Deryk Barker:
>Or, how about Bruno-Heinz Jaja's Punkt-kontrapunkt, whose palindromic
>structure revolves around three bars of silence (the middle on of which,
>being in 3/4 "gives the entire work a quasi-Viennese flavour") during which
>"the silence makes a crescendo" because the violas have a bottom B flat
>marked "tremolando ma quasi pensato". They "must not play this note, only
>think it. In fact they can only think it, because the bottom B flat is not
>on the instrument."
A notorious piece. Not many people realize that the hoax was perpetrated
by two ardent Schoenbergians, whose immediate point was that modern music
was going to hell because so few people understood Schoenberg. Little did
they know that the hoax would be used against Schoenberg himself.
Steve Schwartz