Yes, that perished piano. The one somewhat hidden, mute and inaudible, in the picture above. That particular piano, untouched, unsung and unsinging during fifty long years of gathering dust, rattling ever more out of tune, prone to time’s relentless streams and forces of decay. It is that piano that, in its very own and unique time-worn voice, solitarily plays for you a series of forty-nine (twenty-seven and twenty-two) sudokist pieces, trustingly dedicated to its eighty-five keys. Each piece is a variation on a single sudoku solution: one nine by nine grid of numbers generates all of the sequences of notes and durations.
Each of the variations centres on a cyclic sudokist sequence of 162 notes: a sequence of two times nine times nine permutations of the list of digits 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, that alternately prescribe how many keys to move up or down on the keyboard to play the next note, and another sequence of two times nine times nine permutations of the numbers 1 to 9 for the corresponding duration in ‘ticks’ of their soundings; both sequences are read from the sudoku solution’s number grid.
Like in mirrored counterpoint the first voice’s sequence plays against a second voice, its retrograde, interspersed with resounding random chords of…
