La Monte Young

La Monte Young (b. 1935) is an American composer and musician widely recognised as a founder of minimalism, drone music, and concept art. Working in New York from the early 1960s, he developed a practice centred on sustained tones, just intonation, and duration as compositional material itself. His series The Well-Tuned Piano, begun in 1964, is among the most sustained compositional projects in twentieth-century music. His Theatre of Eternal Music, also known as the Dream Syndicate, including John Cale and Tony Conrad, was foundational for minimal and drone rock. A devoted student of North Indian singing under Pandit Pran Nath, Young absorbed the raga principles underpinning his work.