The just intonation system espoused in The Well-Tuned Piano is found frequently in the music of other cultures, and some have compared the slowly unfolding ideas in the The Well-Tuned Piano, in spirit if not in sound, to an Indian raga. Like Philip Glass and Steve Reich, members of the next minimalist generation, Young was heavily influenced by non-Western music, as well as non-Western ideas. Even if the listener is not committed to taking in an entire uninterrupted performance, the moment-to-moment musical events can be quite engaging and often beautiful. As each theme or melody unfolds, it slowly accelerates, until the notes are repeated so rapidly that their overtones blend and resonate, hovering, as it were, like a cloud above the piano. Young's magnum opus reflects his devotion to the system of "just intonation." While Bach's Well-Tempered Clavier marked the adoption of the equal-tempered tuning system in Western music - the system, familiar to our ears, that skews the intervals of the scale slightly to allow transposition to any key without having to retune the instrument - Young's five-hour work (give or take an hour, since large portions of it are improvised) utilizes mathematically perfect, Pythagorean intervals that sound slightly out-of-tune to our well-tempered ears, but that create shimmering resonances and clouds of overtones not possible with equal tuning.
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