[Each of] The Four Dreams of China is based on four pitches.... An apparently static “harmonic” music results—harmonic in the sense of the intervals formed not only between the basic tones but between their upper partials and the combination tones that are produced when these simple fundamental tones are dwelt on. But, as the performers develop their own sensitivity to such “harmonies,” and to the degree that the listener does also, the music is not at all static; a strange, hypnotic, dream-like succession of delicate sound images unfolds in shimmering, undulating procession.
H. Wiley Hitchcock, Music in the United States:
A Historical Introduction
La Monte Young
The very first sound that I recall hearing was the sound of the wind blowing through the chinks and all around the log cabin in Idaho where I was born, and I’ve always considered this among my most important early experiences. It was awe-inspiring and very beautiful and mysterious. Since I couldn’t see it and didn’t know what it was, I questioned my mother about it for long hours.
The Composition
I composed The Four Dreams of China while riding in a car on a trip from San Francisco to New York City in December 1962. I wrote the first sketch on a paper napkin from a restaurant on the road and later wrote the work out in detail after I got back to New York. I was still inspired from hearing the premiere performance a few months earlier of my Trio for Strings. The Four Dreams of China forms a structural, stylistic and harmonic link between my earlier, fully notated works composed of long sustained tones from the late 1950s, and later works combining improvisation with predetermined rules and elements.
In the Trio for Strings I began to establish what would become my own musical mode. Premonitions of this exclusive harmonic vocabulary of intervallic and chordal structures had appeared earlier in my works for Brass and for Guitar. The opening four pitches of for Brass exemplify a classic statement of one of my “Dream Chords,” and throughout the work numerous examples of the Dream Chords are stated at various transpositions for the first time in my music. In the Trio for Strings, however, every chord, triad, and interval can be found to comprise some transposition of one of the Dream Chords or some subset thereof. I discovered that there were four Dream Chords, and each one eventually became the entire tonal content of one of The Four Dreams of China. As I listened to one of these sustained chords while composing the Trio for Strings, I received a powerful image of the sound and timelessness of China. This feeling pervades the four Dream Chords and inspired the title, The Four Dreams of China.
The titles of The Four Dreams of China are respectively:
1. The First Dream of China
2. The First Blossom of Spring (originally provisionally entitled The Plains of China)
3. The First Dream of The High-Tension Line Stepdown Transformer
4. The Second Dream of The High-Tension Line Stepdown Transformer
Each of the four Dreams is composed of only four pitches. Three of these pitches are essentially the same in two of the four Dream quadrad, The First Dream of China and The First Dream of The High-Tension Line Stepdown Transformer, where these pitches are represented in frequency ratios as the triad 12/9/8. The inversion of these ratios produces the ratios 9/8/6, which constitute the triad of the other two Dream quadrad, The First Blossom of Spring and The Second Dream of The High-Tension Line Stepdown Transformer. In each Dream, the fourth pitch of the quadrad functions as divisor of the 9/8 interval (through octave displacement in two cases) and can be represented by the frequency ratio 17 or some octave transposition of it.
By multiplying the ratios 12/9/8 by two octaves (4) to put them into the correct octave, we get the complete quadrad 48/36/32/17 for The First Dream of China.
The quadrad for The First Blossom of Spring is represented by the ratios 17/9/8/6.
By multiplying the ratios 12/9/8 by an octave (2) to put them into the corresponding octave, we get the complete quadrad 24/18/17/16 for The First Dream of The High-Tension Line Stepdown Transformer.
By multiplying the ratios 9/8/6 by an octave (2) to put them into the corresponding octave, we get the complete quadriad 18/17/16/12 for The Second Dream of The High-Tension Line Stepdown Transformer.
These pitches may be isolated in the harmonic structures of the sounds of power plants and telephone poles from which the titles The First Dream of The High-Tension Line Stepdown Transformer and The Second Dream of the High-Tension Line Stepdown Transformer were derived.
