The Well-Tuned Piano

For the tuning, see Well temperament.

The Well-Tuned Piano is a long, improvisatory, solo piano work by La Monte Young. Young has never considered the composition "finished," and dates the piece as 1964–73–81–present. A typical performance lasts five to six hours.

Biography

La Monte Young was born October 14, 1935, in Bern, Idaho. Growing up, he often listened to the sounds of nature spilling into his log-cabin home. Young cites these sounds as inspirations in later life, and his compositions often involved drones and atypical tuning. With saxophone as his primary instrument, Young attended Los Angeles City College and UCLA, where he studied composition with Leonard Stein, a student of Arnold Schoenberg, and counterpoint with Robert Stevenson, a student of Igor Stravinsky. Young is often described as one of the founding fathers of minimalism, along with Terry Riley, Steve Reich, and Philip Glass, as well as an advocate for Indian classical music. In 1962, Young married visual artist Marian Zazeela. The two have often collaborated on projects that combine visual art and music, including The Well-Tuned Piano. As an audience member at a live performance of The Well-Tuned Piano, one is surrounded by the, "pure and intense color sensations," of The Magenta Lights. These lights are magenta in color and are installed into the performance area and projected throughout the space.

Inspiration and influence

Young gives credit to Dennis Johnson, a former schoolmate and composer from UCLA, for inspiring The Well-Tuned Piano. Johnson wrote an extensive, improvisatory, solo piano piece titled November in 1959, a few years before Young began working on The Well-Tuned Piano. Although the piece is said to be as long as six hours, the tape recording made in 1962 cuts off suddenly after only an hour and a half.

Young has also been influential to many composers and musicians throughout his life. Dennis Johnson cites Young as an influence in his composition, The Second Machine, which is based on four single pitches of Young's Four Dreams of China. Composer and critic Kyle Gann has said that The Well-Tuned Piano, "may well be the most important American piano work since Charles Ives's Concord Sonata, in size, in influence, and in revolutionary innovation." Gann has also called the piece "the most important piano work of the late 20th century." In his book, Four Musical Minimalists, Keith Potter states that The Well-Tuned Piano is significant, "in the contexts of musical minimalism, of musics working at the interface between composition and improvisation, and of twentieth-century music for solo piano."

Tuning

File:Magic chord.png

Magic chord. <phonos file="Magic chord MIDI.mid">Play</phonos>

The tuning of the piano used in The Well-Tuned Piano is the most important aspect of the piece. When Young dates the piece as 1964-73-81-Present, the years 1973 and 1981 identify significant changes in the tuning.

Young has always performed The Well-Tuned Piano on a Bösendorfer Imperial Piano, which is larger than a standard acoustic grand piano, spanning eight complete octaves, with nine notes extending the bass of the piano. Young describes the pitches of his tuning as being, "derived from various partials of the overtone series of an inferred low fundamental E-flat reference ten octaves below the lowest E-flat on the Bösendorfer Imperial".

Although it might seem that Young is giving a nod to Bach's The Well-Tempered Clavier with his title The Well-Tuned Piano, musical tuning and musical temperament are two very different things. Temperament actually involves the deliberate mistuning of pitches to make the overall octave more or less usable in various different tones. In The Well-Tuned Piano, Young is aspiring to get all intervals perfectly in tune, using just intonation, which is often called pure intonation. This means that all pitches are derived using simple whole numbers, such as 1:1 for a unison pitch, 2:1 for an octave, 5:4 for a major third, and 3:2 for a fifth. Using just intonation eliminates 'beats' (waves in pitches' amplitude), often heard when various instruments seem to be playing out of tune. To an ear not accustomed to just intonation, these pitches may sound unfamiliar since they are not in tune with standard equal temperament.

Piano key	12-TET (cents)	WTP (≈ cents)	Johnston's notation	Interval ratio
E♭	000	000.00	E♭	1/1
E♮	100	176.65	F++	567/512
F	200	203.91	F+	9/8
F♯	300	239.61	G♭+	147/128
G	400	470.78	A♭+	21/16
G♯	500	443.52	A♭++	1323/1024
A	600	674.69	B♭+	189/128
B♭	700	701.96	B♭	3/2
B♮	800	737.65	C♭+	49/32
C	900	968.83	D♭	7/4
C♯	1000	941.56	D♭+	441/256
D	1100	1172.74	E♭+	63/32
E♭	1200	1200.00	E♭	2/1
Western chromatic scale tuning vs. Young's tuning for The Well-Tuned Piano

A more complex explanation of Young's tuning method is offered by Kyle Gann. According to his article, "La Monte Young's The Well-Tuned Piano", Young modifies the seven-limit tuning process, which usually involves tunings based on 3:2, 5:4 and 7:4 ratios. In the tuning for The Well-Tuned Piano, Young omits any ratio involving the number five, such as the major third, 5:4, and the minor third, 6:5, which western-music listeners are accustomed to hearing. Young instead uses ratios involving the number seven, known as septimal, such as 9:7 for the septimal major third, and 7:6 for the septimal minor third. To understand the difference between the 5:4 major third, and 9:7 septimal major third, consider that 5:4 is equivalent to 386 cents (<phonos file="Just major third on C.mid">Play</phonos>) and 9:7 is equivalent to 435 cents (<phonos file="Septimal major third on C.mid">Play</phonos>). This difference is audible to the listener by comparing the tuning for each pitch of the western chromatic scale with the chromatic scale used in The Well-Tuned Piano.

