Californian wonder boy Terry Jennings was already exploring John Cage’s music for prepared piano by the age of 12. Two years later, in 1954, Jennings enrolled at the Los Angeles Conservatory of Music and Art, where he met La Monte Young.
The two composers shared the idea of music that prolongs time and ultimately dissolves it, so they became friends and started playing music together.
After Young had moved to New York City, he began curating a series of concerts at Yoko Ono’s loft in Chambers Street in 1960. Naturally, Jennings’ compositions, including Piece for Cello and Saxophone, were part of these selections, and his works were introduced to the city’s avantgarde scene.
Thanks to the openness of the original score, the meditative composition took a new direction in 1989. La Monte Young and his student, cellist Charles Curtis, dispensed with the saxophone and adapted the piece for solo cello in just intonation.
More than 25 years later, in 2016, Curtis performed an 80-minute version at Courtisane Film Festival in Ghent, Belgium, playing live to previously recorded material on which he himself played the same instrument.
Terry Jennings’ Piece for Cello and Saxophone is part of Wild Thyme Music (2): A Sonic Exploration. Read also about the two other composers featured in that episode:La Monte Young’s concept of Dream Music, and Arnold Dreyblatt’s invitation to listeners to engage with sound in new ways.
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