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Comment by ssttoo | Hacker News Reader

Beethoven’s 5th symphony (da-da-da-DAA) starts with a rest too, it’s not unusual to notate like this. Many pieces have “pickup” measures which are not complete and much shorter than a full measure. But when the pickup is more than 50% of a normal measure, it’s no longer much of a pickup and starting with a rest to make up the complete measure makes sense.

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That's all fine and dandy when you're talking about a genuine piece of music. But for something like this, counting a rest that goes for 17 years is taking it way too far.

17 months. But in what sense isn’t this a genuine peice of music? It certainly meets Merriam-Webster’s definition:

a: vocal, instrumental, or mechanical sounds having rhythm, melody, or harmony

b: the science or art of ordering tones or sounds in succession, in combination, and in temporal relationships to produce a composition having unity and continuity

An exploration of what is and is not a piece of music, like this work explicitly is, needs to acknowledge the possibility that the answer might be “no, this isn't”. Dictionary definitions are entirely irrelevent except insofar as they provide the inspiration to ask “wait, but is that _really_ all a work of music is?”

One of HN's few(?) music appreciation professors here: in fact, I start every term posing this question. It's hard to teach music appreciation before a group of humans can agree where music begins and ends :) At the end of the day, like everything else it's a certain degree of statistics and a certain degree of subjectivity.

Does it in fact have rhythm, melody, harmony, unity, or continuity? If it's too slow for any human to actually observe those qualities in it then I'd argue that it does not.

It’s playing a chord, so harmony exists by definition. It also has 600 years of continuity planned in.

And if a tree falls in a forest with no one to hear it, it makes a sound by definition.

…and yet that answer entirely misses the point that the question is about the choice of definition.

Do photons and electrons not exist, because we cannot observe them directly?

You can certainly play a recording of the piece at whatever speed you desire, and decide if it has rhythm, melody, harmony, unity, and continuity. Extremely slowing the piece down does not remove those things.

Are you talking about the composition or this particular performance of that composition. This performance may be too slow for any human to actually observe, but the composition is just a piece of sheet music you can read and judge like any other composition. This is far from the first performance of this piece, it's just that most other performances have been in the 20 minute to 20 hour range.

Not the 639 year recital?

This is as genuine a piece of music as the original.

Please explain what makes a composition “genuine” and show your work

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