January 18 and 25, 2025, at 7 pm
MELA Foundation Dream House
275 Church Street, New York
Join us for the final live concert of our extraordinary four-concert series, celebrating both the 89th birthday of La Monte Young (born October 14, 1935) and the 31st consecutive year of the MELA Dream House Sound and Light environment. This program will feature two live performances, each utilizing the metallic bodies of the original instruments designed and built for Young by his early close collaborators, artists Walter De Maria (1935-2013) and Robert Morris (1931-2018).
JUNG HEE CHOI
Seven (2024)
on
Walter De Maria
Instrument for
La Monte Young (1966)
Avant-Première
Performed by Jung Hee Choi
using Walter De Maria’s sculptural Instrument for La Monte Young (1966),
with pre-recorded digital sound montage and real-time digital processing
on an algorithm by Jung Hee Choi.
Digital processing programmed by Mason Mann.
This avant-première performance will showcase a period instrument and a new set of associations, with Jung Hee Choi performing solo on the Instrument for La Monte Young, an audible sculpture designed and built in 1966 by Young’s early close colleague, Walter De Maria (1935-2013). Consisting of an oblong rectangular metal box encasing a rolling metal ball and with contact microphones to amplify the resonant sonorities generated by the ball as it moves back and forth, De Maria’s Instrument was directly inspired by Young’s intense interest in the properties and potentials of friction as a musical phenomenon. In her piece (entitled Seven for its focus on the seventh harmonic and for its use of the number seven as a constant function to extend the duration of microsounds as the primary thematic and formal element), Choi will route the tactile sounds of the Instrument through a modern digital processor governed by an algorithm of her own devising.
LA MONTE YOUNG
Studies in the Bowed Disc (1963)
on
Robert Morris
Gong for
La Monte Young (1963)
Performed by La Monte Young and Jung Hee Choi
using the gong designed and constructed by Robert Morris (1963)
In this program, history will be present both in the person of composer-performer La Monte Young and in the metallic body of the original four-foot diameter gong designed and built for Young by artist Robert Morris (1931-2018). Young wrote Studies in the Bowed Disc in 1963 specifically for this instrument, and the work’s many iterations since then include the recording 23 VIII 64 2:50:45-3:11 AM The Volga Delta (published originally as side B of the celebrated “Black Record” and recently re-released on the Superior Viaduct label), which Young and Marian Zazeela performed together using double-bass bows to set the vibrations in motion. The latest 2025 realization will once again be a duo, with Young and Jung Hee Choi commanding the two bows.