![]() These two tuplets blend together when you hear them into a 33:9 “mega-tuplet.” That is bananas! But when you hear it, there’s more musical logic than may be apparent on the page. The fourth measure has a 22:6 tuplet, twenty-two bars in the space of six beats. In the third measure, there’s an 11:3 tuplet, eleven notes in the space of three beats. The actual first downbeat is where the left hand arpeggios begin.īeyond their overall metrical instability, the opening four bars have some startlingly weird rhythms at the local level too. If I had to guess, I’d put the downbeat on the third note of the piece, but no, that note falls on beat five. As a result, it takes me several bars to start hearing the melody as lining up with the bar lines. Here’s my MIDI visualization of Arthur Rubinstein’s recording.Ĭhopin destabilizes its meter right in the first bar, because it starts on beat three rather than beat one where you’d expect. I thought that a “ nocturne” was supposed to evoke the night, or dreams or something, but no, it just means “a piece of music meant to be played at night,” like in a salon setting. Chopin’s Nocture Op 9 No 1 in B-flat Minor is particularly hip.Īll this metrical instability is easier to parse over a steady beat, so I made this remix:Ĭlassical Remixes Volume One by Ethan Hein He isn’t as overtly “jazzy” as Debussy or Ravel, but his music shares many of the qualities of jazz that I like: miniature-scale forms densely packed with rhythmic and harmonic excitement, in the service of organic-sounding melodies. Aside from Bach, Chopin is my favorite dead white European male composer.
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