I conceived of The Twelve Subsequent Dreams of China some time around 7 January 1980. At this time, I had been working on making an archival recording of for Guitar, performed by Ned Sublette, who had performed the world premiere of for Guitar at The Kitchen on 7 and 8 December 1979. While focusing intently on for Guitar, I conceived of the for Guitar Prelude and Postlude on 7 January 1980. In for Guitar Prelude and Postlude, several Dream Chords in their original voicings and pitch placements from for Guitar appear in varying sequence. Within each one of these Dream Chords, the performer utilises the appropriate rules from The Four Dreams of China. The idea of working on a version of The Four Dreams of China with guitars somehow inspired me to think about the idea of combining the individual Dreams from The Four Dreams of China. Thus, The Twelve Subsequent Dreams of China (at that time, the title was simply The Subsequent Dreams of China) were born, based on the principle that any two Dream Chords could be combined, provided that: (1) all of the pitches in the two Dream Chords to be combined were either unisons or octave transpositions of each other; (2) at least one interval must be a unison between the two Dream Chords; and additionally, (3) pairings which met the above conditions but had a conjunct tritone interval were disqualified.
I asked Ned Sublette to make a chart of all the possible pairings meeting the above conditions (1) and (2), and on 18 March 1980, he sent me a letter with the fifteen possible pairings. After receiving that letter, I disqualified the three pairings meeting condition 3 above. And thus there were twelve Subsequent Dreams of China. Of The Twelve Subsequent Dreams of China, The High-Tension Line Stepdown Transformer’s Second Dream of The First Blossom of Spring was not only the first to be performed, but it was also the first to receive its own title, although other titles for some of The Subsequent Dreams such as The High-Tension Line Stepdown Transformer’s First Dream of The First Blossom of Spring will logically follow.
Each of The Twelve Subsequent Dreams of China is composed of two sets of four pitches, making a total of eight pitches. At least one of the pitches in each of the two sets of four pitches is an identical common tone and, in some cases, as many as two or three of the pitches in each of the two sets of four pitches are identical common tones.
By combining the ratios 18/17/16/12 for The Second Dream of The High-Tension Line Stepdown Transformer with the ratios 17/9/8/6 for The First Blossom of Spring, and then multiplying the ratios 17/9/8/6 by an octave (2) to put them into the correct octave, 34/18/16/12, we get the complete octad 18/17/16/12, 34/18/16/12 for The High-Tension Line Stepdown Transformer’s Second Dream of The First Blossom of Spring.
Regarding the ratio 17, I discovered the harmoniousness of 17 as a divisor of the dyad 9/8 when working with electronically generated sine waves to produce the ratios 17/9/8/6 for The First Blossom of Spring quadrad. In the case where the dyad 9/8 or the triad 9/8/6 is sounding, I tried a number of ratios for the interval of a major seventh above the frequency ratio 9, and I found that only the ratio 17 sounded harmonious. I attributed the harmoniousness of 17 to the fact that it coincides with and reinforces the sum tone produced by the ratio 9/8 (9 + 8 = 17). All other major sevenths make acoustical beats because of their close proximity to the sum tone 17. It is further relevant that, while the ratio 17 makes an ideal divisor of the 9/8 dyad when working with sine waves, when working with acoustic instruments such as violins, trumpets in Harmon mutes, cellos, and so forth, we search for a value for the divisor of the 9/8 interval that sounds most harmonious in order to take into consideration the special characteristics of the harmonic structures of the timbres of the instruments. Frequently, this new ratio is a little higher than 17, and this may take into account the known inharmonicities of the harmonics of acoustical instruments—or it may be just another ratio that happens to sound better.
After the four Dream Chords were ordered into selective pairings to create The Twelve Subsequent Dreams of China, I composed the Orchestral Dreams in 1985. In the Orchestral Dreams, the selective pairings of The Twelve Subsequent Dreams of China were further combined into expanded sets of pairings and other more complex groupings of the four Dream Chords that appear as extended transpositions in unique octave displacements over the range of the orchestra and meet the above conditions that (1) all of the pitches in the Dream Chords to be combined are either unisons or octave transpositions of each other, and (3) pairings and groupings which meet the above condition (1) but have a conjunct tritone interval are disqualified. The Orchestral Dreams do not necessarily meet the above condition for The Twelve Subsequent Dreams of China that (2) at least one interval must be a unison between the two Dream Chords.
