Young's high primes

[Ray Tomes, TD 185.8]
>
>>[me, monz]
>> La Monte Young is perhaps the
>> foremost explorer of the vertical expansion (using whole
>> groups of primes into the 200s).
>
> Ah, Pythagorean versus Galilean!
>
> Personally I don't think that any primes beyond 23 are important
> in music of themselves.

In general, I agree with you. But Young's music (and that
patterned after it) is a very special case, where these high
primes are presented in a manner that is most conducive to
perceiving their individual sonic _gestalts_.

Most of the pieces he writes today are 'installations',
in which he uses an extremely accurate specially-built
Rayna synthesizer to produce sine waves tuned to various
high-prime ratios which fall between the 7:4 and 9:8 in
various 'octaves'.

The piece simply consists of a 'chord' of these sine waves
which drones on theoretically forever. When one visits
his 'Dream House' to hear his latest installation, merely
turning one's head slightly changes the sound of the 'chord',
because of the effects the room's physical dimensions has on
the sound.

Because there is no melodic or harmonic movement in the
traditional sense, each prime ratio 'sits there', ready
to be observed.

Joseph L. Monzo monz@juno.com
http://www.ixpres.com/interval/monzo/homepage.html
|"...I had broken thru the lattice barrier..."|
| - Erv Wilson |
--------------------------------------------------

___________________________________________________________________
You don't need to buy Internet access to use free Internet e-mail.
Get completely free e-mail from Juno at http://www.juno.com/getjuno.html
or call Juno at (800) 654-JUNO [654-5866]

monz@juno.com wrote:

> The piece simply consists of a 'chord' of these sine waves
> which drones on theoretically forever. When one visits
> his 'Dream House' to hear his latest installation, merely
> turning one's head slightly changes the sound of the 'chord',
> because of the effects the room's physical dimensions has on
> the sound.

It's not just the room. It's the ratio relationship of the 35 notesin the
room. Sometimes you're just out or in phase with some
but not all of the notes.

> Because there is no melodic or harmonic movement in the
> traditional sense, each prime ratio 'sits there', ready
> to be observed.

See above. ;)

--
* D a v i d B e a r d s l e y
* xouoxno@virtulink.com
*
* J u x t a p o s i t i o n E z i n e
* M E L A v i r t u a l d r e a m house monitor
*
* http://www.virtulink.com/immp/lookhere.htm