Time & Perspective Quote by La Monte Young

La Monte Young is describing a kind of musical power move: refusing the deal that Western concert music usually offers, where time is a highway with milestones (theme, development, climax, release). By naming “stasis” as a formal obsession, he’s staking out an aesthetic and almost ethical position. If most music teaches us to anticipate, he’s interested in what happens when anticipation is denied and the listener is forced to inhabit sound rather than chase it.

The phrasing is tellingly careful: “not so directional in time,” “not so much climactic form.” He isn’t merely anti-melody or anti-drama; he’s trying to reframe form itself. Stasis isn’t emptiness here. It’s structure built from sustained tones, drones, micro-variations, beating frequencies, and the slow reveal of acoustic phenomena. “Allows time, to stand still” works because it’s paradoxical: music is time-based by definition, so the claim is audacious. The subtext is that time is not a neutral container; it’s something art can manipulate, even suspend, by shifting attention from narrative to perception.

Context matters: Young emerges in the 1960s minimalist and post-Cage atmosphere, when composers were dismantling inherited hierarchies of “important” events versus “mere” duration. His work pushes that rebellion into an immersive, sometimes physically demanding experience, closer to meditation or ritual than concert entertainment. Stasis becomes a critique of productivity culture, too: a space where nothing “happens” in the usual sense, yet everything changes if you listen closely enough.