The Well-Tuned Piano 81 X 25
(Gramavision)
Press Quotes
"The first choice is clear. I'm
confident that La Monte Young's The Well-Tuned Piano will receive
little competition as the most important and beautiful new work recorded in
the 1980s. Young's achievement is unique, the recording a technological
triumph."
Kyle Gann, FANFARE November/December
1987
"La Monte Young's The
Well-Tuned Piano is an enthralling marathon a non-stop performance at once
wacko and visionary. ... Hear it simply for what it is: hypnotic, mysterious
sound glistening with its own disembodied beauty. Its five hours seem
remarkably short."
Alan Rich, NEWSWEEK 7/27/87
"La Monte Young retunes his
Imperial Bosendorfer and produces a rousing masterpiece."
Alan Rich, CALIFORNIA,
September 1987
"The Well-Tuned Piano is a work
of tremendous vision; those who are willing to give it the time and effort it
takes will find it one of the great monuments of modern culture."
Mark Swed, L.A. HERALD EXAMINER
6/28/87
"The Well-Tuned Piano is the
product of a lifelong enthusiasm for both Eastern mystical traditions and
investigations of acoustics, natural harmonics and human pitch perception
undertaken by 20th-century science. ... His resonantly retuned piano hummed
and roared and seemed to sing; listeners of an earlier time would undoubtedly
have believed they were hearing the Music of the Spheres made manifest."
Robert Palmer, THE NEW YORK TIMES
4/23/87
"The Well-Tuned Piano
is an unparalleled exercise in attunement to sound. Each large section builds
up from sparse, melodic notes to dense, stochastic clouds with such
gradualness that intense listening is needed to catch the process in motion.
Here, form followed acoustic necessity: 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. The play of combination and difference tones
created astounding aural illusions. Young's achievement represents the first
successful implantation of an Eastern heart into a Western body (a grand
piano). Considering the work's harmonic, thematic, and timbral complexity, my
gut feeling was that five-plus hours was not a minute too long."
Kyle Gann, THE VILLAGE VOICE
6/9/87
"The Well-Tuned Piano for
its influence, its formal originality, its fluid improvisational style, its
lengthy gestation, and its monumental ambitions may well be the most important
piano music composed by an American since the Concord Sonata."
Kyle Gann, CHICAGO READER
7/17/87
"50 More Top CD's to Tickle Your
Laser: Five-plus hours of cosmic pianistic thrumming. ...those in search of
mystic waves of sound, as meditational focus or hip background music, are
urged to check this out."
John Rockwell, THE NEW YORK
TIMES 6/7/87
"The Well-Tuned Piano reaffirmed
[Young's] position as one of today's most influential composers, the main man
of minimalism, who has seen his pioneering efforts flourish in artists ranging
from Terry Riley to Jon Hassell to the Velvet Underground. Gramavision has
captured one very good performance. The sound quality is outstanding, the
attention to detail, from the enclosed booklet to Zazeela's calligraphy on the
discs, painstaking. ... The added range, coupled with the alternative tuning
and Young's analytical methods, simultaneously liberates and tames the piano.
Without any electronic enhancement, he can make it roar with a thunderous
tread in "Young's Bose Brontosaurus Boogie" or whisper in
"Sunlight Filtering Through the Leaves."
Charles McCardell, THE WASHINGTON
POST 5/24/87
"The Well-Tuned Piano
marks a turning point, of sorts, in contemporary music. A hearing of the piece
is like being there for the premiere of Beethoven's Ninth Symphony or more
recently, Stravinsky's "The Rite of Spring." The composition has the
potential for changing the way people think about music. It's unlike anything
you've heard before."
Ben King, SAN ANTONIO EXPRESS NEWS
6/28/87
"...this marvelous recording of a
landmark piece in contemporary music and the work that probably coined the
categorical term Minimalism is born. The Well- Tuned Piano is an extremely
insular, calming and personal work and a masterpiece at that. Listening to the
entire five-hour-plus composition [one] discovers something new each
time."
Brooke Wentz, DOWN BEAT August
1987
"Howard
Mandel: Have you heard La Monte Young's The Well-Tuned Piano?
Ornette Coleman: I know La Monte from
California in the '50s; you ever hear him play alto? He was very good. Anyway,
what about it?
Howard Mandel: It's in just intonation, and
it's very beautiful; there's sound that's not played but that emerges from the
overtones."
Howard Mandel, DOWN BEAT August
1987
"The Well-Tuned Piano is,
simply put, an extraordinary, rewarding, exhilarating experience. The
strangeness of the idiom isn't that difficult to assimilate; what you hear
from then on is virtuosic composing and playing, music that exults, roars,
whispers profound but gentle thoughts, caresses, maddens now and then, but
never bores. Time passes quickly; the ear, the spirit emerge refreshed."
Alan Rich, CALIFORNIA September
1987
"What really makes his live
improvisation so accessible is a phenomenal pianistic technique. You can feel
the precise passion of every attack, and you can nearly see him sculpt those
tones out of an inner silence cultivated through meditation. ... No matter
what kind of music you listen to, this album is the quintessential ear wash.
For only fifty bucks you'll never hear the same again."
Pamela Bloom, MUSICIAN September
1987
"A landmark in just intonation is
La Monte Young's monumental 1964 piece, The Well-Tuned Piano. ...
An eerie, transcendent beauty pervades the work. Young's tuning produces ghost
tones phantom strings, choirs, and horns that ring out amid the webs of sonic
interference patterns he spins. The sheer breadth of the piece strengthens the
power of the trance it produces."
Kyle Kevorkian, KEYBOARD
September 1987
"In The Well-Tuned Piano,
Young's high-speed fingering releases great washes of played and unplayed
tones, which sound like nothing so much as a radiant cloud of brass and string
tones hovering over the massive piano. In the same way that the impressionist
painters experimented with tricking the eye to see colors that were not in
their palettes, so Young seems to pull rainbows of sound out of the air. It is
a truly striking effect!"
John Neilson, OPTION Sept - Oct
1987
"La Monte Young's recent
retrospective concerts filled me with nostalgia. Young's music is unusual
today in that it is an idea music: not that it is composed of ideas (a
condition that would be fatal to its meditative purpose), but that ideas are
still important to its understanding and creation. His is an epistemological
music, if you will, based on an intellectual conception of reality rather than
on the day-to-day compromises of performance practice. I ironically called
that the "Darmstadt mindset," as though it were something special,
but Young's music is conceived the way I secretly think all music should
be."
Kyle Gann, THE VILLAGE VOICE
8/4/87
"Given Young's reputation as the
father of minimalism, the inventor of meditation music, the inspirer of the
Velvet Underground, and an intrepid explorer in the mysteries of tuning, I
submit that this recording of Young's The Well-Tuned Piano is destined to be
the most important recording of the 1980s."
Kyle Gann, CHICAGO READER
7/17/87
"Without doubt, Gramavision's
recording of The Well-Tuned Piano by La Monte Young, the first recording
on a commercial American label of an avant-garde master influential since the
early '60s, is the major new music recording event of the 1980s."
Kyle Gann, FANFARE
September/October 1987
