In fact, time seems both to expand as well as contract. What I mean by that is that The Well-Tuned Piano exists as a template for Young's continual improvisation and expansion (although the filmed performance, with lighting by Zazeela, from 1987 is the last time he played the piece in public), and that listening to the recording or watching the video collapses your sense of scale and time so six hours pass differently from how you might expect.
The length of this piece is deceiving, dynamic and ever-changing. Given that this piece has been one of the central pre-occupations of Young's life and work since the mid-60s, and given that you have the chance, here, to immerse yourself in it for more than six-and-a-half hours (or you can choose a shorter, five-hour performance, starting here), The Well-Tuned Piano is going to dominate this discussion. Young, one of the fathers of American minimalism along with Riley, Glass and Reich, may have worked with and inspired everyone from Brian Eno to John Cale, once beaten Eric Dolphy to the second-alto saxophone position at the Los Angeles City College Dance Band, written pieces that require you to release butterflies into the auditorium and feed bales of hay to the piano (yes really they're just some of the pieces that are part of his " Composition 1960" series), been among the first to realise and capitalise on the static time-flow latent within serialism – especially the crystalline pitch-structures of Webern – in a piece such as his hour-long Trio for Strings and founded the Dream House with his wife Marian Zazeela – a project/place/way of being in New York where time is based on a 27-hour clock – but even the ironically maximally long sentence required to sum all that up is only an upbeat to the perception-changing piece that will mean Young's music stretches into the cosmic infinite of music history: The Well-Tuned Piano. It is a work for solo piano as you've never heard it before, and is simultaneously universal in its scope and intimate and enchanting in its effect, even as it opens the doors to new kinds of musical and psycho-acoustic experience. La Monte Young's magnum opus will have you entranced, bewitched and will change your sensory perceptions of the phenomenon we call music.
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