Saint-Saëns scores bell-like piano tones

Here’s a brief addendum to the Readers’ Forum item (Physics Today, October 2014, page 10 ) regarding bell tones from the piano. The unknown piece of music mentioned by Jon Orloff in his exchange with Murray Campbell about such bell tones might well be Piano Concerto no. 5, sometimes called the Egyptian Concerto, by Camille Saint-Saëns—specifically the second movement, a small portion of which is shown below. The bell-like quality of the sound that comes from the piano is an artifact of the way Saint-Saëns scored the piano part. The left hand plays a series of notes moderately loud (mf), which the listener hears as the melody. Simultaneously, the right hand plays the twelfth above each lower note, and the sixth above that, very softly (pp). Those two notes are harmonics (3:1 and 5:1, respectively) of the lower note, and when they are played together with it, they blend with the lower note and give it an exotic, bell-like timbre.