Piano World Home Page Forums Our Most Popular Forums Pianist Corner Anyone ever counted how many notes there are in any piece?

Just curious what some numbers are. Especially for some of the 9-12 minute 15-20+ page pieces.

I led a PianoWorld project several years ago in which we counted all the notes in the third Rachmaninoff concerto. (With both cadenzas!)

I have trouble counting all the notes in Cage's 4:33.

Yes. When I cannot sleep I count notes instead of sheep.

I was going to say, only that piece and Kreisler's "Easy Piece."

I thought of Kreisler's "Easy Piece" too when I read Carey's post.

How do you count a trill?

It depends on whether you start on the upper or lower note.

Imagine being on Who Wants to be a Zillionaire or something, and the last question is, how many notes in some Bach P & F, and they say you're off by 1 or 2 -- and you argue, "But I do a nachschlag...."

That would certainly be an awful "turn" of events......

Go on...

I've been curious about the same issue before too. I've always wondered if there was a database of pieces by note count but none exist to my knowledge. These days it's probably getting easier to do automatically with digital image processing and some custom programming. It would be far from ideal but would offer a rough scale to judge complexity. Much like how mouse clicks can be illustrative of the complexity of a given workflow. It won't match all dimensions of complexity but I suspect there would be some correlation, and depending on the problem one faced, it might bare useful information. If one overlooks for the sake of convenience the complications which arise when counting trills etc. it should be possible to extrapolate estimates from the number of notes per bar and then the number of bars in a piece. Depending on the granularity of one's extrapolation, one could reduce the margin of error.

Why??? What would you do with the information??

For me just perfect amount of notes when listening, but too many notes in all pieces when learning!

Wower, there must be something similar to what you describe. After all they discovered the Joyce Hatto's fraud with a musical database.

Like I said, just curious.

Well, I used a software for sheet music writing once, and this program gave some statistics about the pieces including the note count. I don't remember exactly, but for a 6 page piece (taking about 5 minutes) with quite a few big chords the total number was slightly above 1000. Memorising this piece took some time, but was not extremely difficult. I have been thinking about comparing this with memorising 1000 digits of the number, Pi (3,14159265...). In numbers of the decimal system there are 10 different digits to choose from while the piano has 88 keys. In addition comes timing and duration of the musical notes. This means that the number of possible combinations of 1000 notes is much higher than the possible 1000 digit number sequences. Still I believe that music is much easier to memorise. Firstly, many note combinations are practically impossible. Then I many combinations of notes (figures and chords) are much more frequently used than others, and can somehow be considered as musical "words". When we memorise text we learn the words, not the letters. So also with music.

Excuse me, I'm drifting away from the subject. The number of notes in a piece depends on many factors, but I guess that 1000 notes in 5 minutes is not far from avarage.

I did it once when I was bored with chopin's op 10 no 1, which was quite easy with some multiplication and addition.

what was the count if you remember?

I can't think why you don't just count it yourself, if you find this sort of stuff interesting.

I'm guessing it was somewhere between the number of notes in Kreisler's Easy Piece and Rachmaninoff's Third Concerto, both of which counts we know, courtesy of Mark_C and Kreisler. So it should be pretty easy to figure it out from there.