Item Detail
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22479
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0
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English
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Music of a "More Exalted Sphere" : Compositional Practice, Biography, and Cosmology in the Music of La Monte Young
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Rochester, New York
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University of Rochester, Eastman School of Music
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Ph.D. diss.
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"If listeners aren't carried away to heaven," La Monte Young states, "I'm failing." For centuries, composers have used numinous language to describe the transcendent potential of their art. In Young's case, however, one cannot dismiss such lofty claims as prime facie hyperbole: a presupposition of ontological contiguity underscores Young's work, such that what appear to be indistinct musical metaphors play out in surprisingly literal ways within the mechanics of his music. This dissertation examines this interplay between Young's cosmology and his compositional practice. In his early serial works, Young sees the role of a "composer" primarily within the context of musical activity; the highly conceptual works from the early 1960s, with their sometimes baffling transgressions of musical norms, resist traditional musical analysis to such a degree as to expand the composer's activities well beyond the traditional scope of "composition"; in his maturity, Young sees himself as nothing less than a prophet, whose highly specialized tuning systems and sustained sound environments recast music onto a spatial, rather than temporal plane, interface directly with the periodic structures of the universe, and traverse the boundary separating the physical from the metaphysical. The expansive nature of Young's works necessitates a concomitantly expansive methodology on my part. On the one hand, I engage with the music on the level of pure sonic phenomena by addressing such concepts as serial structure, tuning, acoustics, and psychoacoustics. On the other, I follow the implications of these analyses as they extend beyond the purely musical and converge with the various narratives of Young's biography and the cosmic contours of his religiosity: the sonic memories of his rural childhood, his Mormon upbringing, the transcendent aspirations of 60s counterculture, and the musical mysticism of North Indian raga. My argument thus rests on diverse materials, methodologies, and critical approaches: technical analyses, field work, historical documentation, personal communications with the composer himself, reception and cultural history, even religious teachings and church doctrines. A single set of questions, however, underscores these various modes of inquiry: Where and of what kind is Young's heaven, and how exactly does he propose to get us there?" [Author's abstract]