SATOR AREPO TENET OPERA ROTAS

Instrumentation

Piano
1

Additional Information

SATOR AREPO TENET OPERA ROTAS for solo piano, was inspired by the Latin palindrome of the same name. The five words that comprise the square roughly translate to: The farmer Arepo works a plough. While these words serve no significant or poignant meaning it is their positioning that creates a palindrome with eight possible reading positions. By starting at any of the four corners, one can read the square in any column or row, left or right, up or down, and as word order in Latin is quite free, it can even be read in alternating directions and still arrive at a palindromic result. To represent this, the piece is constructed out of eight non-transitioning and contrasting sections each representing a different letter of the square. When played in succession, these sections illuminate the structure of the original Latin square. To represent the symmetry of the palindrome the sections are turned upside down and reversed on reaching the central point (the letter N). Each of the eight readings is represented by a new ordering sequence of the sections.

Details

Year
Minutes
12

Recordings

Performers
Fumiko Miyachi
Title
SATOR AREPO TENET OPERA ROTAS (Reading III)