La Monte Young, Marian Zazeela, and the Just Alap Raga Ensemble (review)

Until a few years ago it was possible to extricate La Monte Young's identity as an American experimental composer from his identity as a practitioner of North Indian classical music. While pursuing both musical paths, and while recognizing certain points of connection and even of mutual validation between them, Young nonetheless seemed to keep them in separate spheres of creative practice. After all, the aesthetic and technical foundations of his two most important works, The Well-Tuned Piano and the series of installation pieces known as Dream Houses, were established well before he and his collaborator, Marian Zazeela, became disciples of North Indian vocal master Pandit Pran Nath in 1970. Even during and after his study with Pran Nath, Young's non-Indian works continued to evolve without becoming discernibly more "Indian-sounding." Young's respective positions within the American and North Indian musical worlds differed dramatically as well. La Monte Young the American composer was the Downtown enfant terrible of the 1960s who went on to become the mystical patriarch of the far-flung minimalist movement; La Monte Young the North Indian vocalist deferred with remarkable reverence to his guru, Pran Nath, even assuming the disciple's duty of arising at four in the morning to make his master's tea.

Several events in the last decade or so have fostered a blending of Young's two musical worlds. After Pran Nath's death in 1996, Young claimed to receive visions and visitations from his deceased teacher. One of these occurred during a period in which Young had stopped singing altogether—first in mourning over Nath's death, and then because of a serious illness that subsequently befell Zazeela. Nath purportedly appeared to Young in a dream and urged him to take up singing again. According to Young, Nath also indicated the great promise of a young artist who had recently asked to be taken on as a student. Jung Hee Choi consequently became a disciple of Young and Zazeela, and in the summer of 2002 the three of them became the founding members of the Just Alap Raga Ensemble. Around this same time, Young was conferred the rare title of Khan Sahib by Ustad Hafizullah Khan Sahib, son of Pandit Pran Nath's teacher, Ustad Abdul Wahid Khan Sahib. This title recognized Young's artistic mastery (it literally translates as "leader" or "Lord") within the Kirana Gharana, the stylistic school to which Pran Nath belonged. In other words, some three decades after first undertaking raga studies with Pandit Pran Nath, Young himself underwent the transformation from disciple to guru. In fact, when I attended a concert of the Just Alap Raga Ensemble in 2003, I observed Jung Hee Choi, sarangi player Rose Okada, and other students addressing Young in the same manner as Young had addressed Pran Nath, with the affectionate honorific "guruji."

During the Just Alap Raga Ensemble's performances in the early 2000s, Young gradually began exercising the artistic license afforded him by his elevated status within the Kirana Gharana. The most apparent innovation at the concert I attended in 2003 appeared in the second half of the program, which comprised a single, original composition: Song to Guruji. The piece, in raga Sindh Bhairavi, which is set in the Phrygian mode, featured an English text in praise of Pandit Pran Nath. Another alteration to traditional practice, obvious to experienced raga listeners but perhaps not so apparent to others, was Young's use of sustained sounds beyond the conventional tambura drone: at certain points in his improvisations, he would arrive at a note of importance and then gesture to one of the other vocalists to sustain the pitch.

A third innovation involved not so much a deviation from tradition, but instead an exaggeration of a feature already associated with the Kirana style. Traditional North Indian raga performance usually consists of two general components: an introductory alap section, in which the singer slowly and gradually...