Dream Music

La Monte Young


 In Dream Music there is a radical departure from European and even much
Eastern music in that the basis of musical relationship is entirely harmony.
Not European harmony as textbooks have outlined it, but the intervallic
proportions and acoustical consequences of the particular ratios which sound
concomitantly in the overtone series when any simple fundamental is produced.
Melody does not exist at all (The Disappearance of Melody) unless one is
forced to hear the movement from group to group of various simultaneously
sounded frequencies derived from the overtone series as melodic because of
previous musical condoitioning. Even before the first man moved successfully
from one frequency to another (melody if you like) a pattern for this movement,
that is the relationship of the second frequency was already predetermined
(harmonically) by the overtone structure of the fundamental of the first sound.
And in the life of the Tortoise the drone is the first sound. It lasts forever
and cannot have begun but is taken up again from time to time until it lasts
forever as continuous sound in Dream Houses, where many musicians and students
will live and execute a musical work. Dream Houses will allow music which,
after a year, ten years, a hundred years or more of constant sound, would not
only be a real living organism with a life and tradition all its own but one
with a capacity to propel itself by its own momentum. This music may play
without stopping for thousands of years, just as the Tortoise has continued
for millions of years past, and perhaps only after the Tortoise has again
continued for as many million years as all of the tortoises in the past will
it be able to sleep and dream of the next order of tortoises to come and of
ancient tigers with black fur an omens the 189/98 whirlwind in the Ancestral
Lake Region only now that our species has had this much time to hear music
that has lasted so long because we move further into this period of sound.
We will become more attached to sound. We will be able to have precisely the
right sounds in every dreamroom playroom and workroom, further reinforcing
the integral proportions resonating through structure (re: earlier
Architectural Music), Dream Houses (shrines, etc.) at which performers,
students, and listeners may visit even from long distances away or at
which they may spend long periods of Dreamtime weaving the ageless
quotients of the Tortoise in the tapestry of Eternal Music.


Back