In May 1993, while preparing the score and program notes for the 29 June 1993 world premiere performance by the Ensemble Modern of the Hessischer Rundfunk of The High-Tension Line Stepdown Transformer’s Second Dream of The First Blossom of Spring from The Twelve Subsequent Dreams of China, I further ordered the selected pairings of The Twelve Subsequent Dreams of China into groupings which combined “more than two” of the Dream Chords from The Four Dreams of China to create a new work provisionally titled The Subsequent Dreams of The Four Dreams of China in Simultaneity. From this new work I discovered only two unique voicings which include all four of the Dream Chords and also meet the above listed conditions (1), (2), and (3) for The Twelve Subsequent Dreams of China. These two unique voicings are provisionally titled The Two Subsequent Dreams of The Four Dreams of China in Perfect Simultaneity. There are also two voicings of The Subsequent Dreams of The Four Dreams of China in Simultaneity that meet conditions (1) and (3) above, but regarding condition (2) there are different common tone unisons between every pairing of the four Dream Chords. Each of The Subsequent Dreams of The Four Dreams of China in Simultaneity requires an ensemble of at least 16 bowed strings in sets of four of like timbre, or 32 wind instruments in sets of eight of like timbre, or combinations of the above strings and winds in sets of four strings and eight winds for each of the four Dream Chords included.
Stylistically, The Four Dreams of China and, in turn, The Twelve Subsequent Dreams of China and Orchestral Dreams continue the texture of long sustained tones and silences and the extended-duration time construct set forth in the Trio for Strings. Structurally, however, while the Trio for Strings is fixed in time by its method of conventional notation, The Four Dreams of China is the first work I composed in the style of the Trio that involves the process of improvisation. Inspired by the scores of Cage, Feldman, Brown, Wolff, and Bussotti, which require performer interpretation, I evolved a concept of composition that led to rule-based scores such as Vision (1959), Poem for Chairs, Tables, Benches, etc. (1960), Compositions 1960, and Compositions 1961 and crystallised in The Four Dreams of China. Strict rules in each of the four “Dreams” determine which of the four pitches may be sounded together. Within this framework of fixed rules, the musicians listen to each other and improvise. This process of actively listening to each other is one of the important aspects of The Four Dreams of China, and it has become a central principle for group improvisation in all of my subsequent ensemble music. Because The Twelve Subsequent Dreams of China employ eight pitches instead of four, and combine the rules for two of The Four Dreams of China, which in turn requires new, more comprehensive rules resulting from the combination of rules, the rule-based improvisation becomes a much more complex process demanding even greater skill, concentration and eventual mastery from the performers. Similarly, in the Orchestral Dreams this process will evolve to a significantly higher level of complexity.
Since improvisation is a part of the performance process, each realisation of The Four Dreams of China and of The Twelve Subsequent Dreams of China is different, and as a method of cataloguing the different recorded realisations of works of this nature, I include the date, time, and city of recording within the titles. For example, the 77-minute Gramavision recording of The Second Dream of The High-Tension Line Stepdown Transformer is the 9:35 pm, 9 December 1990 realisation (notated in the title as “90 XII 9 c. 9:35–10:52 PM NYC”) of The Melodic Version of The Second Dream of The High-Tension Line Stepdown Transformer.
Similarly, on the subject of dates and titles: the dates of composition of my works during the 1960s, when I was working closely with the late poet and hand drummer Angus MacLise, often incorporated the names of the days as written in the original version of his calendar YEAR. Hence, day of the unquiet grave – smoke of the shore, beneath the date of composition on the title page refers to the names of the days 10 and 11 December.
