the ensemble with a nod or simple gesture. During
some improvisational passages Young exploited the timbral diversity of the group by
engaging in call- and-response with members of the ensemble; Zazeela and Choi
featured prominently in this regard. The concert consisted of the premiere
performance of a single piece, Young's own Raga Sundara, a work in twelve-beat
ektal and in the raga known as Yaman Kalyan or simply Yaman. Young's two
stanzas of Sanskrit text offered up praise- first to raga itself, then to Young's guru,
for their ability to manifest divine, cosmic harmony through sound.
Yaman is a very well-known raga within the North Indian tradition- it is one
of the first a student learns from his or her guru-but it has distinctive features
that stand out to the Western ear. For convenience, I will describe these features as
if Yaman were rendered above a Western C tonic (or, in Hindustani solfege, "sa'').
Above the tambura drone notes, C and G, the notes of the raga proceed as if in a
Lydian mode, with a raised fourth scale degree, or F sharp. However, the ascending
scale starts on the seventh-scale degree, B, and while the C and G are present in the
drone, they are often absent in the ascending melodic configurations of the raga. The
raga tends to emphasize the seventh- and third-scale degrees, B and E; in fact, their
distance a perfect fourth apart sometimes suggests a kind of "tonicization" of E, with
the F sharp and G suggesting E natural minor. This creates a stunning bifurcated
tonal orientation, as the B and E seem to occasionally escape the gravitational pull of
the ever-present C-G drone of the tambura.
The ensemble's performance of Raga Sundara exploited these features quite
ingeniously. In the alap section, the unmetered improvisational passage in which
the raga is gradually introduced in order to prepare the ear for the composition
proper, Young used occasional sustained notes to emphasize the competing tonal
allegiances of raga Yaman, including the perfect fourth dyad between the seventh-
and third-scale degrees. At one point, these pitches were actually sustained in four
parts across two octaves, combining with the tambura drone to create a rich chord.
After the introductory alap, the musicians initially presented the text of the
composition proper in traditional monophonic fashion against the drone. Later on,
however, the ensemble revealed its most striking innovation: in another bold
deviation from traditional North Indian monophony, they rendered the composition
in two-part harmony. The perfect fourth between the seventh- and third-scale
degrees, already emphasized ordinally in raga Yaman and occasionally sustained
during the alap, suddenly became audible as part of a dynamic harmonic
progression. Furthermore, as the various instruments proceeded in this
harmonic fashion, they followed lines in conjunct motion separated by sonorous
thirds and fourths. In the context of raga performance, this harmonization,
combined with the ethereal polytonal quality of raga Yaman, lent the ensemble
a breathtakingly lush quality with each return of the refrain.70
Young's program notes for the March 2009 concerts suggest that he had
begun to see the two previously separate strands of his musical life-
experimental ("minimalist") composition and Indian classical singing-as
intertwined. Or, as Young would describe it, the two strands revealed
themselves to have come from the same divine loom:

The parallels between the Kirana style . . . and my music with long
sustained tones, the focus on one work over long periods of time, and just
intonation, are remarkable- a set of shared concerns that seemingly
evolved independently but actually derived from a common source of
higher inspiration and resulted in a merging of East and West that now
continues with informed awareness.

