Echoes of Nothing (2011)

Echoes of Nothing is a piece for virtual retuned piano with 30 pitches to the octave. The title refers to a statement in John Cage's book Silence: "Every something is an echo of nothing." The two movements, "Nothing" and "Something," use the same tuning. "Nothing" is a meditation on gentle emptiness; "Something" is kind of a fast piano boogie that regroups the first movement's chord progressions into more rhythmically familiar configurations. This "Something" is truly an echo of "Nothing." I thank pianist Aron Kallay for commissioning the work and playing it so often and so well.

The scale (given in a typographical approximation of Ben Johnston's notation) is as follows:

Pitch:	G	GL	G^	A7b+	Av+	A	A+	AL	B7b	Bv	B	BL	C7+	C	CL
Ratio:	1/1	36/35	33/32	21/20	12/11	10/9	9/8	8/7	7/6	40/33	5/4	9/7	21/16	4/3	48/35
Cents:	0	48.8	53.3	84.5	150.6	182.4	203.9	231.2	266.9	333.0	386.3	435.1	470.8	498.0	546.8

C^

D7b

Dv

D

E7b

Eb

E13b

F77b+

E

F7v+

F7+

F

FL

G7b

Gv

11/8

7/5

16/11

3/2

14/9

8/5

13/8

49/30

5/3

56/33

7/4

16/9

64/35

28/15

64/33

551.3

582.5

648.7

702.0

764.9

813.7

840.5

849.4

884.4

915.6

968.8

996.1

1044.9

1080.6

11.46.7

(If you don't have enough experience with just intonation to make sense of this chart, try reading the step-by-step Just Intonation Explained section.) In Johnston's notation, + raises a pitch by 81/80, - lowers it by 80/81, # raises it by 25/24, b lowers it by 24/25, 7 lowers it by 35/36, L raises it by 36/35, ^ raises it by 33/32, v lowers it by 32/33, 13 raises it by 65/64, and F-A-C, C-E-G, and G-B-D are all perfectly tuned 4:5:6 major triads.)

Kyle Gann

Duration: 11 minutes + 4 minutes = 15 minutes total

Premiere performance: by Aron Kallay, at Beyond Baroque, Venice, California, June 23, 2012

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