Trois cent notes

About

In this piece which last around 4 minutes, the sustain pedal has to be depressed until the very end.

Although notated solely in quavers, the tempo encompasses a wide range from very slow to extremely fast. Starting with a speed of MM = 50, it gradually accelerates to MM = 400 which equals three “time octaves”, speaking with Karlheinz Stockhausen (cf. his famous article ...how time passes... from 1957). A similar transition also happens in the harmonic domain where the range of three octaves (from F to f”) finally collapses into a single pitch (f'):

Harmonic structure of Trois cent notes
© 2019 by Karlheinz Essl

And also in the dynamics, a permanent process of crescendo and diminuendo takes place. Needless to mention, all this processes happen simultaneously at the same time. Despite its strict structure, the piece should be played in a fluent rubato attitude with lots of espressivo. Pay attentention to the piano resonance while playing – they will guide you through this sound journey.

This piece was extended to Prends le Fa (2019) for piano.

Trois Cent Notes weist einen Tonumfang von drei Oktaven ab und besteht aus drei Abschnitten zu je 100 Tönen. Die Oktavverhältnisse werden auch auf die Tempoveränderungen übertragen, die das ganze Stück prägen. Die Harmonik ist ebenfalls daraus abgeleitet: der Ton f spreizt sich über drei Oktaven zu einem vierstimmigen Oktavklang aus; diese Übergangsvektoren werden an 13 verschiedenen Punkten vertikal abgegriffen und ergeben unterschiedliche Akkorde, die jeweils aus gleichen Intervallen bestehen.

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Scores

Trois cent notes (2019) for piano solo, page 1
© 2019 by Karlheinz Essl

Review

This morning I'm going to be listening to a piece by Karlheinz Essl, Austrian composer, called "300 Notes". This piece exists in three versions, one for piano, one for vibraphone, and one for toy piano. We're going to be listening to the vibraphone version because we're in the middle of a percussion series. That's the current series right now. I think all three of them were written in 2019 and they're more or less the same. So the piano version was the original one. The sustain pedal is to be depressed throughout the piece, use a medium soft mallet. The tempo encompasses a wide range from slow to extremely fast, and it gradually gets faster over the course of the piece. Here's the harmonic structure, so he gives you these chords. The piece slowly converges on an F, and it starts with these F's and octaves. He even provides a link to the mp3 in here.

The score is free, so we may as well peruse it a little bit. It's freely available on his website. It's just three pages, each page ends in a fermata. It looks like it starts quiet on each page and there's a big crescendo and decrescendo. So it's like three big swells.

I discovered Essl's music through looking at this American project called the Toy Piano Library. His name kept popping up because he has several toy piano pieces and pieces for toy piano and electronics. This led me to his website. He's really good at documenting his music, you can find recordings and scores for all of his pieces. I downloaded a bunch of them. I've listened to most of them, mostly I just downloaded piano and toy piano stuff.

Karlheinz Essl was born in 1960, studied composition with Friedrich Cerha in Vienna, wrote his dissertation on the music of Anton Webern. He was a double bassist, and has played in many ensembles. Composer in residence at Darmstadt from 1990 to 1994. Composer in residence at IRCAM from 1991 to 1993, so those two things overlapped. Taught algorithmic composition at Bruckner University in Linz from 1995 to 2006. Since then he's been professor of composition and electroacoustic music at University of Music and Performing Arts Vienna.

He's super prolific as well. If you go through his website he has a ton of pieces for all kinds of instrumentations. He's very fluent in electronic music. He does code and I think he made his own Max library of sorts. Really, really educated person. Kind of an ideal career, which in many countries most composers can't even imagine. Just going from position to position after his degrees.

Okay, enough about that. There's a link in the video description to this recording. I'm just going to have a listen to it. It's not going to take much out of your day, it's just four minutes long. You'll probably spend more time listening to me talk than listening to the piece. So I encourage you to pause the video here and have a listen.

I'm surprised that this was written for piano first because I think this really makes a lot more sense to have all this repeated note stuff on a vibraphone. And the single melodic line stuff really works well on vibes. The pedal has no trouble blurring everything, which is nice. There's obviously a lot of little procedural games going on that are really fun. Which are a lot more apparent when you start listening to it.

Clearly, the first page and the third page are like mirror images of one another. In terms of pitch, the tempi, something else is going on. Then the middle page you have the different chords are like interleaved. They're like alternating between one another. So you get this weird juxtaposition of stuff in the middle section. Possibly there's two things layered because you have two voices going on at the same time. So maybe it's more like two chords are happening at the same time in every measure. Also I noticed in this part that you have four notes in the first measure, then five, then six, then seven, then eight. So there's stuff like that going on too, which you have to be aware of. The number of notes is also fluctuating.

It strikes a nice balance of being minimalistic enough that you can hear all this stuff. And also layered enough that it's verging on modernist. Like something Ligeti would do. Yeah, it's a cute little piece.

We'll probably be looking at a lot more Essl if we ever get around to doing the toy piano scores I have. But for now I think this is a good introduction to what he's about. Lots of procedurally generated music and the influence of serial music is obvious as well. So yeah, do check him out.

Updated: 4 Jan 2026