A Thousand and One Notes is a solo piano composition conceived as a musical fairy tale for children. Its title, as well as its overall concept, parallels the famous collection of stories known as One Thousand and One Nights. The central idea of One Thousand and One Nights is Scheherazade’s skillful storytelling, through which she prevents the sultan from executing her. Condemned to death once a story is completed, Scheherazade connects one tale to the next, thus extending her life by another day each time. Similarly, the musical fairy tale A Thousand and One Notes presents a programmatic framework in which a series of short stories are linked together without interruption—stories filled with notes, thereby creating “a thousand and one notes.” The subject matter, intended for children, largely explores an imaginative world connected with music, musical performance, and musical terminology. In this way, young listeners may be guided through associative thinking by means of various musical metaphors. Examples include: How the Notes Became Stars and Shone in the Sky, The Salon Lion and the Parrot, Count Marcato and His Maid Staccato, General Bass and the Three Captured Voices, The Man Who Counted Measures, The Story of the Chord and His Family, The Unhappy Triplet, The Story of the Piano Tuner, A Lonely Night in the Concert Hall, The New Ornaments and Jewelry of Lady Sarabande, and others. Although A Thousand and One Notes is performed without pauses — in one breath, so to speak — it could formally be understood as a suite, since it is characterized predominantly by the same tonality, the simple key of C major. Except for rare exceptions, it avoids modulation into tonalities that use altered tones (the black keys). An exception appears in certain thematic sections that are based entirely on the pentatonic scale of the black keys. Through such a simple concept, the composition aims to be didactic and to approach the child’s analytical ear, while at the same time serving as a reminder of the final words of a well-known twentieth-century composer who had moved into atonality. He stated that, if he had lived longer, he would have wished to write another composition in the “ordinary” key of C major.