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Music open thread: Zeroeth Symphonies [1]

['Alonso Del Arte', 'View Profile', 'Greg Dworkin', 'Sabrina Haake']

Date: 2026-04-27  

Computers begin numbering at zero. This is not something profound, it is not mystical, it is not magical. It is a simple consequence of mathematics and practicality. It can be confusing for someone who doesn’t have experience working directly with low-level hardware and software. But we still can make sense of it without the help of so-called “artificial intelligence.”

Most things that computers do involve iteration over an array of elements of the same data type. Most, if not all, of the text on your screen has passed through arrays of characters. The title of this article, for example, could easily fit in an array of 8-bit characters. Consider the fifth character, as you or I would count it: it is the letter C in lowercase. But to the computer, that particular character occurs at index 4 in the character array, and the uppercase M occurs at index 0. And so the function title.indexOf('c') ought to return 4 in this particular example.

The first element of an array is 0 because then its memory address matches the memory address of the whole array. Or at least that’s the case with programming languages that are fairly “close to the metal,” like C and even C++. Starting at 0 greatly simplifies iterating over an array. For example, a simple echo program in C might look like this:

#include <stdio.h>

int main(int argc, char **argv) {

int counter = 0;

while (counter < argc) {

printf("%s

", *(argv + counter));

counter++;

}

}

Here, argv is the array of character arrays, and argc counts how many elements there are in the argv array. If arrays began numbering at 1 instead of 0, the loop condition would need to change to “ counter ≤ argc ” (or “ =< ” or “ <= ” if “ ≤ ” is not available) and the array addressing would need to be changed to “ argv + counter + 1 “. But then what would “ *(argv + 0) ” contain?

Numbering symphonies is not really something composers did in Leopold Mozart’s day, but by Mahler’s time it had become a big deal. And of course composers almost always begin their numbering with No. 1.

What was the very first symphony Leopold Mozart ever wrote? No one knows and no one seems to care. People do care about what the very first symphony written by his son Wolfgang was, though the issue is muddied by the fact that the stylistic continuity between father and son is so smooth that at least one symphony thought to be an early work of the son’s has turned out to actually be by the father. The first symphony by Wolfgang is perhaps the Symphony in E-flat major, K. 16, written when the brat was just eight years old. Both Leopold Mozart and his son wrote more than nine symphonies.

By the time Gustav Mahler wrote his Eighth Symphony, a superstition had developed about ninth symphonies. If Mahler wrote a Ninth Symphony, he would die soon after. So instead he wrote Das Lied von der Erde. Then he followed that up with what he actually called his Ninth Symphony. Confident fate had been cheated, he went on to his Tenth Symphony, which he did not live to complete.

Anton Bruckner died while he was still working on the finale of his Symphony No. 9 in D minor. It was so close to complete that his pupils could have completed it. But to cover up their laziness and intransigence, they started the myth that the master’s sketches for the finale were too cryptic and fragmentary, and beyond the understanding of mere mortals. Despite that myth taking hold, the finale has been reconstructed with a very high degree of confidence.

Bruckner’s Symphony No. 9 in D minor was in fact his eleventh or his twelfth symphony, and his third in the key of D minor. His very first symphony in D minor is now known as his Symphony No. 0 in D minor, implying that he wrote it before the one we refer to as “No. 1.”

Bruckner himself certainly never called it “No. 0.” But he did call it “invalid” and “annulled” after getting some clueless criticism, and this eventually led to the use of the number zero for this symphony. To have the confidence to write something like that and then invalidate it? Wow. Maybe I run the risk of building it up too much. But let’s not forget that at this point he had already written the high-octane action-adventure Mass No. 3 in F minor.

And at this point he had also written the Symphony No. 1 in C minor, the first version of which was completed in 1866. It appears that the Zeroeth was written in 1869, which would make it Bruckner’s Second Symphony if he hadn’t invalidated it.

Paavo Järvi conducts the hr-Sinfonieorchester.

There is at least one other earlier Bruckner symphony, a symphony in F minor which he wrote as an exercise for Otto Kitzler. It’s often called the “Study” Symphony, which makes sense. But it’s also sometimes called “No. 00,” which is just silly. However, note that in the WAB catalogue, Symphony No. 1 is WAB 101, No. 0 is WAB 100 and the Study Symphony is WAB 99. Which means the Study Symphony could be called Symphony No. −1. But that seems a bit excessive.

And there’s also a sketch for a symphony in B-flat major that suggests great possibilities. It’s barely a minute of music. We can only guess where he was going with that. Almost certainly he forgot long before he died.

As far as I can tell, Alfred Schnittke did not write anything he called “Symphony No. 0” either.

Had you heard either of these before? What do you think?

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[1] Url: https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2026/4/27/800021479/community/music-open-thread-zeroeth-symphonies/

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