The Well-Tuned Piano in The Magenta Lights

La Monte Young 91st Birthday Celebration

Concert of Pre-recorded Tape of

La Monte Young  Marian Zazeela

The Well-Tuned Piano

in 

The Magenta Lights

“87 V 10 6:43:00 PM — 87 V 11 1:07:45 AM NYC”
 

Sunday, October 18, 2026, 2 PM

MELA Foundation Dream House
275 Church Street, 3rd Floor, New York

Admission $39. MELA Members, Seniors, Student ID, $31.
Limited seating. Advance reservations/ticket purchases recommended.
Doors open at 2:00 PM for concert seating.
 

Seating will be on carpeted floor and cushions only. For those requiring special assistance, please contact MELA to make arrangements at mail@melafoundation.org or (917) 603-9715.

PLEASE NOTE: To prepare for the scheduled concert, the Dream House installation will close early at 6 PM on Saturday, October 17, 2026.

La Monte Young’s 1987 live performance of The Well-Tuned Piano—his last and most expansive performance of the work, unfolding continuously over six hours and twenty-five minutes within Marian Zazeela’s The Magenta Lights—will be presented in its entirety at the MELA Dream House on Sunday, October 18, 2026, in celebration of Young’s 91st birthday. The program will begin at 2 PM. Audience members are welcome to enter, stay for as long as they wish, and depart quietly at any time during the concert.

The program presents a video-and-sound recording of La Monte Young’s live concert performance of May 10, 1987, recorded during the La Monte Young 30-Year Retrospective, presented by the MELA Foundation at the Dia Art Foundation Performance Space on Mercer Street in New York. Performed on a custom Bösendorfer Imperial Grand tuned in just intonation, the recording captures, in Young’s words, “the most important aspect of my work in composition that I have succeeded in recording to date. It is the yardstick against which all my other work must be compared.”

In the booklet for The Well-Tuned Piano in The Magenta Lights DVD released by Just Dreams in 2021, Jung Hee Choi, senior disciple of La Monte Young, states: “La Monte Young's magnum opus, The Well-Tuned Piano is a solo improvised work that he performed live in public over 65 times between 1974 and 1987 in the Marian Zazeela light environment. Conceived in 1964, this work continued absorbing, evolving and expanding for over two decades until it flourished to its full structure in the '80s. Each performance was improvised by memory over an interwoven architectural form, which often inspired new material while performing. During the second decade, the scale of the work had expanded exponentially with a wealth of musical materials built from the organic confluence of both Western and Hindustani classical traditions. The keyboard of Young's Bösendorfer was sometimes stained with blood from his wounded fingers after a long performance. The 45-minute recorded version (1964) had gradually developed to a continuous 6-hour 25-minute virtuoso live performance in 1987. The Well-Tuned Piano is certainly the epitome of a justly tuned piano in the modern context that transcends the character and limitations of the instrument. While deeply rooted in the ancient traditions of aural primacy, tonal structure and modality, The Well-Tuned Piano delineated an unprecedented sustained harmonic resonance and a complex sonic epic that we had never before experienced.”

"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

"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

“Marian Zazeela's The Magenta Lights offers a particularly intriguing point of view, one located in the wondrous realm of spectral energy. She transforms material into pure and intense color sensations, and makes a perceptual encounter a spiritual experience. The Magenta Lights is an environmental piece in every sense of the word. What Zazeela has wondrously represented is the subtle relationship between precision and spirituality.”

― Ronnie Cohen, ARTFORUM, May 1981

La Monte Young is a foundational figure in contemporary music and American minimalism. His radical vision reshaped the postwar avant-garde and has exerted a far-reaching influence on Fluxus, experimental music, ambient drone, and psychedelic music. For over sixty-five years, he has advanced durational musical composition and explored the psychological and phenomenological effects of precise tuning in periodic composite sound waveform environments. In 1962, Young and his lifetime collaborator and partner, Marian Zazeela, founded the influential group The Theatre of Eternal Music and embarked on The Tortoise, His Dreams and Journeys (1964– ), a large-scale work involving improvisation within strictly predetermined guidelines. With an evolving membership that included Terry Riley, Angus MacLise, Tony Conrad, and John Cale, the group developed a radical performance practice centered on sustained sound, drone, improvisation, and harmonic relationships. In 1970, Young and Zazeela supported Indian master vocalist Pandit Pran Nath’s journey to the United States, spending twenty-six years as his disciples in the Kirana style of Indian classical singing. In 1962, Young formulated the concept of a Dream House, realized in 1966 with Zazeela. Nearly forty Dream House installations have been presented internationally. The MELA Foundation Dream House has remained open since 1993 at 275 Church Street in New York, where Young continues to perform with The Theatre of Eternal Music and The Just Alap Raga Ensemble, founded in 2002 with Zazeela and their senior disciple Jung Hee Choi. Musician magazine stated, “As the acknowledged father of minimalism and guru emeritus to the British art-rock school, his influence is pervasive,” and in 1985 the Los Angeles Herald Examiner wrote, “for the past quarter of a century he has been the most influential composer in America.  Maybe in the world.”  In Minimalism: Origins, 1993, Edward Strickland added, “Young is now widely recognized as the originator of the most influential classical music style of the final third of the twentieth century.”  In 2020, The New York Times referred to Young as “The Man Who Brian Eno Called ‘the Daddy of Us All’: La Monte Young, the Composer Who Quietly Shaped Much of Contemporary Western Music.”

Marian Zazeela A seminal artist in the New York avant-garde and Minimalist movements, Zazeela is renowned for her pioneering work with light and her calligraphic abstract drawings. Over the course of more than six decades, she developed a singular vision across diverse media. She played a pivotal role in the emergence of intermedia and environmental art by establishing a visual vocabulary for The Theatre of Eternal Music and Dream House, created in collaboration with her lifelong partner, composer La Monte Young. Zazeela began singing with Young in 1962 as a founding member of The Theatre of Eternal Music. In 1970, she became one of the first Western disciples of the renowned master vocalist Pandit Pran Nath, later performing and teaching the Kirana style of Indian classical music. She accompanied Pandit Pran Nath in hundreds of concerts throughout the world and also performed with The Just Alap Raga Ensemble and The Sundara All Star Band. Zazeela’s work has been highly influential. Her abstract calligraphy was a primary influence on the work of Angus MacLise, the great poet and founding drummer of The Theatre of Eternal Music and the Velvet Underground. The visionary tradition of her curvilinear calligraphic drawings has also been carried forward and developed to a highly imaginative level by her visual-arts and raga disciple, Jung Hee Choi. Zazeela’s Ornamental Lightyears Tracery has been credited as a direct influence on Warhol’s Exploding Plastic Inevitable. Artforum wrote of Zazeela’s light installation: “Zazeela transforms material into pure and intense color sensations, and makes a perceptual encounter a spiritual experience. The Magenta Lights is an environmental piece in every sense of the word. What Zazeela has represented is the subtle relationship between precision and spirituality.” In 2021, Zazeela was honored as one of fourteen artists to receive the prestigious Anonymous Was A Woman Award, in recognition of her significant contributions. Zazeela’s installations, works on paper, and performances have been presented by major American and European institutions, most recently at Dia Beacon from 2019 to 2022 and at Artists Space, New York, in 2024.