I composed The Melodic Version of The Second Dream of The High-Tension Line Stepdown Transformer in New York City in 1984. The concept of The Melodic Version also applies to each of the other three Dreams from The Four Dreams of China, as well as to The Twelve Subsequent Dreams of China and The Orchestral Dreams. The Melodic Versions of The Four Dreams of China include all of the material of the original “harmonic” versions of 1962. However, while each player performs only one of the four pitches in The Harmonic Versions, The Melodic Versions permit each player to play all of the four pitches provided the pitches are played in sequences prescribed by the harmonic rules; that is, pitches that are permitted to be played together harmonically may be played in ordered conjunct melodic sequence. In addition to the sequences of the pitches, the rules for The Melodic Versions also determine the permissible progressions among the dyads, triads and the quadrad. By permitting each player to play all of the four pitches, The Melodic Versions create the possibility of unisons in performances that have only four players, whereas in The Harmonic Versions, unisons are only possible in performances with more than four players. Also, in realisations by wind instruments The Melodic Versions enable any one of the pitches to be sustained longer, since it can be shared by two or more of the players.
Over the course of rehearsals and performances of The Melodic Versions, I have developed special guidelines for the improvised realisations of the work, which I have taught to the musicians as an oral tradition, in addition to the rules already established in the score. These guidelines include a suggested proportional duration macrostructure for a performance of a given length. This macrostructure outlines the sections of the work, which include an exposition of the elements section, a development section, a culmination section, a preparation for the ending section, and the ending. Within these sections, the macrostructure also outlines the sequence and duration of the exposition of each of the four pitches, and the sequence and duration of the elements of the work which include silences, sustained tones, pulses, dyads, triads, chords, canons (in single lines, dyads and triads), and dyadic, triadic and chordal progressions (in long sustained tones). This oral tradition of performance practice continues in The Twelve Subsequent Dreams of China.
The Four Dreams of China and The Twelve Subsequent Dreams of China represent yet a further expansion of time structure in my work: developing the idea of timelessness, I determined that individual performances of The Four Dreams of China had no beginning or ending. Each performance is woven out of an eternal fabric of silence and sound where the first sound emerges from a long silence, and after the last sound the performance does not end but merely evanesces back into silence until a group of musicians “picks up” the same set of pitches again, or from time to time, emphasising the audible aspect of the performance. It was this concept, in fact, of a work which was eternal, with no beginning and no end, first set forth in The Four Dreams of China, that led me to evolve the idea of the Dream House, a permanent performance place where such a work would be played continuously, eventually establishing a life and tradition of its own.
Musical and Environmental Influences on the Evolution of My Music
In the mid-1950s I was studying counterpoint and composition in Los Angeles with Leonard Stein, the noted pianist, conductor, and principal assistant to Arnold Schoenberg. Stein had introduced me to a broader spectrum of modern music, and I had gradually become totally absorbed in the work of Anton Webern. While for Brass is a serial work, it also forms the bridge between Webern and what became my own style. Some of the durations of the pitches are still short enough to be reminiscent of Webern, but here for the first time, I introduced long sustained tones into the vocabulary of my music. The introduction of sustenance in for Brass led me to create the Trio for Strings. This was the first work that I composed entirely of tones of long duration, and it is probably my most important early musical statement. To my knowledge, no one had ever before made a work that was composed completely of sustained tones. There was sustenance in Eastern and Western music, but it was always a drone, a pedal point, or a sustained tone of a cantus firmus over which melodies were sung or played. It is difficult to find any other examples of sustenance besides these types of drones in music before the Trio for Strings and for Brass.
The concept of the expanded time structure composed of long sustained tones and the unique tonal palette of these works came to me not by theoretical deduction, but by totally inspired intuition. This new approach to composition and hearing evolved not only from my great appreciation for the music of Anton Webern, but from environmental influences as well: the sound of the wind; the sounds of crickets and cicadas; the sounds of telephone poles and motors; sounds produced by steam escaping such as my mother’s teakettle and the sounds of whistles and signals from trains; and resonances set off by the natural characteristics of particular geographic areas such as canyons, valleys, lakes, and plains. In fact, the first sustained single tone at a constant pitch, without a beginning or end, that I recall hearing as a child was the sound of telephone poles: the hum of the wires. This was a very important auditory influence upon the sparse sustained style of the work of the genre of the Trio for Strings, Composition 1960 [# 7] (where a perfect fifth, B–F#, is “To be held for a long time”) and The Four Dreams of China.
There are two examples of sounds of electrical power transformers that I remember listening to during the first four and a half years of my life. One was a telephone pole on the Bern road (there’s only one road in Bern, Idaho; it was gravel), near where I was born and not too far from the intersection with the road that goes to Montpelier, the closest town. I used to like to stand next to this pole and listen to the sound. The other electrical sound was produced by a small power distribution station just outside of Montpelier next to a Conoco gas depot that my mother’s father, Grandpa Grandy, managed, and where my father worked. I often stood next to this depot outside of a fenced-in area, which had about twenty electrical transformers and produced a louder, more complex sound. Sometimes on warm days I would climb up on top of the huge gasoline storage tanks and sit in the hot sun, smelling the gasoline fumes, listening to the sounds, daydreaming, and looking off at the mountains.
The use of long sustained tones in music allows one to better isolate and listen to the harmonics, and the harmonic series is a clearly audible model for understanding the structure of “just intonation.” Just intonation is that system of tuning based on the idealised principles of harmonics and resonances as our ears hear them and our voices produce them, that is, as they are found in nature. The tunings I invented for The Tortoise, His Dreams and Journeys (1964–) and The Well-Tuned Piano (1964–) were set in the system of just intonation. Additionally, sustained tones help make it possible to achieve finer degrees of precision in tuning. In my book, Selected Writings, I point out that tuning is a function of time. When scientists want to make a comparative measurement of two or more periodic events in time, the longer the period of measurement, the more information they can extract about the relationships between the events in time. This is exactly what happens in tuning: whether the frequency is measured with a frequency counter, an oscilloscope, or by ear, the degree of precision possible will always be proportional to the duration of the analysis, that is, to the duration of the tuning.
The concepts set forth in my works from the late 1950s and early 1960s came to characterise my style, forming the beginnings of minimalism in music, and subsequently developed into the creation of continuous sound and light environments which I presented in collaboration with Marian Zazeela in our Dream Houses, large-scale installations extending over durations of weeks and years. Sustenance became one of the basic principles of my work, providing the foundation for the development of my musical expression and, ultimately, the light that illuminated the path that led to my later work in tuning and just intonation, inspiring a new vision of composition evolving from the universal truths of harmonic structure.
Performance History of The Four Dreams of China
The world premiere of the original “harmonic version” of The Second Dream of The High-Tension Line Stepdown Transformer was presented as part of George Brecht and Robert Watts’s YAM Festival on the afternoon of 19 May 1963 at George Segal’s Farm, North Brunswick, New Jersey. The work was performed outdoors in a meadow of very tall grasses by Marian Zazeela, violin; Angus MacLise, violin; Tony Conrad, viola; Larry Poons, viola; Jack Smith, bowed mandola; Dottie Moskowitz, bowed lute; Joseph Byrd, bowed guitar; and myself, bowed mandolin. The performers were seated in a symmetrical, intersecting, double diamond arrangement designed by Larry Poons.
This was followed in 1965 by a series of performances by Paul Zukofsky and Charles Joseph, violins, under the auspices of the Center of the Creative and Performing Arts, at the State University of New York at Buffalo, and at Carnegie Recital Hall and Asia House, in New York City. Between 1972 and 1976, the work was also performed by Petr Kotik’s SEM Ensemble in concerts at Aachen, Berlin, Geneva, Buffalo, New York City, Cologne, and Witten.
Trumpeter Ben Neill has studied my work over a long period, and since 1984 has led The Theatre of Eternal Music Brass Ensemble in many full-length performances of The Melodic Version of The Second Dream of The High-Tension Line Stepdown Transformer, in realisations for four or eight trumpets in Harmon mutes. In addition to the musicians on the Gramavision recording (see below), these performances have included such outstanding trumpeters as Sue Radcliff, Rick Albani, Rhys Chatham, Tom Bontrager, Frank London, David Sampson, Charles Olsen, Christofer Dimitroff, Stephen Haynes, and Lesli Dalaba.
