“Through this system we can, first, catalogue each feeling with its corresponding rational number, and then actually create, store, and retrieve, and finally and most importantly, repeat the feeling, relative to the musician’s ability to tune the intervals.” Even further, because “The Well-Tuned Piano” uses novel and rarely-heard intervals, it could potentially upend conventional notions of which emotions different keys produce. “It seems to me that each harmonically related interval creates its own unique feeling,” Young says in his box set notes. As he put it, “The manner in which I play the piece, and how well, is directly inspired by the nature of the tuning.”īut the goal of “The Well-Tuned Piano” is less technical precision than emotional expansion. It’s difficult to tune a piano this precisely, which is why the process starts well in advance of the performance, and why Young usually plays on specially-modified pianos. Young’s version of just intonation, by contrast, is more exact, with the intervals between each string following rigid whole number ratios. Most pianos are “well-tempered,” meaning each note is slightly off-center so that all 12 musical keys can be played.
Young came upon this idea through his obsession with “just intonation,” the tuning system on which he based the composition. But immersion in the legend of “The Well-Tuned Piano” reveals it to be not just a work of art, but a complex mathematical and philosophical system, one to which scholars could devote whole lifetimes.ĭespite the piece’s staggering reputation, there is at least one simple idea at its heart: Specific sounds can create specific feelings. The mere idea of listening to a five-hour piece of music is daunting enough. Many others have attempted to explain “The Well-Tuned Piano” too, the most monumental effort being Kyle Gann’s 30-page 1993 essay in Perspectives of New Music, which mapped out its inner workings using numbers and graphs. They include a four-page list charting the exact times of over 400 “Themes, Chordal Areas, and Durations,” which bear titles as basic as The Chorale Theme and as fanciful as The Flying Carpet and The Cadence of Paradise.
The first commercially available recording, a 1987 five-disc box set on Gramavision documenting his 55th performance of the piece in 1981, lasts a little over five hours.īut how long does it take to understand “The Well-Tuned Piano”? Judging by all the literature and analysis surrounding it, the answer could be “forever.” Young’s own notes are long, detailed, and deeply technical.
The work itself, which he’s played in public over 60 times, takes him up to six hours to execute on a piano that needs a “minimum of a few weeks” to be tuned and ideally remains in its exact location for three months before a concert. After Young conceived “The Well-Tuned Piano” in 1964, a decade passed before he performed it in concert, and another 13 years went by before he released a commercial recording. Though he hasn’t performed this massive piece in many years and he has never considered it finished, it is possible to quantify some moments on its timeline. The story of La Monte Young’s solo piano composition “The Well-Tuned Piano” feels infinite.