|
“19 X 63 fifth day of the hammer Bb Dorian Blues” (1962)
Performed by The Theatre of Eternal Music La Monte Young : Sopranino Saxophone Marian Zazeela : Voice Drone Angus MacLise : Hand Percussion Tony Conrad : Bowed Guitar John Cale : Viola
Recording source unknown assumed to be somewhere in NYC. Appears on the 1992 RIP 2 LP unauthorized bootleg edition as well as a Japanese bootleg LP.
The name “fifth day of the hammer” is taken from Angus MacLise’s calendar poem “Year”
The recording also includes a spoken German introduction from a 1973 German FM radio broadcast.
This piece was also later aired during the October 21, 1984 WKCR (89.9 FM) 24 Hour La Monte Young Retrospective radio broadcast in celebration of La Monte Young’s 49th birthday.
This recorded version has been further improved by normalization and rebalancing and does not appear to have come from a vinyl source. It has also been pitch corrected to a drone of B flat as indicated by the title and by the following statement made by La Monte Young in his online essay “Notes on The Theatre of Eternal Music and The Tortoise, His Dreams and Journeys”
The specific rules that governed the performance of my music, including the sections of The Tortoise, His Dreams and Journeys participated in by Tony Conrad and John Cale, create a sound characterized by the predominance of musical intervals whose numerators and denominators in just intonation are factorable by the primes 7, 3, and 2, and selected higher primes, especially 31, and by the exclusion of intervals whose numerators and denominators are factorable by the prime 5. If we represent intervals with numerators and denominators factorable by the primes 7, 3, and 2 in conventional music notation and terminology, we obtain intervals that include various sized major and minor sevenths (with emphasis on the septimally derived blues minor seventh in my compositions such as Bb Dorian Blues, Early Tuesday Morning Blues, Sunday Morning Blues, and The Tortoise), perfect fifths, octaves, unisons and their inversions, various sized major and minor seconds, and perfect fourths. The blues I was playing on the sopranino saxophone, directly preceding the period of The Tortoise, emphasized a technique I invented consisting of extremely fast combination permutations of a limited set of tones to simulate a sustained chord. And the chord I increasingly emphasized consisted of the pitches Eb, Bb, Db, Eb, (the IV-chord from Bb Dorian Blues) extended over the full range of the saxophone. Translated back into just intonation, these pitches are all examples of octave transpositions of the primes 7, 3, and 2.
|
