[5] While few of his recordings remain in print, his work has inspired prominent musicians across various genres, including avant-garde, rock, and ambient music.

[6] Young played jazz saxophone and studied composition in California during the 1950s, and subsequently moved to New York in 1960, where he was a central figure in the downtown music and Fluxus art scenes.

[8][9] In the jazz milieu of Los Angeles, Young played with notable musicians including Ornette Coleman, Don Cherry, Billy Higgins, and Eric Dolphy.

[13] A number of Young's early works use the twelve-tone technique, which he studied under Leonard Stein at Los Angeles City College.

Influenced by Cage, Young at this time took a turn toward the conceptual, using principles of indeterminacy in his compositions and incorporating non-traditional sounds, noises, and actions.

In the Spring of 1961 he developed an artistic relationship with Fluxus founder George Maciunas at the electronic music course of Richard Maxfield at The New School.

A few months earlier, in December 1960, Young had curated and organized a series of concert-performances by members of the nascent Fluxus movement at the top floor loft of Yoko Ono at 112 Chambers Street involving visual artists, musicians, dancers and composers — mixing music, visual art and performance together.

It was attended by John Cage, Peggy Guggenheim, Max Ernst and Marcel Duchamp, among others art world luminaries.

For example, Young's Compositions 1960 includes a number of unusual actions: some of them un-performable, and constituted an early form of poetic conceptual and post-conceptual art.

One, Composition 1960 #10 to Bob Morris instructs: "draw a straight line and follow it" (a directive which Young has said has guided his life and work since).

[23] The group initially included calligrapher and light artist Marian Zazeela (who married Young in 1963), Angus MacLise, and Billy Name.

[3] In 1964 the ensemble comprised Young and Zazeela, John Cale and Tony Conrad (a former Harvard mathematics major), and sometimes Terry Riley (voices).

[24] On September 25, 1965, the Fluxus FluxOrchestra was conducted by Young at Carnegie Recital Hall in New York City, with a program, designed by George Maciunas, folded into paper airplanes and launched during the evening into the audience.

Young and Zazeela's first continuous electronic sound environment was created in their loft on Church Street, New York City, in September 1966 with sine wave generators and light sources designed to produce a continuous installation of floating sculptures and color sources, and a series of slides entitled Ornamental Lightyears Tracery.

Fellow students of Pran Nath, included Zazeela, Terry Riley, Rhys Chatham, Jon Hassell, Simone Forti, Shabda Kahn, Jon Gibson, Michael Harrison, Yoshi Wada, Don Cherry, Henry Flynt, Lee Konitz, Charlemagne Palestine and Catherine Christer Hennix.

A Dream House installation exists today at the MELA Foundation on 275 Church Street, New York, above the couple's loft, and is open to the public.

[36] The four pitches he later named the "Dream chord", on which he based many of his mature works, came from his early age appreciation of the continuous sound made by the telephone poles in Bern.

He cites Béla Bartók, Igor Stravinsky, Pérotin, Léonin, Claude Debussy and Organum musical style as important influences.

Cannabis, LSD and peyote played an important part in Young's life from mid-1950s onwards, when he was introduced to them by Terry Jennings and Billy Higgins.

[41] He considers that the cannabis experience helped him open up to where he went with Trio for Strings, though sometimes it proved a disadvantage when performing anything which required keeping track of the number of elapsed bars.

"[43] His work has inspired prominent musicians across various genres, including fellow minimalist composer Terry Riley, experimental rock groups the Velvet Underground and Sonic Youth, and ambient music pioneer Brian Eno.

"[44] Andy Warhol attended the 1962 première of the static composition by La Monte Young called Trio for Strings.

[51] According to Seth Colter Walls, writing in The Guardian, while Young has released very little recorded material, with much of it currently out of print, he has had an "outsized influence on other artists.