In some works of minimal music, a particular type of tuning forms the foundation of the composition. Tuning is a science in its own right, difficult to understand for laypersons, but easy to recognise and experience. Instruments sound different and often produce acoustic phenomena such as overtones.

With the Dreyblatt Tuning System, US-American media artist and composer Arnold Dreyblatt invented a microtonal approach in the 1970s in which 20 notes are played per octave instead of the usual twelve.

Many of Dreyblatt’s compositions invite listeners to engage with sound in new ways and leave room to explore the situation with their ears. However, Organ Music for 16 Hands is not only exploratory for the audience. 

The piece was composed in 1999 on site for the huge organ in the Kresge Auditorium at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in Cambridge, MA, and requires seven musicians who are active inside the organ loft.

There, they cup their hands at the pipe mouths and use the stoppers to change the timbre and create glissandi, while Dreyblatt himself presses and holds pre-arranged keys.

Arnold Dreyblatt studied with composers such as Pauline Oliveros and La Monte Young, for whom he also worked as a tape archivist in the Seventies. 

La Monte Young grew up in a town of less than 50 souls, the tiny village of Bern, Idaho, and was raised in a Mormon tradition. In the mid 1950s, he began experimenting with intonation and minimalism at the University of California in Los Angeles.

When fluxus emerged in New York City in the early Sixties, he was a vital part of the movement – together with his partner, calligrapher and light artist Marian Zazeela, and a seemingly endless list of musicians who would shape the avantgarde in the years to come.

Accompanied by Tony Conrad and John Cale, the couple performed an early version of Young’s idea of Dream Music with two three-day weekend concerts at Brooklyn’s Pocket Theatre in 1964.

The Tortoise Droning Selected Pitches From the Holy Numbers for the Two Black Tigers, the Green Tiger and the Hermit is a title of average length for La Monte Young’s compositions. It refers to the performers as tigers and hermit, and also introduces the image of the long-lived tortoise for the first time.

The creature, which has existed virtually unchanged for millions of years, seemed somewhat static and became the ideal analogy for Young’s concept of Dream Houses – sensual places where perfect and unconventionally harmonious music without melody would be played eternally, in an environment marked by Marian Zazeela’s magenta-coloured light installations and filled with the scent of incense sticks.

After ten or a hundred years, he hoped, such environments of sound and light would develop into living organisms with a life and tradition of their own. The most famous (and longest-lasting) incarnation of a Dream House was established above La Monte Young and Marian Zazeela’s loft at 275 Church Street in Manhattan in 1993.

Young’s idea of music that prolongs time and ultimately dissolves it was shared by Terry Jennings, a Californian whiz kid who was already studying 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. He met Young, became friends with him, began playing music and studying with him.

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 work was introduced to the city’s avantgarde scene.

Thanks to the openness of the original score, the meditative work took a new direction in 1989: La Monte Young and his student, cellist Charles Curtis, dispensed with the saxophone and ultimately adapted it into a piece in just intonation for solo cello.

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.

Cover art: light and object by Marian Zazeela, Dream House, 275 Church Street, NYC

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Playlist ‘Wild Thyme Music (2): A Sonic Exploration’

Arnold Dreyblatt – Organ Music for Sixteen Hands

performed live at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in Cambridge, MA (1999, Choose Records)

La Monte Young – The Tortoise Droning Selected Pitches From the Holy Numbers for the Two Black Tigers, the Green Tiger and the Hermit

live performance at the Pocket Theatre, Brooklyn, New York City (1964, Otherside Recordings)

Terry Jennings – Piece for Cello and Saxophone

performed live by Charles Curtis at Courtisane Film Festival, Ghent, Belgium (2016, Saltern)

First public performance of Wild Thyme Music (2) was on Filopappou Hill, Athens, 30 May 2024. The Minirig sound system is hidden in a pine tree.