La Monte Young's "Well-Tuned Piano"

Yesterday David Beardsley hosted a listening session
at La Monte Young and Marian Zazeela's _Dream House_
in New York, of the now out-of-print Grammavision 5-CD
set of a performance by Young of his "The Well-Tuned
Piano". This work is an always-evolving (I suppose I
really mean always-expanding) piece for piano solo, and
this performance was just over 5 hours long. It is certainly
Young's magnum opus, and in this version, truly a
vast conception. It was performed on a specially
reconstructed 9-foot B�sendorfer Grand which has
an extraordinarily resonant tone and which was
meticulously retuned.

The tuning is a 12-tone 7-limit just intonation scale,
mapped onto the keyboard in one octave and repeated
in all the rest. It actually uses ratios with factors of
only 3 and 7 -- Young has never been fond of composing
with ratios involving 5 as a factor. As best as I can tell, he
feels that 5 has been explored fairly extensively in
our most familiar music, and he wishes to investigate
the ratios with prime factors higher than 5 (he probably
uses 3 because it supplies lots of perfect 4ths and 5ths).
He conceives his pitches as extracts from the harmonic
series, so that all the different melodies and chords
ultimately reinforce the same low fundamental, although
he displays much skill in "tonicizing" higher partials
by using pitches which relate to them in small-number
ratios -- in particular, he uses the septimal 3rds and
6ths (7/6, 9/7, 12/7, and 14/9) a great deal, to make
major and minor chords.

The piece is continuous (certainly an extraordinary feat
of endurance for any performer), and uses many different
melodic styles -- chorale, middle eastern, gamelan, etc.
(all the sections have Young's typically fanciful names) --
each of which is a little self-contained section.
Interspersed between these, and sometimes used as
bass part under them, are longer sections Young calls
"clouds", in which he plays a sort of tremolo on a chord
in the lower ranges of the piano (the differently-named
clouds use different chords). These "clouds" produce
summation tones which reinforce higher overtones
of the so-low-it's-inaudible fundamental, and they
can be clearly heard. For me, these are the most
striking parts of the piece, as high overtones waver
in and out, creating a kind of melody, over the rumbling
bass. Indeed, these sections to me did not sound
like a piano at all, but rather like an ensemble of
strings and horns.

Kyle Gann has a webpage about the tuning, at:

http://home.earthlink.net/~kgann/wtp.html

Gann has also written a much longer and more
detailed article about the piece, "La Monte Young's
The Well-Tuned Piano", published in _Perspectives
of New Music_, Vol. 31 No. 1.

Beardsley's website also has a link to a
comprhensive webpage about Young. His
server was down when I tried to get the
address to this page, but his site is at:

http://www.virtulink.com/immp/lookhere.htm

Many thanks to David Beardsley for hosting this --
it was a great opportunity to hear a compete
performance of a landmark modern just-intonation
piece, in a most effective setting (a Zazeela light-
and-shadow environment, which always
accompanies a Young piece). It was about
as close as one could get to a live Young/Zazeela
performance. Anyone with an interest in tuning
should wish that these CDs would be reissued.
I know I'd buy a copy.

Joseph L. Monzo
monz@juno.com


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