Alex Ross has a brief review of the Eternal Music String Ensemble 70th birthday concert performance of Young's Trio for Strings ("an awesomely strange landscape of slowly shifting tone"). He also comments:
The experience wavered between the unbearable and the transcendent, coming to rest on the latter.
The same comment may also apply to the music of Philip Glass, although more often coming to rest on the former...
Young in a Music Mavericks interview:
It's interesting that even at the age of 2 or 3, I began to get an intuition about the way to create music. I didn't really start to do it until 1958, when I wrote the Trio for Strings, which is the first work in the history of music that is completely composed of long sustained tones and silences.
This reminds me of one of those Rob Kapilow lectures on why Mozart is so great:
Things are never as simple as they seem.... The next phrase of music continues elegantly...followed by an astonishing measure of complete silence.
Ok, I'll grant the music is graceful and elegant but after hearing the art of Cage, Young, and Johnson, sorry, "classical" silence like this no longer astonishes.
Although I don't want to cause Fred dismay, in order to re-calibrate my ears for "legacy" music, I'm taking Hucbald's suggestion to focus on Haydn rather than Mozart. And I have yet to decide if I'll attend Kapilow's Stanford program on Copland's Appalachian Spring.
rgable:
aworks american high era young: official del.icio.us wikipedia google news yahoo audio singingfish trio for strings: aworks octet version current track: and now, revelation!/rob kapilow/mozart
