The Well-Tuned Piano

"[1] Young gives credit to Dennis Johnson, a former schoolmate and composer from UCLA, for inspiring The Well-Tuned Piano.

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.

Bach's The Well-Tempered Clavier took full advantage of the development of a temperament where all 24 major and minor scales were reasonably usable.

In contrast, Young's The Well-Tuned Piano is organized around certain fixed non-transposable sets of pitches that function as scales, such as the Magic Chord.

While just intonation eliminates rough beating between the harmonics of two pitches, the trade-off is the loss of general transposability to other tonal centers due to 2, 3, and 7 being coprime and pianos having a physical limit to the number of keys per octave.

The closest a listener can come to understanding the structure of Young's piece is by studying the liner notes from the 1981 Gramavision recording.

[20] The seven major sections are as follows: The subsections are often called themes, and each is vastly and descriptively labeled.

[21] Young gave the world premiere of The Well-Tuned Piano in Rome in 1974, ten years after the creation of the piece.

As of October 25, 1981, the date of the Gramavision recording of The Well-Tuned Piano, Young had performed the piece 55 times.

[22] The only other person to ever perform the piece besides Young is his disciple, composer and pianist Michael Harrison.

[23] In 1987, Young performed the piece again as part of a larger concert series that included many more of his works.

On 3 January 2016, the 25 October 1981 Gramavision recording of The Well-Tuned Piano was broadcast on BBC Radio 3 (followed by excerpts of other Young compositions and collaborations) between 1 am and 7 am (GMT).

This listener's consciousness became a little restless after two hours of overtonal influence, but Mr. Young has clearly achieved something extraordinary, creating unexplored regions of sound.My personal experience with The Well-Tuned Piano was one of just such heightened concentration...the flow of momentum marshaled the vibrations of air in the room, slowly making the ear aware of sounds that weren't actually being played….I thought I heard foghorns, the roar of machinery, wood blocks, a didgeridoo, and most powerfully, the low, low vibration of the 18-cycles-per-minute E-flat that the ear supplied as the "missing fundamental" of the piano's overtones.Sources