With its very title, Luciano Berio's short piano piece, Erdenklavier, offers an ideal allegory for much of his work. The title is German for "Earth-Piano," and is one of a quartet of "elemental" piano-pieces written over some 25 years (including Water-Piano, Air-Piano, and Fire-Piano); also like its companions, and like much of Berio's music in general, it seems to pursue a single process, an algorithm of sorts through which it sends and conditions all its particular materials. In the case of Erdenklavier that material is a slowly rotating, permuting sequence of pitches, gradually introducing new tones and siphoning off old ones; to a certain degree the process is not entirely distinct from serial procedures in general, which seek not so much a condition of non-repetition as much as of perpetual revolution and reorganization.

But Berio's little composition differs from the typical incarnations of serialism in that—at least on the surface—it's a stunningly simple work: to this 88-keyed Olympus of musical technology Berio directs only one attacked note at any given moment; on the score it appears as if the entire piece is a single line, unharmonized through to its end. In fact, the piece is an impressively subtle study in pedaling and resonance: various tones in this line are struck at different dynamic levels and held for different durations, so that the melody in essence creates its harmony, which it meticulously restricts or develops further. Berio first cultivated this technique about two years earlier, in the extraordinary O King for voice and chamber ensemble, and would develop it for the rest of his career; here as there, a sense of impossible, luminescent depth radiates from something otherwise clear and one-dimensional in appearance.

What ultimately materializes is a kind of brilliant trick on musical cognition: even though we hear nothing more than a durational snippet—sound pushing its way through a tiny wedge of previously unexperienced time—what we listen to (that is, what we interpret through hearing) is much less like a two-minute interval, and much more like revolving orb of sound, spinning outside time and which we only observe for two minutes. And in the process of its turns, something like a sonic flashlight seems to move willfully across its smooth surface, brilliantly illuminating patches here and there. A game of revelation and concealment, Erdenklavier should in its illusion of a 3-D object perhaps be counted as musical "op-art," a new member of that flourishing '60s phenomenon.

Like the wonders of Renaissance Arcadia—indeed, like the pre-modern sense of the natural world—Berio's small, parable-like score offers an incarnation of complexity nestled into the otherwise stunningly simple. Transparency becomes only the open door through which the ear is invited to search and find layer upon layer of labyrinthine interconnections. In its meticulously engineered surface, its "mere" appearance, Erdenklavier follows so much of Berio's other music in opening up a default-depth, a self-stratifying and subcutaneous situation.

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