Included among these performances is an invitational performance of The Melodic Version of The Second Dream of The High-Tension Line Stepdown Transformer for my 49th birthday, 14 October 1984, at the Dia Art Foundation 6 Harrison Street Dream House, New York City, followed by the world premiere performance of The Melodic Version, presented at the Kennedy Center, Washington, D.C., on 16 October 1985. Both performances were four-trumpet realisations.
The Theatre of Eternal Music Brass Ensemble also performed the work with eight trumpets at MELA Foundation’s La Monte Young 30-Year Retrospective, New York City, on 20 May 1987; with four trumpets at Paula Cooper Gallery, New York City, on 22 December 1987; and with eight trumpets at St. Ann’s Center for the Arts, Brooklyn, on 12 November 1988.
In many of the performances with The Theatre of Eternal Music Brass Ensemble, The Second Dream of The High-Tension Line Stepdown Transformer has been presented in a special setting of Marian Zazeela’s Light.
On 24 September 1991 Gramavision Inc. released the 77-minute CD version of The Melodic Version of The Second Dream of The High-Tension Line Stepdown Transformer from The Four Dreams of China (# R2-79467) performed by The Theatre of Eternal Music Brass Ensemble led by Ben Neill with Stephen Burns, Rich Clymer, James Donato, Pamela Fleming, Rich Kelley, James O’Connor, and Gary Trosclair.
Charles Curtis has demonstrated a remarkable interest in and dedication to the performance of my music. After moving to Germany to become solo cellist with the North German Radio (NDR) Symphony Orchestra, Curtis formed a cello quartet with Andreas Bleyer, Thomas Grossenbacher, and Christof Groth, all members of the Radio Orchestra. In March 1992 the cello quartet gave the world premiere performance of The Melodic Version of The First Blossom of Spring from The Four Dreams of China in the setting of Marian Zazeela’s unique light installation for the dome of the Berlin Zeiss Planetarium as part of the DAAD Inventionen Festival. Following this, the cello quartet presented the European premiere of The Melodic Version of The Second Dream of The High-Tension Line Stepdown Transformer from The Four Dreams of China in April 1992 at the St. John’s Church in Hamburg as part of the NDR chamber music series.
The cello quartet performances of The First Blossom of Spring and The Second Dream of The High-Tension Line Stepdown Transformer took the performances to date of The Four Dreams of China full circle, back to the bowed-string world premiere in 1963 and the violin duo New York premiere in 1965 by Paul Zukofsky and Charles Joseph of The Second Dream of The High-Tension Line Stepdown Transformer and harked back to the Trio for Strings, the direct ancestor of The Four Dreams of China.
In November 1992, the Kunsthalle in Krems, Austria, presented the Cathedral of Dreams concert series in the 11th-century Minoritenkirche, in Marian Zazeela’s Dream Light environment. This series represented a landmark in the performances of The Four Dreams of China: it was the first time that two of The Four Dreams of China, The Second Dream of The High-Tension Line Stepdown Transformer and The First Blossom of Spring, had been performed in the same concert series; and it was also the first time that the eight trumpets from The Theatre of Eternal Music Brass Ensemble led by Ben Neill and the four cellists from the NDR Symphony Orchestra led by Charles Curtis joined forces to create a twelve-piece chamber ensemble performance of each of the two Dreams.
The April 1993 Interpretations/WNYC New Sounds Live at Merkin Concert Hall performance by The Theatre of Eternal Music Brass Ensemble led by Ben Neill was the first American presentation of The Second Dream of The High-Tension Line Stepdown Transformer from The Four Dreams of China after the release of the Gramavision CD.
The 29 June 1993 Ensemble Modern of the Hessischer Rundfunk performance led by Ben Neill and Charles Curtis, brass and string section leaders of The Theatre of Eternal Music, was the world premiere of The High-Tension Line Stepdown Transformer’s Second Dream of The First Blossom of Spring, but it was especially important because it was also the world premiere of The Twelve Subsequent Dreams of China.
