Ensemble (Musik in Stadt und Land)

In the early 18th century, violinist Giuseppe Tartini came across a phenomenon unknown at the time: if he played two notes on his instrument at the same time, he heard – buried in between – the frequency of a third note. Today we know that the human mind compulsorily forms a third from two sounding tones: it adds their difference to the two: so-called combination tones. What at first seems like mathematical nonsense or at best a colloquial truism is in fact a phenomenological fact: One and one is more than two.

In the documentary short film ENSEMBLE (Musik in Stadt und Land) (German for “music in city and country”) instrument maker Markus Bauernfeind talks about experiences in a temporal and geographical comparison.