The Book of Sounds was composed between 1979-82, when Hans Otte was reflecting on his previous artistic output, by distilling hundreds of pages of improvisations he had written down, and looking ahead to a future dealing with his cancer diagnosis. The work was originally released in 1984 and consists of 12 solo piano pieces which blend older and newer traditions: the intimacy and poetic style of Chopin and the pantheistic eulogies of Debussy as against the Eastern rhythms and pointillist pulses familiar to Reich and Glass. Yet these influences are subsumed beneath an artistic vision: music stripped to the bone and laid open to deep listening and personal reflection. There is neither great variation nor exact repetition in these 12 tracks. Instead there is a deep exploration of sound, the sound of an acoustic piano, with great emphasis on harmony.