The impossible song that requires 14 pianists to play it
You’ve heard of all the different types of difficulties musicians encounter when writing, producing, or recording a song. Robert Plant, for instance, deems Led Zeppelin’s hit ‘Polly Come Home’ the most challenging song to sing live, while Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers needed to record ‘Refugee’ over 150 times before they got it right. In theory, creating an iconic track shouldn’t be too difficult if you’re a renowned musical veteran. However, even the most intricate compositions get there in the end, but there are some seemingly impossible songs that exist a little too outside of human capability to be achievable. At least, not alone.
‘Faerie’s Aire and Death Waltz’, a score created by John Stump, was actually deliberately designed to be impossible for one person to play. Widely regarded as an unplayable parody – one which requires its source to have, well, ten fingers – the composition was supposedly created to “drive the performer insane”, with equally frustrating indications like “release the penguins”.
‘Nights of Nights’, similarly, is also regarded as just as impossible to perform, with a composition so complicated that it would take one person a long time to learn, much less perfect. However, rather remarkably, a group of fourteen people took up the challenge of not only playing one but both of these compositions at the same time.
The result, aptly titled ‘Night of Nights/Death Waltz’, utilises the former as an introduction and then shifts into the latter, following an extremely difficult challenge set by a piano teacher for an annual recital. The piece took a year of “intense practice and coordination”, according to the video description, before the students arrived at a finished result that they were proud of.
The video gained a modest amount of attention after it was first posted in 2016, but has since “gone viral” after being uploaded to Reddit and shared across multiple platforms in the years since it was created. Clearly, nothing is impossible, as even the most difficult compositions can not only be mastered but actually combined and not sound too terrible.
This isn’t the first time music has crossed over into absurdity, and it certainly won’t be the last. The only man who can play music using a leaf, for example, AKA Levi Celerio, continues to leave his impact on the realm of strange and unusual musical accomplishments. However, unlike Stump’s ‘Faerie’s Aire and Death Waltz’, Celerio’s venture was somewhat accidental. He didn’t actively seek out to master the leaf as a musical instrument, rather, he had an encounter with Japanese soldiers during World War II and had to convince them that he was a musician. He picked up a leaf, under the immense pressure, and proceeded to play a song.
Becoming a world-class leaf-player seems an easy feat though when you consider the amount of delicacy required to play something like ‘Night of Nights/Death Waltz’. It really makes you wonder, ultimately, what would be out of reach when it comes to musical eccentricities.
