The Well-Tuned Piano

The Well-Tuned Piano is a long, improvisatory, solo piano work by composer La Monte Young. Begun in 1964, Young has never considered the composition or performance "finished", and he has performed incarnations of it several times since its debut in 1974. A typical performance lasts five to six hours.The Guardian described the piece as "one of the great achievements of 20th-century music.

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.

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.

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