ABSTRACT
A single note sounds loneliest when it falls from a piano — the huge machine so underutilized, the other fingers hovering over scores of keys without touching them, the ghostly resonance of unplayed strings, one note's ringing promise immediately decaying but lingering. An instant after the melody reaches flat-6, the harmony accompanies it to G minor, an initially consonant adjustment that ends up creating more dissonance, for the ostinato's problematic flat-6 becomes the minor third of the new chord but its second and fourth beats are clashing ninths in the new context. The song's structure is strange; not a conventional alternation of verse and chorus, it has only one twelve-bar sequence, separated by churning interludes that are syncopated, studded with harmonic tensions found nowhere else. Gender privilege keeps the trends and statistics off the minds of most men, but many women, even if they do not know the precise figures involved, live these facts with immediacy.
