‘Pink’ Festival Finale Is Long on La Monte Young

At a time when patience is wearing thin, in society as well as culture, the slow, meditative music of composer La Monte Young could seem almost as radical as when he launched his ideas 40 years ago. At Barnsdall Park on Saturday, in the final event of the conceptually eared “Beyond the Pink” festival, cellist and Young specialist Charles Curtis assembled a three-hour celebration of Young’s early work.

A rapt crowd settled in for a long winter’s evening of drones, closely observed intervals and definitive long-tones in a fascinating program entitled “The 1960s World of La Monte Young.” Though he’s been gone for many years now, Young has local connections, having played saxophone with jazz musicians Billy Higgins and Don Cherry before they gained acclaim with Ornette Coleman, and having studied with Schoenberg protege Leonard Stein.

Though often dubbed the grandfather of minimalism, Young’s interests focus on some atomic level of sound phenomena, veering in a separate and more esoteric direction from the arpeggio--and pulse-driven music of composers such as Terry Riley, Philip Glass and Steve Reich.

The most overtly theatrical piece on Saturday was “Perspectives for La Monte Young,” by Young contemporary Richard Maxfield, in which a prerecorded tape of Young’s own string playing was complemented by Curtis. He bowed a bass laid on the floor, behind the bridge and on the stem, coaxing a bounty of overtones.

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The interval-intensive “Piece for Two Saxophones,” by another ‘60s kindred spirit, Terry Jennings, was refitted for two cellists. Curtis and Hugh Livingston sat in separate corners offstage, bathed in red and blue spotlights, respectively (the subtle, shifting light design was by long-standing Young collaborator Marian Zazeela).

Young’s pivotal long-toned 1958 work, Trio for Strings, was retooled by Curtis for the two cellos, and two basses, Connie Dieter and Joe McNally. After intermission the quartet returned to realize Young’s “Composition 1960 #7 (July 1960),” running an hourlong course based on the hypnotic exposition of two tones, a fundamental and a fifth.

But like most of Young’s ideas, within this ostensibly static scheme, a lot happens, not the least of which is the sonic effect of phantom “beating” tones resonating in the ear. More important is the psychological effect of music that pulls the willing listener into a mystical world of sound, where the perception of time is altered and a cleansing effect is the upshot.