This piece of music, which looks like one note on a strange musical stave, is actually 4 notes, spelling the name BACH.
There's no H in the musical alphabet in English, but there is in German. Germans call our B flat B and our B H.
Reading the music anticlockwise, also known as widdershins, you have the well-known treble clef, then a tenor clef (used by cellos, bassoons and a few other instruments), an alto clef (mainly used by violas) and another treble clef.
The notes are then
B flat = B
A
C
and
B =H
But the source of this ingenious musical curiosity is unknown. Musicologists would love to find that it comes from Bach himself, but so far its origin is undetermined.
