Draw a Straight Line and Follow It
The Music and Mysticism of La Monte Young
Jeremy Grimshaw
Reviews and Awards
"An intimate and revealing portrait of one of the most enigmatic musicians who ever lived, and a pivotal historical figure to boot." --Kyle Gann, author of No Such Thing as Silence: John Cage's 4'33"
"La Monte Young has spent a lifetime treating the exploration of musical intonation as a search for spiritual truth. One of the powerful themes of this book is to trace how much Young's independent spiritual thinking springs from his Mormon roots--that one of American music's most rugged pioneers found inspiration in America's only rugged pioneer religion is a revelation, and it makes a lot of sense. I learned about it from this very enjoyable book." --David Lang, composer and winner of the 2008 Pulitzer Prize in Music
"Sure to become the indispensable work on composer La Monte Young, Jeremy Grimshaw's Draw a Straight Line and Follow It provides a uniquely balanced and engaged look at perhaps the most reclusive, enigmatic, and controversial figure of twentieth-century experimental music...Grimshaw's survey of Young's life work benefits greatly from the author's unprecedented access to the composer and his archives. The book moves seamlessly between rich biographic and ethnographic detail, sophisticated exposition of complex musical techniques, and searching interrogation of metaphysical influences and implications. From the Mormonism of Young's rural Idaho childhood through encounters with jazz, serialism, Darmstadt, Cage, Warhol, Pythagoras, Pandit Pran Nath, and beyond, Grimshaw argues that Young has consistently followed a straight line pointing toward the immanent physical presence of the Absolute in sound. What a long strange trip it's been!" --Robert Fink, UCLA
"Vigorously stimulating...It also rekindled a love for art that is challenging, a bit dangerous, and potent with change." --Mormon Artists Group Newsletter
"An intriguing read." --Deseret News
"Remarkable and indispensable...Draw a Straight Line does what only the most rewarding books about music do: it makes you want to immediately drop whatever else you're doing to go and listen to the music." --Frank. J. Oteri, NewMusicBox.org
"The biographical portions of this work flesh out one of the most doggedly mysterious figures of the experimental music world, while the analytical insights provide a compelling way in which to understand why and how Young created his extraordinary output... [It] should become an essential text for anyone interested in American experimental music." --Journal of the American Musicological Society
"Offers an intriguing model for a kind of orthogonal Mormon studies..." --Mormon Studies Review