The Well-Tuned Piano is based on a pitch lattice of perfect fifths and harmonic sevenths.

Form

The Well-Tuned Piano, being improvisatory in nature, as well as ever-changing, has no specific form. The closest a listener can come to understanding the structure of Young's piece is by studying the liner notes from the 1981 Gramavision recording. Within the liner notes, Young breaks the performance into seven major sections and further deconstructs each of those sections into multiple subsections. The sections and subsections are not notated or described, but simply listed along with the duration of each section so a listener can easily follow along. The seven major sections are as follows.

1. The Opening Chord (00:00:00-00:21:47)
2. The Magic Chord (00:21:47-01:02:29)
3. The Magic Opening Chord (01:02:29-1:23:54)
4. The Magic Harmonic Rainforest Chord (1:23:54-03:05:31)
5. The Romantic Chord (03:05:31-04:01:25)
6. The Elysian Fields (04:01:25-04:59:41)
7. The Ending (04:59:41-05:01:22)

The subsections are often called themes, and each is vastly and descriptively labeled. A few examples are "The Flying Carpet", which belongs in The Romantic Chord section, and "Sunshine in The Old Country", which is found in The Magic Opening Chord section. Each theme is made up of a specific, unique combination of pitches. However the smaller themes found in one larger section will often have many pitches in common.

Performance history

Young gave the world premiere of The Well-Tuned Piano in Rome in 1974, ten years after the creation of the piece. Previously, Young had presented it as a recorded work. In 1975, Young premiered it in New York with eleven live performances during the months of April and May. As of October 25, 1981, the date of the Gramavision recording of The Well-Tuned Piano, Young had performed the piece 55 times. The only other person to ever perform the piece besides Young is his disciple, Sarmad Michael Harrison. Young taught Harrison the piece, which not only allowed him to perform it, but also to aid in tuning and preparing the piano for performances. In 1987, Young performed the piece again as part of a larger concert series that included many more of his works. This performance, on May 10, 1987, was videotaped and released on DVD in 2000 on Young's label, Just Dreams.

Each realization is a separately titled and independent composition. Over 60 realizations to date. World première: Rome 1974. American première: New York 1975. Chords from The Well-Tuned Piano (1981–present), are presented as sound environments. Includes: The Opening Chord (1981), The Magic Chord (1984), The Magic Opening Chord (1984);

Reviews

The playing waxes and wanes, with the slow parts ritualistically simple and repetitive and the fast parts whirling and flurring notes together into eerie, independently generated voices….This sort of music is certainly not for everyone, and even for those who respond to it, there is sometimes the question of whether it should be concentrated on, mediated upon or simply lived through. Whatever one does, Mr. Young remains a fascinating if austere figure in our musical life.

— John Rockwell, The New York Times (1975),

The grand performing space was dimly lighted with magenta lights. There were no chairs. Listeners wore no shoes, reclining on plush white rugs….The work lasts about four hours, and listeners are encouraged to attend numerous performances. This listener's consciousness became a little restless after two hours of overtonal influence, but Mr. Young has clearly achieved something extraordinary, creating unexplored regions of sound.

— Edward Rothstein, New York Times (1981),

My personal experience with The Well-Tuned Piano was one of just such heightened concentration...the flow of momentum marshaled the vibrations of air in the room, slowly making the ear aware of sounds that weren't actually being played….I thought I heard foghorns, the roar of machinery, wood blocks, a didgeridoo, and most powerfully, the low, low vibration of the 18-cycles-per-minute E-flat that the ear supplied as the "missing fundamental" of the piano's overtones.

— Kyle Gann, The Village Voice (1987),

Discography

• 1981 Performance CDs La Monte Young, The Well-Tuned Piano: 81 x 25 (6:17:50-11:18:59 PM NYC), by La Monte Young, Gramavision 18-8701-2, 1987, five compact discs.
• 1987 Performance DVD La Monte Young, Marian Zazeela, The Well-Tuned Piano in The Magenta Lights (87 V 10 6:43:00 PM – 87 V 11 1:07:45 AM NYC), DVD, produced by La Monte Young and Marian Zazeela (New York, NY: Just Dreams Inc., 2000).

Further reading

• Doty, David B. "The La Monte Young Interview: Part Two." The Quarterly Journal of the Just Intonation Network 6, no. 1 (1990): 8-12.
• Young, La Monte. The Well-Tuned Piano: 81 x 25 6:17:50-11:18:59 PM NYC. La Monte Young. Gramavision. 18-8701-2. 1987. Five compact discs.
• Young, La Monte and Marian Zazeela. The Well-Tuned Piano in The Magenta Lights 87 V 10 6:43:00 PM – 87 V 11 1:07:45 AM NYC. DVD. Produced by La Monte Young and Marian Zazeela. New York, NY: Just Dreams Inc., 2000.

External links

• "The Well-Tuned Piano 81 X 25". MelaFoundation.org.
• Brown, Kevin Macneil (2011). "Heart of Sound and Light: La Monte Young and Marian Zazeela's The Well-Tuned Piano In The Magenta Lights". DustedMagazine.com.