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
Steel guitar and far between, because of some of the techniques involved such as slanting the bar, palm damping, thumb damping, and unique styles of picking are not easily mastered. The technique was invented and popularized in Hawaii. Thus, the "lap steel guitar" is sometimes known as the Hawaiian guitar, particularly in documents from the early 20th century, and today any steel guitar is frequently called a Hawaiian steel guitar. However, "Hawaiian guitar" often refers to "slack key guitar", played in the conventional or Spanish position, using a conventional fretted guitar in various open tunings, generally with the strings tuned considerably lower