The 4 August 1994 Ensemble 5 performance led by Charles Curtis of The Melodic Version of The First Blossom of Spring from The Four Dreams of China was, to my knowledge, the first performance of my music in Darmstadt since David Tudor’s performance of Arabic Numeral (Any Integer) to H.F. in the summer of 1960. When I was a student in Darmstadt in summer 1959, my Study III for piano, which I had written in Karlheinz Stockhausen’s Advanced Composition Seminar, was somehow lost the day before it was to have been performed by David Tudor at the student recital, and miraculously found again the next day. With this performance by Charles Curtis and Ensemble 5 miracles continued, and I only wish I could have been present to hear the performance.
1995–96 was the year of my sixtieth birthday. For this occasion, Charles Curtis and the organisation Contemporary Music proposed to present as many of the Dreams from The Four Dreams of China as possible.
The first of these birthday presentations, the 4 February 1996 North German Radio performance in Hamburg by Charles Curtis and The Theatre of Eternal Music String Ensemble was the world premiere of The First Dream of China. The First Dream of China was the third of The Four Dreams of China to have its world premiere, and the second of The Four Dreams of China to have its world premiere in Germany by Charles Curtis and The Theatre of Eternal Music String Ensemble.
Produced by the Hessischer Rundfunk, the 25 February 1996 performance at the Städelschule in Frankfurt of The Melodic Version of The Second Dream of The High-Tension Line Stepdown Transformer from The Four Dreams of China by Ensemble Innovation led by Charles Curtis was the second of the Dreams to be presented during the 60th Birthday Celebration Year.
The 3 June 1996 concert at Berlin’s Podewil of The Melodic Version of The Second Dream of The High-Tension Line Stepdown Transformer in the Klangwände (Wall of Sound) series curated by Ulrich Krieger, performed by The Theatre of Eternal Music String Ensemble consisting of sustaining electric guitars utilising e-bows, was the third performance of one of The Four Dreams of China led by Charles Curtis during the 60th Birthday Celebration.
The 1 December 1998 final event of the Inventing America Festival at The Barbican Centre, London, was a milestone in that it was both the UK premiere of The Melodic Version of The First Blossom of Spring from The Four Dreams of China and also the first appearance by The Theatre of Eternal Music Brass and String Ensemble in the British Isles.
The 4 August 2007 performance of The Melodic Version of The Second Dream of The High-Tension Line Stepdown Transformer by Charles Curtis and The Theatre of Eternal Music String Ensemble was the first presentation of one of The Four Dreams of China at our Regenbogenstadl Dream House in Polling.
The 26 July 2008 performance of The Melodic Version of The First Dream of The High-Tension Line Stepdown Transformer from The Four Dreams of China by Charles Curtis and The Theatre of Eternal Music String Ensemble in the Regenbogenstadl Dream House was the world premiere of the last of The Four Dreams of China to be premiered, forty-five years after the Yam Festival premiere of The Second Dream of The High-Tension Line Stepdown Transformer in 1963, the first of the Dreams to be performed.
In honour of the 1000-Year Anniversary of the Village of Polling, the First Dreams: Quellen des Raumklangs performance of The First Dream of China from The Four Dreams of China was presented by Charles Curtis and The Theatre of Eternal Music String Ensemble at the Regenbogenstadl Dream House on 17 July 2010. In 2011, Charles Curtis led The Theatre of Eternal Music String Ensemble in performances of all Four Dreams of China at the Regenbogenstadl Dream House. The Second Dream of The High-Tension Line Stepdown Transformer was performed on 15 July at 8 pm. The First Blossom of Spring was performed on 16 July at 3 pm and The First Dream of China was performed on 16 July at 8 pm. The First Dream of The High-Tension Line Stepdown Transformer was performed on 17 July at 11 am.
The Melodic Version of The Second Dream of The High-Tension Line Stepdown Transformer performed by The Theatre of Eternal Music Brass and String Ensemble with eight trumpets in Harmon mutes and four cellos on 31 July and 1 August 2015 at the Dia 15 VI 13 545 West 22 Street Dream House was the American premiere of the arrangement for this ensemble of twelve instruments.
