First, La Monte Young is not related to Brigham Young. Not a grandson, not a great great nephew, not a third cousin, none of that. It was such a standard part of the composer’s Mormon roots origins that I assumed it had been checked, or that it had come from him. Brigham Young University musicologist Jeremy Grimshaw obliquely dismissed any connection in the foreword to his 2011 biography of Young, Draw A Straight Line And Follow It, only to somehow embrace it as confirmation of Young’s prophetic narrative. And it still persists, probably for reasons.
I mention Young’s genealogy because he cites childhood experiences in towns in rural Idaho founded by his Mormon pioneer ancestors as foundational to his most important musical innovations. The earliest sustained tone sounds Young recalls, he often recalls, included the droning hum of power lines and the electricity substation next to his grandfather’s gas station in Montpelier; and the winter wind whistling through the walls of the log cabin where he was born, five miles up the Bear Lake Valley in the tiny cheese-making enclave of Bern.
And I mention it now because according to Cameron Rowland’s Estate, Dia bought the cabin in 1979, “for La Monte Young historical site and museum. Birthplace of La Monte Young. Never used.” This was in January, just after closing on the second building in Marfa for Donald Judd, and just before buying 6 Harrison Street, a 45,000 sf building in Tribeca as a performance and rehearsal space for Young, Marian Zazeela, and Pandit Pran Nath. 6 Harrison was sold in 1985, during Dia’s first financial implosion. But Young and Zazeela’s New York City real estate is well known, or as well known as Dream House, the sine wave drone and light installation they’ve been performing in various locations since 1979.
It’s the cabin in Bern that seemed exceptional. Dia transferred ownership of it to Young and Zazeela’s Mela Foundation in 1993, amidst another of Dia’s spasms of financial upheaval and its separation from Dream House. It turns out Zazeela’s photo of the cabin on the Mela Foundation website, [top] was taken during a visit in 1979 on Young’s 44th birthday.
Trying to figure out what story a La Monte Young Birthplace Museum would tell, I did the most Mormon thing, and looked at his family history on FamilySearch.org. While people in the minimalist music and postwar avant-garde were confused about La Monte being related to Brigham, the Youngs posting decades of family photos and personal histories to their communal online genealogy network knew the whole family tree. There are letters where La Monte’s parents, Dennis Young and Mary Evelyn Grandy let relatives know that LaMonte and Zazeela will be joining them at family reunions in Idaho during the 1980s, the Dia era.
So it was just me, then, who was surprised to learn Young’s connection to Bern came from his father’s mother, who, like almost everyone else in Bern, was a Kunz. Dennis was 22 and Mary Evelyn was 19 when La Monte was born in 1935, and Dennis’s mother, Ella Grace Kunz Wilde, was married to her second husband (both named Leonard), and single-handedly running the Bern Cheese Factory. Wilde turned 800-900 pounds of milk/day into 80-90 pounds of cheese, in two log cabins built by her grandfather John Kunz in 1872. In the Salt Lake Tribune’s 1938 article, the cabins don’t look so different from the one the Youngs lived in. They were still there for the 1940 census, but decamped to Los Angeles in 1942, looking for work.
In a 1979 interview transcript with her aunt Florence Kunz Jenson, Mary Steck mentioned, I think, La Monte’s museum project:
“Isn’t that little Bern Library or Bern Museum cute? It’s not much yet but I think it has the beginnings of something really special. I hope ( ?) keeps up with it.”
“He will, for as long as he’s alive, you know – and maybe it’s a good thing Warren’s involved. Warren’s a little younger than him.”
“Warren cares about it. I know he cares about it. He’s very proud of his heritage.”
Warren Kunz was Florence’s nephew, six years younger than La Monte, who sold the cabin to Dia. He died in 2017.
In Zazeela’s photo, the cabin looks like it’s in the absolute middle of nowhere, which may be how Bern feels compared to big towns like, say, Montpelier, or nearby Paris. But it’s right on the main road in town, across from the little LDS chapel, and next to the brick schoolhouse, built in 1921, whose roof has since collapsed. Google Streetview finally came to town last year, and captured the cabin’s next door neighbor storing parts for a project truck in front of it.
These days, adverse possession is probably low on the Mela Foundation’s list of concerns. A decade of funding shortfalls and the pandemic left Mela’s current Dream House installation, its performance program, and its archive in “existential” peril. Besides a general gofundme in 2020, Mela put out a fundraising plea in 2023 specifically to help make urgent repairs to the cabin’s roof. The “archival postcard” prints of Zazeela’s cabin photo, signed by Young, are still listed for sale on Mela’s site. Zazeela died in 2024. An email inquiry to Mela about the cabin’s status has so far received no response.