Young then quotes the text of the evening's composition, Raga Sundara, which
seems to represent a reconciliation of Young's polymusical pursuits: Anahata
Nada. Raga Ahata. The inaudible vibrations of universal structure become audibly
manifest through Raga.
Young provided further evidence of this reconciliation in a series of concerts
in 2010, which featured Pandit Pran Nath's arrangement of "Hazrat Turkaman;' a
traditional piece in raga Darbari, rendered in the kind of harmony Young had
introduced in the 2009 performances of Raga Sundara. He also started including
these raga-based performances as compositions in his works list.
Still, despite this late-career reconciliation of previously distinguishable
pursuits, and despite the earlier commonalities between Young's "Western" and
"Eastern" styles (such as a general similarity between his improvisational style in
The Well-Tuned Piano and the Kirana approach to alap ), Young's most important
nonraga compositions avoid explicit borrowing from Indian music. The scale for The
Well-Tuned Piano, for example, finds no remotely similar scalar relatives in the
multitude of North Indian ragas. Beneath the surface stasis they share, his Dream
House sound environments bear little harmonic resemblance to a tambura drone.
The mystical discourse with which Young has surrounded his music, however,
has moved freely between the timeless tradition he hopes his music will inaugurate
and the established musical genealogy into which he, through Nath, had been
grafted. The mystical persona Young had already adopted before his first encounter
with the Kirana gharana found additional validation in Young's discipleship with
Pran Nath: the most devoted shishya , after all, one day takes the place of his guru.
The authority granted by just intonation's acoustical positivism, and the
concomitant psychophysiological path to transcendence that Young saw as the
promise of rational tuning, merged with the mystical and musical lineage brought by
Nath from India.
The cynic might call this double identity a case of hedging one's
cosmological bets: praying simultaneously to both the rational Western god of
number as well as the ethereal author of the Eastern OM (not to mention the
disparate deities of counterculture and Mormonism, LSD and LDS). These
spiritualities cohabitate comfortably in Young's universe; his religiosity is
cumulative. God, Young states,

. . . [is] like this multifaceted jewel. ... Each facet, of course, is

extraordinarily brilliant. If a prophet catches the light of this facet, it's just
like enlightenment, indeed. And maybe some prophets catch a few facets.
But my feeling is that there are so many facets that it's been difficult for
any prophet to get the whole picture, and that's why I think you have these
interesting overlaps and these interesting differences between so many
different spiritual paths.71

At the conclusion of the raga performance I attended in June 2003, the

performers were greeted with solemn silence rather than applause. Several
minutes passed before Young rose from his position on the floor, and even as the
audience got up to leave they moved toward the door slowly and quietly. One
woman, a former student of Young's, knelt, touched his feet in a traditional
Indian gesture of respect, and presented him a mango as an offering; he paused,
thinking, then placed it on the shrine against the wall, in front of the pictures of
his raga ancestry.
More recently, Young and Zazeela have sought to exert a guru's control not
only over the performance of Young's music, but over the musicological and
music-theoretical study of it as well. Just as this book neared production,
publicity materials appeared for a ten-day seminar on Young's and Zazeela's
work to be held in the summer of 2011. The workshop is to be led by Charles
Curtis (Young and Zazeela no longer travel), and held at Kunst im
Regenbogenstadl in Polling, Germany, the longtime site of installations of
Young's and Zazeela's work. The slated program features lectures, workshops,
screenings, and performances, all featuring or examining Young's and Zazeela's
works. Perhaps the most distinctive element of the publicity brochure is this
quote from Young, which appears in the second paragraph:

I am from the school that believes the guru should stand at the top of the
hill and throw rocks at the would-be students and disciples as they ascend
toward him. In this way, it is assured that only the most strong and serious
devotees will reach the top of the hill to learn the tradition and carry it on
into the future.72

To reiterate: this was not just one of Young's many strident statements about
his own importance; it was the text chosen to entice prospective attendees.
The reverence bestowed upon Young by his most devoted listeners and
students, the devotion he demands from those who would study his music-and,
it must be said, the working relationships with him that have soured-shed a
particular light upon final refrain of the “Song to Guruji” from the 2003
performance: Allah-ji, give Guruji to me. Given the context of the performance,
there, in that space normally devoted to the continual and complex drones of
the Dream House, Young's words transcended the memorial nature of the song
and expressed more than affection for his deceased guru. Having responded to
what he considered his own divine mandate, and having founded what he
considered a new but nonetheless ageless musical tradition,Young spoke in the
words of both a shishya and a mystic. As I heard Young paying homage to Pran
Nath (and, by extension, to Ustad Abdul Wahid Khan, and Ustad Abdul Karim Khan),
and as I likewise observed Young gesture to his own shishya , Jung Hee Choi, I
perceived the makings of a ritual ordination, a mantle being bestowed, a musical
priesthood being passed on through a lineage of ancient authority. Young had not
found the guruji he had sought so fervently through song. He had become it.