Flat

Description

Running over eleven minutes, Flat is the longest of Ravi Kumar's pieces on this site. It was written in 2007, and its score is published on the Mutopia Project. Nothing in the work settles whether the title means something level or the flat sign, and no reliable information has been found on the composer's background or on how the piece came about.

Its 1,670 notes average about two and a half a second, a low density for its length, and the figures show a piece that spends much of its time with wide gaps between notes. No key signature or metre is recorded. The range is broad, from B0 to G-sharp 6, more than five and a half octaves, reaching close to the bottom of the keyboard.

Though rated intermediate, it tests concentration and tone across eleven minutes more than finger speed. Listen through once to find where the sections divide, practise each part with A-B looping, then join them up. In the spacious passages, listen at normal speed and treat the time the sound takes to die away as part of the music. The lowest note, B0, needs an 88-key instrument.

A broad collection of standalone piano pieces not belonging to any specific set, offering hundreds of varied character pieces to explore and compare.