The Well-Tuned Piano recording made in 1962 cuts off suddenly after only an hour and a half. Young has also been influential to many composers and musicians throughout his life. Dennis Johnson cites Young as an influence in his composition, "The Second Machine", which is based on four single pitches of Young's "Four Dreams of China". Composer and critic Kyle Gann has said that "The Well-Tuned Piano", "may well be the most important American piano work since Charles Ives's "Concord Sonata", in size, in influence, and in revolutionary innovation." Gann has also called the piece "the most important piano work of the late
The Well-Tuned Piano octaves, with nine notes extending the bass of the piano. Young describes the pitches of his tuning as being, "derived from various partials of the overtone series of an inferred low fundamental E-flat reference ten octaves below the lowest E-flat on the Bösendorfer Imperial". Although it might seem that Young is giving a nod to Bach's "The Well-Tempered Clavier" with his title "The Well-Tuned Piano", musical tuning and musical temperament are two very different things. Temperament actually involves the deliberate mistuning of pitches to make the overall octave more or less usable in various different tones. In "The Well-Tuned Piano",