A composer wrote a three-hour piano piece using just one note | Hacker News Reader

A composer wrote a three-hour piano piece using just one note

nytimes.com

71 pointsahmadss52 comments

If you'd like to explore the ideas further:

Carter's 8 etudes and a fantasy's 7th etude is just the note G (1949) and Ligeti's Musica ricercata's (1951-3) first movement almost only A (the entire work explores having a limited number of notes).

In terms of playing with harmonics, the spectralists (starting with Grisey and Murail in the 1970s) originated the idea formally whilst it is informally explored by many minimalists (the most relevant to this article's piece would be Terry Riley's In C, 1964).

In terms of mammoth piano works, seek out Sorabji's Opus clavicembalisticum (1930, 4 hours) by John Ogdon.

>> Ligeti's Musica ricercata's (1951-3) first movement almost only A (the entire work explores having a limited number of notes).

Just to clarify regarding Ligeti's Musica Ricercata, each successive movement incorporates a new interval. First movement only deals with unisons (and octaves), the 2nd movement adds minor 2nds, and so forth.

Meanwhile, at the shallow end of the meme pool, this entry from the baffling but, to me, fascinating microgenre of "'All Star' by Smash Mouth but", in which case the entire song is in one note:

https://soundcloud.com/vagidictoris/all-star-by-smash-mouth-...

The thing that surprised me is how much it sounds like 'real' music, like this could have been an entirely deliberate and valid choice by a composer. It has a sort of surly, menacing urgency to it that i'm sure i've heard in some kind of rock/metal music, although i can't think of any examples.

It turns out it's really 7 notes, not one. If you're not already good at identifying tones, there no one-ness about it at all.

Yeah, this is pure semantics.

We attached certain names to certain frequencies in western culture and made rules about 'proper music'. It is quite fascinating how culturally influenced we are on what is beautiful sound. Other cultures will have different frequencies and composition rules they consider good or artistic. Seven different D notes is how you say 7 unique frequencies, not one.

Can you point me to a culture whose music doesn't acknowledge octaves? It sounds interesting.

China I think.

Why was this downvoted? I was right. Traditional Chinese music is in pentatonic scale.

I'm no expert on Chinese music, but every Chinese scale I'm aware of is still based on the harmonic series and still observes octave equivalence.

In context, "have octaves" mean treating notes whose frequencies are powers of two as the "same", just shifted up. I believe the pentatonic scale still has this feature.

Thank you.

Chinese pentatonic scale is just a subset of major heptatonic scale used in western music.

Sorry, inherently hard to find again again on google, so no links, but I remember 2 different studies, one in Central- or Eastern Africa and another in the Amazon rain forest: People who where never exposed to harmonic music don't have an innate preference for harmonies over disharmonies. IIRC they preferred whatever was closest to what they knew, which was interpreted as a clue that music perception is heavily influenced by the expectations of the listeners.

It's how you say 7 unique frequencies with a specific mathematical relationship between each other. You can ignore the names of the notes, and it's still interesting, considered in those terms.

Yeah, It's a single pitch class if you want to be pedantic.

As regards to one-ness, I'd be curious to know what proportion of people don't hear the relationship. Cause I guess I'd call not hearing octaves on a piano something like tone deaf, but maybe it's more learned and less innate than I think.

There's some evidence that perception of consonance and dissonance is innate:

http://www.brainmusic.org/MBB91%20Webpage/Evolution_Zentner....

Restricting your notes to octave intervals makes dissonance impossible, assuming you're using timbres made with vibrating strings or columns of air, or simulations of them.

One note? So indulgent. How about zero notes?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Cage

It's quite pleasant and I can imagine listening to this for pleasure occasionally.

Equate it with a piece for untuned percussion and then maybe it's not quite so unusual. The first sections of Steve Reich's Drumming are pitchless and very listenable. It's composing purely with rhythm.