Jon Catler: The Young Mountain of the East
Chaikin Records
Reading about an alternate tuning system and hearing the music generated using it are two entirely different things. For listeners who've primarily been exposed to traditional Western tuning, being presented with others that in their descriptions sound esoteric and even perhaps mystifying can be intimidating once the practitioner begins laying out in microscopic detail the technical minutiae of the system in question. Yet those hearing the music created with that alternate system may well find themselves attuning to its idiosyncrasies with little effort whatsoever. Yes, the ear initially tingles at the unusual pitches and note combinations but nevertheless quickly adjusts and adapts. After all, “Music is music,” as Alban Berg once said, reassuringly, to George Gershwin.
A prime illustration is The Young Mountain of the East by guitarist Jon Catler, a specialist in microtonal tuning systems who's been an associate of La Monte Young for more than three decades and a card-carrying member of the Forever Bad Blues Band, The Theater of Eternal Music Big Band, and the Just Alap Raga Ensemble. An author too, Cattier wrote extensively about Just Intonation in his first book The Nature of Music (2002). That the artwork and calligraphy on The Young Mountain of the East was done by Jung Hee Choi, herself affiliated with the Mela Foundation, makes the connection to the world associated with La Monte Young all the stronger.
Catler's full immersion into that sound universe occurred after he met the composer and his long-time partner Marian Zazeela after a 1981 performance of The Well-Tuned Piano. The guitarist's interest in microtonal tuning systems was already in place before that encounter, however, as Catler, while a Berklee student, performed the school's first microtonal music performance in 1979. The release of The Young Mountain of the East was also preceded by others, more than a dozen, in fact, and all in Harmonic Series Tunings. Catler's latest, composed in 2023, might be seen as a tribute to Young, given that its title originated from a remark made by Terry Riley about him as being “the young mountain of the east.”
To perform the work, Catler played a self-designed fretless sustainer guitar in thirteen-limit Harmonic Tuning. Deploying up to eight tracks of overdubbing, the music achieves a riveting textural character in its use of long sustained drones. Recorded at WildHouse Studio in Randolph, Massachusetts, the work unfolds across twelve “emanation” parts, each approximately three minutes and twenty-one seconds long. Catler builds on the title concept in going ever higher up the mountain, so to speak: in each movement, an upward harmonic ascent's countered by a descent, with the work building on the opening chord section of The Well-Tuned Piano. By the composer's own description, the first and twelfth parts form the compositional core, with the other parts variations and the twelfth a recapitulation of the first.
So, cutting (finally) to the chase, how does The Young Mountain of the East sound? From its first upward swoop and the layers that fall into place thereafter, intoxicating. As a given drone extends, tones rise and fall around it and arresting chordal combinations emerge. The music's effect proves more calming than tension-inducing as the work advances and the ear attunes itself to the wavering sound mass. At precisely timed moments, an ascending electric guitar figure imposes itself like some lost element from Lark's Tongue in Aspic. Unfolding across forty minutes, this sound sculpture isn't static; subtle changes from one movement to the next occur, the molten stab at the beginning of the sixth one that's particularly noticeable, and later, in that same “emanation,” a vocal-like melisma. The ears also perk up during the Crimson-oid eleventh when a two-note figure plunks insistently alongside other entwining patterns, the work at this stage having moved as far away from a single-note drone as might possibly be imagined.September 2026