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The Well-Tuned Piano
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The Well-Tuned Piano
The Well-Tuned Piano is an ongoing improvisatory solo piano work begun in 1964 by La Monte Young. Young has never considered the composition or performance of this piece finished, and he has performed it differently several times since its debut in 1974. He has called it "in a sense, a life's work". The composition requires a piano tuned in just intonation. A 1987 performance of the piece was released on DVD in 2000.
A typical performance lasts five to six hours. and is performed within the context of Marian Zazeela's light art installation The Magenta Lights. The Guardian described it as "one of the great achievements of 20th-century music."
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".
La Monte Young's piano tuning is an essential aspect of The Well-Tuned Piano. Young dates the piece as "1964–73–81–Present" to indicate the work's development through its tunings, wherein E was retuned in 1973, and C♯ and G♯ were retuned in 1981. Young had kept the tuning a secret until 1993, when he allowed Kyle Gann to publish the details.
Young has always performed The Well-Tuned Piano on an Imperial Bösendorfer 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".
As explained by Kyle Gann, Young's system uses 7-limit tuning, a just intonation system where every pitch class in the scale is constructed from a previously constructed pitch by taking only up to the seventh pitch from its overtone series or undertone series. Young cites a distaste for the fifth harmonic, so Young uses only overtone and undertone numbers 2, 3, 4, 6, and 7 in the construction of his scale. A consequence to this is that the ratio between the frequencies of any two pitches is a rational number whose numerator and denominator have prime factors consisting only of 2, 3, and 7. Factors of 2 correspond to octave shifts, so in tuning theory ratios are normalized to lie within the octave 1/1–2/1 by multiplying or dividing through by powers of 2.
All of the pitches in Young's scale can be placed in a two-dimensional grid, where pitches on the horizontal axis are related by a 3/2 ratio (a perfect fifth) and pitches on the vertical axis are related by a 7/4 ratio (a harmonic seventh). This collection of 12 pitches is then assigned to the keys of a standard piano keyboard in such a way that pitches with a 3/2 ratio tend to span 8 keys, which in standard piano tuning forms a perfect fifth. Each octave of the piano follows the same sequence of intervals. The following table shows the grid along with the assignment to piano keys:
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The Well-Tuned Piano
The Well-Tuned Piano is an ongoing improvisatory solo piano work begun in 1964 by La Monte Young. Young has never considered the composition or performance of this piece finished, and he has performed it differently several times since its debut in 1974. He has called it "in a sense, a life's work". The composition requires a piano tuned in just intonation. A 1987 performance of the piece was released on DVD in 2000.
A typical performance lasts five to six hours. and is performed within the context of Marian Zazeela's light art installation The Magenta Lights. The Guardian described it as "one of the great achievements of 20th-century music."
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".
La Monte Young's piano tuning is an essential aspect of The Well-Tuned Piano. Young dates the piece as "1964–73–81–Present" to indicate the work's development through its tunings, wherein E was retuned in 1973, and C♯ and G♯ were retuned in 1981. Young had kept the tuning a secret until 1993, when he allowed Kyle Gann to publish the details.
Young has always performed The Well-Tuned Piano on an Imperial Bösendorfer 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".
As explained by Kyle Gann, Young's system uses 7-limit tuning, a just intonation system where every pitch class in the scale is constructed from a previously constructed pitch by taking only up to the seventh pitch from its overtone series or undertone series. Young cites a distaste for the fifth harmonic, so Young uses only overtone and undertone numbers 2, 3, 4, 6, and 7 in the construction of his scale. A consequence to this is that the ratio between the frequencies of any two pitches is a rational number whose numerator and denominator have prime factors consisting only of 2, 3, and 7. Factors of 2 correspond to octave shifts, so in tuning theory ratios are normalized to lie within the octave 1/1–2/1 by multiplying or dividing through by powers of 2.
All of the pitches in Young's scale can be placed in a two-dimensional grid, where pitches on the horizontal axis are related by a 3/2 ratio (a perfect fifth) and pitches on the vertical axis are related by a 7/4 ratio (a harmonic seventh). This collection of 12 pitches is then assigned to the keys of a standard piano keyboard in such a way that pitches with a 3/2 ratio tend to span 8 keys, which in standard piano tuning forms a perfect fifth. Each octave of the piano follows the same sequence of intervals. The following table shows the grid along with the assignment to piano keys: