This article offers an analysis of the Second Piano Sonata ‘being and non-being create each other’, op. 82 (1990–91) by Horatiu Radulescu (1942–2008), the first work in which Radulescu applied the spectral techniques he had developed in his music since the late 1960s to that most apparently unpromising of instrumental media for this type of approach: the solo, equal-tempered piano. And it has a quite specific aim: to analyse Radulescu's sonata in a descriptive language as close as possible to that used by the composer himself.