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Subject: FWD: Statement on Table of The Elements CD
La Monte Young
P.O. Box 190
Canal Street Station
New York, N.Y. 10013
212-966-4089 Fax: 212-226-7802 Email:
mela@lamonteyoung.com
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
On Table of The Elements CD 74 "day of Niagara" April 25, 1965
La Monte Young
The Table of The Elements (ToE) CD 74, "day of Niagara" April 25, 1965, is an unauthorized release of my music from my ongoing
composition, The Tortoise, His Dreams and Journeys (1964-present).
I have taken the position all along for many years that I am the sole
composer of the underlying musical composition on this recording.
It is my understanding that the performers on the recording can no
longer contest my position because the three-year statute of
limitations on their claims of co-authorship expired many years ago.
Further, I believe that my position is correct as a matter of
substantive law as well. As I previously stated in an interview
published in The Wire magazine (Issue 178, December 1998): "To be
co-authors you had to agree that there was co-authorship, which I of
course never did; also, in order to be co-authors, your section,
whatever your contribution is, has to be copyrightable by itself,
which the contributions of Cale and Conrad may not be."
The sound quality of my Original Master tape is certainly measurably
superior to the "now restored and digitally remastered" CD made from
the allegedly unauthorized copy of my tape that has somehow surfaced
at Table of The Elements. Many of the reasons for the poor sound
quality of the CD are enumerated in Section II, "Sound Quality of the
CD" below. The version ToE wants to release is flawed and contains
several problems that were created in the process of the unauthorized
copying, not the least of which is that approximately one and a half
minutes of music are completely missing from their copy.
Marian Zazeela and I listened to the CD several times, comparing it
and even "A-B-ing" it with a high quality DAT copy of my Original
Master tape. After several audits we concluded that the generally
deteriorated quality of the CD and the deletions from the music make
it a poor representation of the original, and by extension, of the
music composed by me and performed with great effort and inspiration
by the musicians in my group, The Theatre of Eternal Music.
Regarding this particular selection from The Tortoise, His Dreams and
Journeys, I would not have chosen the "Day of Niagara" recording
session to be released for several reasons (see Section I, "Selection
of Music for First Release" below).
That said, however, I do not object to the release of my music "25 IV
65 c. 8:15-8:45 PM NYC day of niagra" (spelling as per Angus
MacLise1s Calendar Year) from The Tortoise, His Dreams and Journeys,
as long as the following conditions are met:
1. That I receive proper credit as the composer of the underlying
musical composition;,br>
2. That I receive fair remuneration for my contributions;
3. That Table of The Elements obtain a complete version of the work
from my complete Original Master, which is in much better condition
than the unauthorized copy they have used to produce this CD.
My attorney is in discussion with the attorney for Table of The
Elements and I am hopeful that a satisfactory and harmonious solution
can be reached among the parties so that the music from my work of
this period can finally be released.
It is noteworthy, although unfortunate, that I was never contacted by
Table of The Elements regarding this release until after my attorney
contacted the ToE label manager following the online publication by
"Creative Loafing CL-Atlanta" of an article on the CD on June 7,
2000. According to CL-Atlanta, the CD was to be released during that
first week of June, but ToE has since represented to me that the CD
will not be released until August 2000. After my attorney spoke with
the label manager, Marian and I each received letters of notification
regarding the release from Table of The Elements, as well as two
boxes of CDs, so it has been only very recently that we have been
able to compare their "restored and digitally remastered" production
with my original master tape of the same date.
ANALYSES OF SOME ASPECTS OF THE ToE CD 74 "day of Niagara" April 25, 1965
I. Selection of Music from The Tortoise, His Dreams and Journeys for
First Release
Regarding this particular selection from The Tortoise, His Dreams and
Journeys, I would not have chosen the "Day of Niagara" recording
session to be released for several reasons, including, but not
limited to the following:
1. The mix is totally out of balance (see #6a in Section II, "Sound
Quality of the CD" below).
2. The texture of the music is somewhat uneven, with unaccounted for
stops and starts in the string section. For example, John Cale1s
viola is out or unamplified for a noticeable period from about 13:12
and reenters at 16:20 with a pop and sudden surge of volume. Nice to
have him back, but where was he? In the earlier sessions of The
Tortoise, the strings were still experimenting with amplifying their
instruments, and sometimes had to make road-stops to get their
pickups back in optimum placement. Or, a peg may have slipped. In
order to articulate beat-free tuning, it is best to play loudly in
the process. On the other hand, during a performance or recording
session, retuning must be as inaudible as possible. Although the
reason for Cale1s stop may have been important at the moment, the
result is that rather than sounding like a solid excerpt from an
endless stream of eternal music, the "day of niagara" session gives
too much of an impression of an endless stream of starts and stops.
If the strings were in better balance to the rest of the performers,
this problem would be less noticeable (see #6a in Section II, "Sound
Quality of the CD" below).
3. It is an atypical example of music from The Tortoise because of
the brief, albeit under-recorded, appearance of Angus MacLise (see
Section IV, "Appearance of Angus MacLise on this recording" below).
4. Usually the best realizations of a given genre of my music occur
later, rather than earlier, in a given period. For example, each
release I have made of The Well-Tuned Piano, the 1987 Gramavision
5-hour performance from October 1981, and the forthcoming DVD of The
Well-Tuned Piano in The Magenta Lights of the 6-hour, 25-minute 1987
performance, were of the final performance in a 7 or 8-concert
series.
There are many better realizations of The Tortoise, His Dreams and
Journeys recorded even a few months later on, such as "15 VIII 65 day
of the antler" from The Obsidian Ocelot, The Sawmill, and The Blue
Sawtooth High-Tension Line Stepdown Transformer Refracting The Legend
of The Dream of The Tortoise Traversing The 189/98 Lost Ancestral
Lake Region Illuminating Quotients from The Black Tiger Tapestries of
The Drone of The Holy Numbers. The system of frequencies of this
realization has been published and analyzed in Kyle Gann1s essay,
"The Outer Edge of Consonance," in Sound and Light: La Monte Young /
Marian Zazeela (Bucknell Review Vol. XL, No. 1, 1996), and the score
of the work in Zazeela1s calligraphy, is published, also with
analysis, in Four Musical Minimalists by Keith Potter (Cambridge
University Press, 2000).
This "day of the antler" realization of The Tortoise, and
other realizations like it, also solve the problems listed in #s 1, 2
and 3 in this Section I, above.
II. Sound Quality of the CD
1. At 09:14 on the CD there is a serious dip in frequency with a
loud wow, most likely caused by someone bumping a reel on either the
playback or record machine that made the tape ToE used as a master to
create this CD from. The Original Master tape has no such noise.
2. The bump at 09:14 on the CD apparently also caused the loss
of at least 15 or 16 seconds of music that is recorded on my Original
Master tape but has been deleted from the CD by the inept copying
process.
3. The overall length of the CD is about one minute and 25 or 35
seconds shorter in length compared to the Original Master tape. In
addition to the loss of 15 or 16 seconds caused by the bump dropout
at 09:14, approximately one minute and 10 seconds is missing from the
end of the reel. Possibly, the reel the master was copied to was
slightly shorter in length than the Original Master and the tape ran
out sooner than the actual audio material on the Original.
4. The character of the ending sounds on the CD are different
from the ending on the Original Master, caused by the factor
indicated in item #3 above.
5. We were able to isolate at least one other spot on the CD
where there is a very slight speed drop, less noticeable than the
bump at 09:14, but nevertheless audible. This speed drop is not
audible on my Original Master tape. It is our opinion that there are
probably other spots like this that we would be able to identify if
we continued to endlessly compare the CD with the Original.
6. Balance and EQ:
a. In those days, I had no professional mixers and somehow managed to
get all the sounds onto one track of a reel-to-reel tape recorder.
