Excerpt from

“28 XI 63

the overday”

(1963)

 

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

 

Title from Angus MacLise’s original calendar poem “YEAR”.

 

This piece was 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

from Columbia University.

 

This piece has been erroneously titled as

“28th / 63 : B^b Dorian Blues” (1962).

 

This has been remastered, balanced and pitch-corrected to the drone note of A^b,

in order for the sopranino saxophone to be playing

as indicated 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.