The Book of Hours

Twentieth-century physics expanded our sense of subatomic and cosmological scales, opening up musical time and space in the process. Modernism is full of the complex dance between “large” and “small.” It includes the encyclopedic gigantism of works like Mahler’s Symphony No.8, Havergal Brian’s “Gothic” Symphony, or Alexander Scriabin’s “Mysterium.” The latter, an unperformed and unperformable spectacle for the foothills of the Himalayas, would last a week and conclude with the end of the world and the replacement of humanity by a more enlightened race of spiritual beings. In Webern’s “Six Pieces for Orchestra,” enormous forces are used with extreme restraint, with the shortest movement lasting a mere 11 bars. Inverting this schema, Satie and Sorabji imagined vast works for solo piano, testing the physical limits of performers and the expressive limits of the instrument. La Monte Young’s “The Well-Tuned Piano” takes five or six hours to tease out the infinitely subtle harmonic colors of meticulously considered microtonal tunings; the pianist improvises around seven chords that linger for 20, 40, or 60 minutes at a time.