Then we listened back to the results to determine whether or not we
had achieved a good mix. Table of The Elements has found a tape in
this case where the violin is extremely loud and up front. As one
turns up the volume to bring the rest of the group up to substantial
audibility without using additional EQ, the violin part becomes
boosted to an ear-splittingly painful level. However, being the
loudest sound source on the tape does not make a performer a
co-composer. I have only had one opportunity to attempt to
re-equalize the CD and I found that even with my limited home studio
mixer1s bass-mid-treble EQ, a more balanced and harmonious EQ of the
CD was achievable with no effort whatsoever. Even Angus1 drumming,
which is almost completely drowned out by the level of the violin on
the ToE CD, was improved, as well as the voices. Give me a day in a
professional Year 2000 studio with my Original Master tape and I can
improve the balance on this recording by 99% to 101%. This is not
the fault of whoever did the "restoration and digital remastering".
They were simply uninformed and given no proper instructions or
guidance.
b. Whoever "restored and digitally remastered" the CD from the
unauthorized copy of my tape for Table of The Elements was not
apprised of the fact that we always insisted that the bass be boosted
for playback of any of the tapes recorded by The Theatre of Eternal
Music group in order to bring out the low frequency combination
tones, just as we would boost the bass in the PA system to bring them
out in live concerts. Therefore, the overall sound of this
selection does not have the character I intended.
III. Packaging of the CD
1. The visual appearance of the ToE CD is certainly not up to
the high artistic standards of my own releases of my music, including
performances by various ensembles of The Theatre of Eternal Music.
Obviously, I could not expect a Marian Zazeela design, but this
package, other than the choice of the color purple, looks much like
other bootlegs of my music: plain, totally unimaginative, and with
very little attention to the visual aspect. Marian Zazeela1s
lighting designs and printed calligraphy accompanied and visually
characterized nearly every live performance of The Tortoise. This CD
bears no graphic or other relationship to the established visual
character of those performances. From the look of the CD, it is as
though the company threw it away, without any investment in the
production or inquiry into the history of the music.
2. The absence of program notes, a shared characteristic with
other bootlegs, is surprising, given the involvement of Tony Conrad,
an artist not given to understatement. Although none of the recorded
realizations of The Tortoise has yet been authorized for release on
CD, a substantial amount of documentation has been published on the
music, its history and its performers, but none of this information
was included in the booklet. As with other aspects of the production
of the ToE CD, I was not invited to contribute to the literary
content of the package.
IV. Appearance of Angus MacLise on this recording
It is very unusual to find the participation of Angus MacLise in The
Theatre of Eternal Music performances and recordings of The Tortoise,
His Dreams and Journeys, since this work is structured around long
sustained continuous tones. In fact, this might well be the only
recording from The Tortoise that includes Angus. Angus drops out of
the recording early on (he does not appear on the CD after the bump
at 09:14, although he can be heard playing slightly longer on my
Original tape), probably because he had no complementary rhythmic
part to play against. It is for the same reason that Angus did not
play with the group as long as I was working with sustained tones
exclusively. His rhythmic contribution did not fit in with the long
sustained tones.
It may have been purely accidental that Angus was at the recorded
performance at our studio that night. According to our diary, we had
organized a dinner party for several friends for the evening of
Sunday, April 25, 1965, at which we were going to play music for our
guests. The guests were Henry Geldzahler, David Hayes, Jim Kirker,
Bob and Laura Benson, Diane Wakoski and Wesley Day. It happens that
April 25 was the birthday of Frances Araby Stillman, Angus1
girlfriend, with whom he had traveled to the Middle East and India in
1964. Probably, Angus dropped by with Araby, and, of course, they
were invited to join the dinner party. Because of all the years that
Angus played in the group when La Monte was playing sopranino
saxophone in a rhythmic style, Angus would have sat in with the group
as we performed, although he had not been rehearsing with us during
this period. Nor did he perform on any of the public concerts we had
given of sections of The Tortoise, His Dreams and Journeys in
October, November and December, 1964; March, October and December,
1965; February, July and August, 1966.
The barely audible sound of Angus1 extraordinarily intricate rhythms
in the background on this CD does not do justice to his legendary
stature as a percussionist.
--
I meant to mention that Psue Braun on fmu was going to play a pre-recorded interviwe with Kim Fowley last friday evening. Wow, two hours at warp speed year by year orgey by orgey hit by hit. "I'm the guy who invented lighting matches at concerts. Sorry, but I am !"
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More on this later........