Mary Ann Lucas

Listening Journal – Unit 4

The Well-Tuned Piano

By La Monte Young

I often find myself having a difficult time appreciating any music that falls in the “minimalist” category, and typically I will rule out everything before I give it the chance. I usually dislike anything that does not sound classical or romantic and I especially discard anything that lacks any form or is atonal. However, being forced to listen to something that is out of my norm, I found myself enjoying it more than I thought. The effect the music can have on the listener is astonishing.

La Monte Young is one of four composers commonly recognized as the founding generation of American minimalism. The other three composers are Steve Reich, Terry Riley, and Philip Glass. Although none of the four minimalist composers studied with John Cage, they all have all acknowledged him as an influence, with his ideas on time, silence, indeterminacy, and the inclusion of all sounds. Arguably one of the most influential American composers of the post-World War II era, Cage provided a source of ideas for further development of new music and the foundation upon which other artists could compose.

The genesis of Young’s style is rooted in a combination of factors that include Indian music, his Mormon upbringing, his composition studies with Leonard Stein and Seymour Shifrin, and his exposure to world music (especially Japanese gagaku) through the ethnomusicology program at UCLA started by Laurence Petran and Mantle Hood. Raised Mormon, Young declares that the first sound he can remember hearing was wind whistling by the Idaho log cabin he was born in, and that during his youth he became captivated by the humming of step-down power transformers and telephone poles. Many features of Indian music are prominent in Young’s style, most notably the purity of intonation, improvisation, and structure based on rhythmic principles. Young was also heavily influenced by the modal jazz style developed by John Coltrane, who absorbed Indian, Arabic, and African music into his playing. Coltrane’s use of modal improvisation, cyclic rhythms, and drones may have acted as an indirect source of Indian musical concepts to Young.

The Well-Tuned Piano, which has been a work in progress since 1964, consists of uninterrupted improvisation with sections of thematic and intervallic exploration, which are sprinkled with segments where Young rapidly articulates notes in a chord (which Young calls “clouds”) that create a stagnant resonance of harmonics and combination tones. This is the drone effect that I mentioned earlier. The “drone state of mind” is a way of attaining a state of meditation, allowing the listener to be in direct touch with a common structure and a high sense of order. Young’s influences are expressed in this work with the importance of expanding the unfolding of time, purity of tuning, and the presence of a thematic, directional structure for the work. He remains within a limited set of pitches for an extended period of improvisation before gradually introducing new pitches to the existing set.

There is a delicate richness in sound that most listeners are not accustomed to hearing in this piece that is achieved by many things. The relatively sustained sounds (both melodic and harmonic), repeated arpeggios of restricted range, the intermittent fast repeated notes and intervals, and the quick tremolos that produce “clouds” all have an effect that makes it seem like time is endless and undefined. When watching the 6-hour and 41 minute piece The Well-Tuned Piano (a title with an obvious reference to Bach’s Well-Tempered Clavier) by La Monte Young, the second thing I thought to myself was, “Doesn’t he get tired? Or thirsty? Or even the least bit bored? What if he had to go to the bathroom?” Of course, the first thing I thought to myself was, “Holy crap, this piece is really long!” However, while I was listening to the piece, I lost track of time and had not realized I had been listening for almost 4 hours. I was so interested in picking out the different notes I was hearing in the drones and listening to the out of the ordinary intervals Young was experimenting with.

In this piece, Young tuned the piano to his own system, which is a seven-limit system that completely avoids ratios containing the number 5. The ratios for refer to the lengths of the piano strings of the notes that the intervals use. The familiar major third (5:4) and minor third (6:5) simply do not exist in The Well-Tuned Piano. In their place, Young has utilized the septimal major third (9:7) and the septimal minor third (7:6) along with a host of other septimally derived intervals. The result of this system sounds nothing like the twelve-pitch chromatic scale with which most musicians are familiar. Instead, the distance separating each adjacent note varies from intervals smaller than a quarter tone but also larger than a whole tone. To give you an idea of his tuning, Young’s E natural is tuned at 177 cents, his F natural at 204 cents, and his F# at 240 cents, when normally these notes are tuned with a 100 cent difference. While I was reading an article in the American Music journal, I found a quote in which Young states that harmonics and combination tones that result from paired or sets of fundamentals produce a “powerful and at the same time harmonious effect that gives a whole that is great than the sum of the parts. This phenomenon has the ability to produce very profound psychological states. It is the goal of my music to produce these states in the listener.”

Young does not seem to get disinterested or weary during his performance because he has a great amount of trust in his intuition and is fascinated by every sound. The sounds that he uses in his music are preplanned through the studied use of natural acoustics and significant tunings. He is sitting at a grand piano in a mostly dark room dimly lit by a magenta colored light set up by his wife, Marian Zazeela, which sets the mood for this piece by affecting how we conceive music and how we conceive the human experience beyond music. This piece is the host of small variations in detail, which provides an endlessly fascinating carpet of sound for the listener, because their ears have been redirected to listen for each element. Drones were ringing in my ears that were created by the notes he was playing. I heard pitches that were not even being played. And sometimes, these drones that I heard were being played by instruments other than the piano, such as other string instruments like the cello or violin. The experiments Young performs on intervals are nothing other than beautiful. They reminded me of bells and chimes outside of a church or an old building in Europe that plays a hymn every hour. His change in rhythm is effectual during the interval explorations. They caused me to listen more closely and be able to picture stories or feel emotions that would not come so easily otherwise. Young’s purpose for his listener was achieved in me, for my psychological states were odd and unlike any other I have experienced while I was listening. I was almost hypnotized, thinking and dreaming in my own little world. Once or twice a friend came by me in the library and scared me half to death because I was so concentrated on the work.

Regardless of the unmatched length of this composition, it is not left to chance. Every time Young performs The Well-Tuned Piano, its duration lengthens. It is still unbelievable to me that he can sit there for almost seven hours and play the piano so repetitiously. This astounding work will constantly be in progress until the day he dies. I do not deem that this work should be added to the Canon, because it really can only be performed by Young himself. However, I do believe that it should be recognized as a remarkable work that deserves the respect and appreciation of everyone. I am proud to say that I did watch and listen to all 6 hours and 41 minutes of this piece, and while my ears may have been on a different tuning system when I finished, it was worth the experience.

I always thought that minimalism would be exactly what the word insinuates: minimal and lacking substance. John Rockwell (an established music critic) describes it as “damned by its enemies as so lacking in complexity and emotional range that it [could] hardly be called ‘serious’ at all.” I now disagree with the idea that minimalism is minimal, and believe that there is more to it than meets the eye (or ears). By listening to Young’s Well-Tuned Piano, I became more and more aware of the relevance of harmonics, and what effect they have on music and the state of the listener.