It was one of those thin, unreliable 120-minute cassettes, and the pitch wobbled badly. I was writing an article about the music of La Monte Young, who in the 1960s had introduced long drones into the music of the avant-garde, and in so doing secured himself as reputation as “the father of minimalism.” La Monte gave me a hissy cassette tape of some slow, faint piano music. My first hint of its existence came around 1992. This is a recording of a major work that has been lost to history for fifty years.
