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La Monte Thornton Young (born October 14, 1935) is an American avant-garde composer, musician, and artist. Young is generally recognized as the first minimalist composer. His works have been included among the most important and radical post-World War II avant-garde, experimental, and contemporary music. Young is especially known for his development of drone music. Both his proto-Fluxus and “minimal” compositions question the nature and definition of music and often stress elements of performance art. [source]

John Cale about “X for Henry Flynt” by La Monte Young: “In 1962, I was at Goldsmiths [College]. I was really wrapped up in writing pieces that were instructions. That’s when I found La Monte Young, and Cage, and “4’33″”, which threw another spanner in the works, because it was really about how environment impacts performance. This is a peculiar American thing that was very fractured, because in Europe, the concert was sacrosanct: silence, and you listen. But you don’t listen to Cage as much as you read him. If you read him in Silence, or A Year From Monday, you get a world outlook that’s very interesting. The walls of the concert hall were not the only thing that he was breaking down.

We learned about discipline and working every day from La Monte, about not particularly forcing anything to happen, but allowing things to happen. I think Cage liked how La Monte was writing instructions for performers. That’s the original performance art. And those instructions didn’t just deal with performance or music. “X for Henry Flynt” was a piece where you pick an event and then you repeat it X number of times with the same gap in time between it. “Draw a straight line and follow it,” which was really about Einstein and space. If you draw a straight line and you come back to where you started, then space is finite. So you really didn’t know what’s performance and what’s not.
Later, when La Monte and I were working together down here on Church Street, holding the drum for an hour and a half every day for a year and a half, it’s like, “What is a performance? Where does it start and where does it end?” And his idea was that it didn’t. He said it was a very Chinese idea at the time. Everybody else in Europe think about centuries. But China thinks in terms of eons.”

Performed by Aljaž Zupančič: