Sometimes, they will discover a lost piece by some known composer, and the media will pick it up. But imo, when you have a listen, it often turns out that the piece had been lost for a reason.
What makes this waltz remarkable as a new discovery, in my opinion, is that it is more or less a finished work; the composition is so distinctively a work by Chopin; and the work brings something novel to the oeuvre.
——
As for the debut, I think someone involved could have been more thoughtful. It feels as if some people in NYC saw a chance to be the first to debut, and they ran with it. It was published in the NYTimes, with a New York-based pianist, with New York’s “Steinway Hall,” which reads like a product placement. Chopin wrote these intimate pieces for the acoustics of small, intimate settings, and for nothing like a modern Steinway concert grand piano.
Maybe they could have instead worked with some local cultural organization in Poland, which could have made the debut a significant local cultural thing? Maybe taking the chance to promote an early-career pianist from Chopin’s homeland, rather than that of a world-famous New Yorker?
I wonder if music experts could have identified it as a work by Chopin just by the sound? Obviously it's a bit late now, but it would have been an interesting experiment - to ask 100 "professors of music" to guess which composer out of [1] wrote this newly discovered piece.
Composers have very distinct styles my teacher would joke Mozart adored the triad, Beethoven the octave and Chopin the tenth.
A fun game I like to play myself is "guess the composer". I think I shocked my friend the most when I watched West World with him and after seeing the intro only once I guessed correctly that it was the same composer as the Game of Thrones intro.
Sometimes I second guess myself too much between late Mozart and early Beethoven but I think most the composers have their own hallmarks.
Chopin in particular was quite idiosyncratic because his piano writing was fairly innovative. He came up with a lot of new ways to play the piano and his polish influences and focus on salon music is very distinct
If you haven’t already heard of it, you might enjoy the Piano Puzzler podcast[0]
“Bruce Adolphe re-writes a familiar tune in the style of a classical composer … [someone calls in and] listens to Bruce play his Piano Puzzler™. They then try to do two things: name the hidden tune, and name the composer whose style Bruce is mimicking.”
Of course, you can play along at home as you listen.
>Chopin in particular was quite idiosyncratic because his piano writing was fairly innovative
I bow to your superior knowledge, just want to add for the poor shlubs who are even dumber than me:
Chopin was not simply a composer, but a virtuoso piano player, and i guess because of that he wrote what he wrote for the piano; in contrast to say Mozart who performed at the piano but mostly composed for orchestras, etc.
And the periods of time were different wrt, when Chopin was active, Mozart, Beethoven et al's music innovations already existed, along with larger audiences to play for, which created Chopin's niche
My understanding is that when writing for an orchestra, a composer needs to adjust to the orchestra's skill level and likely err a bit on the easy side for good measure.
Most composers, most of the time. Beethoven, on the other hand, refused to rewrite portions of the Ninth that were maybe too high for some to sing, and you can probably find difficult instrument parts if you chat to, say, Bassoon players.
There was a time when I was rather good at guessing the composer from hearing a snippet of music I hadn't heard before. We had a group exercise where I had a streak going of guessing correctly every time. Then our instructor tricked us by playing a snippet of a Chopin Concerto that didn't have any piano in it. :)
Check out Emmit Rhodes. My only music conspiracy theory is that he was a ghost writer for Paul McCartney. The musical similarities are absolutely uncanny.
You wouldn't have to be a professor of music for this.
Chopin has a unique style and it is a waltz.
This would have been a trivial question for any piano music lover.
The only reason I might not have have guessed Chopin first is it seems too obvious and easy if I had been asked. A new Beatles song might be harder to guess than this.
I think it sounds pretty good too but I would want to hear it performed by a pianist who I like the way they play Chopin to judge it better. It sounds quite good considering I don't really like the sound of the piano that is being used.
There was another (attributed) Chopin Waltz that was discovered about a century ago, and "professors of music" argued whether it really sounded like Chopin or not. I think they reached a consensus that it wasn't Chopin, but an unrelated contemporary called Charles Mayer.
- "In an email exchange we had relating to this discovery, Stephen Hough wrote (and gave me permission to publish) the following comments:"
- "It was not so much the structure which made me think from the first time I saw the piece (1936 edition) that it couldn’t be by Chopin but the compositional mistakes. Chopin was fastidious about such things and there is false note-leading, inaccurate spelling of accidentals and rough harmony (too many thirds, bad spacing). I also never thought it sounded Chopin-esque but much more Russian. I only put it on as a curiosity and insisted that the notes explain its doubtful attribution."
Chopin is pretty distinctive. I think the question would be if someone could identify it as “actual lost Chopin” vs “modern composer trying to imitate Chopin”.
The question is, if someone who is a grand master in identifying the “modern composer trying to imitate Chopin” knows so much that his own Chopin imitations become (statistically) undistinguishable from Chopin's own compositions for anyone else. (Except for experts who know every piece of Chopin and thus do not need to identify them by style, but can use “brute force”.)
Very likely. I'm nowhere near a professional nor am I giid at recognizing pieces/composers, but some people have such a deep understanding of yhe music from various composers, that they likely categorize it correctly.
See for example Nahre Sol [1] who plays the same piece in the style of different composers. In order to do that, you need to have a deep understanding of each composer's "quirks".
> Obviously it's a bit late now, but it would have been an interesting experiment - to ask 100 "professors of music" to guess which composer out of [1] wrote this newly discovered piece.
They'd have guessed correctly. But you already know ahead of time that this newly discovered piece is not, say, juvenilia written by Scriabin specifically to imitate a Chopin waltz. And in that case, 100 professors would have guessed wrong because it would not have been the obvious answer.
Guessing composers based on sound/musical content alone is problematic for many reasons:
1. Common practice vs. composer's idiosyncrasies. Even separating Mozart's oeuvre from Michael Haydn's (Joseph's brother) has been non-trivial-- scholars have gotten it wrong over the centuries. Also-- IIRC there is a research paper about stylistic analyses leading to circular dependencies in the attribution of works of Josquin. E.g., A is Josquin because it sounds like Josquin's B, and B is Josquin because it sounds like Josquin's A...
2. Cross-contamination. Mozart knew Michael and his music, and was highly influenced by it. Compare the initial fugue at the beginning of Haydn's Requiem in C minor to Mozart's, plus the upward cascade of vocal entrances. Additionally, Schumann was influenced by Chopin, who was influenced by Liszt/Schumann/Mozart/Bach/etc. The problem gets worse as you go forward in history-- the next generation can take a composer's entire output and use it as their bible, which leads to...
3. Experts are also composers, and the most highly trained ones can write in the style of any composer whose works they have access to. E.g., Scriabin's set of Preludes was obviously written to be the sequel to Chopin's Op. 24 Preludes, (e.g., Chopin's no. 1 has a few fleeting quintuplets at the end, Scriabin's no. 1 is OMG all quintuplets phrased across barlines till the very end [engine_revving.wav]!). He understood Chopin's formal and textural affinities, could match his virtuosity at the keyboard, and fully immersed himself in Chopin's harmonic language.
I have no doubt if Scriabin had wanted to do a prank (or, more likely, an exercise) by writing a piece to fall convincingly into Chopin's oeuvre, he could have done so at any point in his career.
Plus...
4. Confirmation bias. I really want this to be a newly discovered waltz by Chopin![1]
These are the reasons an article like this mentions things like paper, ink and handwriting analysis.
I gotta say that with Bach and Mozart, I feel like I could id their pieces consistently. They have a distinct pattern of symphony and motifs no other composers could mimic.
Famous composers mimicked other composers plenty, or parodied other composers, copied them or played homages. Mimicked, yes, famous composers definitely did mimic other composers.
Prokofiev Symphony No. 1 is one of the more famous. It mimics Mozart and Haydn (obvious choices!)
Stravinsky’s Octet is another.
There are plenty of other examples. Those are just two of the more obvious ones. Bach did it. Beethoven did it. Mozart did it.
I guess the subtle distinction here is that these great composers probably did it because they simply could do it as one deliberate choice among many. Lesser composers may be stuck mimicing a few styles because they lack the skill to go beyond them.
But if some unpublished work mimics a certain style, I would assume that it is an exercise to gain a better understanding of that style.
Fritz Kreisler faked some old composers'---e.g. Vivaldi's---work, claiming to have discovered some unpublished manuscripts, but later revealed that they were his own compositions all along.
It was mostly a prank on the music industry, but nonetheless, mimicry of style was involved, and was enough to fool many people for years.
It's funny now divisive Lang Lang is with classical people. The Reddit classical threads are full of people outraged that they had him play this and declare him the worst possible person in the world to debut a Chopin piece.
As far as Chopin waltzes go, this is certainly not among his best. It almost feels unfinished. I wonder if he dashed it off quickly as a gift (suggested in one of the articles about it) rather than ever as an intent to have published.
Rhymes with the "new" Mozart composition rediscovered last month.
> While compiling the Köchel catalogue's newest edition – an authoritative list of all of Mozart's documented musical works – classical music researchers rediscovered the manuscript of the previously unknown piece from the Carl Ferdinand Becker collection in Leipzig's music library.
Yes, although they are either juvenilia or relatively small pieces that would not greatly change our understanding of the composer in question.
On the other hand there is another piece of music "recovered" this year not by rediscovery but by recomposition/restoration, and it's quite a substantial piece that should provide quite a useful new perspective on the composer[1][2].
Mediocre pieces by otherwise great creators have huge value at the meta level. They add to the evidence that greatness is more than just being born a genius and then just cranking out masterpieces.
Vonnegut comes to mind in literature. In one of his novels, he even grades his other works A-F based on how good he thinks they were. His grades seem remarkably accurate, too, given my subjectivity as a reader, and his bias as the author.
Seems like the passage of time has a role in accentuating the genius of artists
> passage of time has a role in accentuating the genius of artists
That makes sense, I think genius is time evolving process.
One pattern, I have seen in high performers, is that they are competing only with themselves, using introspective feedback to continuously improve in an ego free way.
Do folks generally still believe that the "masters" are/were born great, rather than being born with an advantage of some sort (whether by nature or environment) and then leveraging that to achieve mastery of some craft?
I don't know about born "great" but born with a different perspective seems reasonable. The perspective maybe nurtured by the environment. I think the environment could be a repetitive task or plenty of leisure time.
I believe luck with timing is the biggest determination.
1) I absolutely loved the execution by Lang Lang of it.
2) You're really looking at this in terms of modern music industry, which is nonsense, Chopin created music for his friends too and would send them the scripts.
Chopins posthumously published Nocturne in C# minor is a very popular piece to play/listen to. I also think there are several Debussy pieces he didn’t want published but are very popular now (maybe Reverie is one if my memory serves me)
After decades of liking his work, I learned one of his little preludes recently and now he's just freddy the disconsolate schmaltzmeister to me. the discovery seems too late, nobody is going to be that maudlin again.
I was obsessed with Chopin for a while then went off his music for many years. I have had a resurgence in my interest in his music. Probably due to the Chopin competition rekindled it alongside with finally getting hold of a piano again.
Maybe unintentionally, the word ‘little’ is quite dismissive. Perhaps you’re thinking of one of the three very minor Preludes which no one plays and not included in the 24 Preludes Opus 28.
If you do mean something like the 4th Prelude in E Minor for instance, should it be prefaced with a trigger warning that ‘you're about to hear music that is - effusively sad or full of self-pity; extremely sentimental or 'tearful; easily moved to tears; exciting to tears; excessively sentimental; weak and silly? (American Heritage Dictionary definition of maudlin).
Written much later, would you regard Rachmaninov's Vocalise (1915) or Barber's Adagio (1936) as 'maudlin' not to mention a vast number of other compositions that explore the kind of intensity of feeling that is expressed in the 4th Chopin Prelude. Given that the pianist Alfred Brendel considers ‘Chopin’s Preludes as the most glorious achievement in piano music after Beethoven and Schubert’ you might wonder why he takes a somewhat view from you. Could you be missing something?
Kirill Gerstein played it Friday in his Tschaikowsky concert in Dresden. I didn't like it that much, compared to Tschaikowsky's 1st and a Rachmaninoff. And the two modern pieces by Fagerlund and Lutosławski. Esp. Fagerlund blew away all the others.
In addition to all the publishing activities they also acted as verification service. Apparently it was common for Conductors to modify compositions which over time drifted from the original.
My understanding was that the family collection of sheet music stretched back in time so they could verify the modifications.
The building had about 12,0000 square feet stacked floor to ceiling sheet music.
Much of the sheet music ended up at the library of congress. I can believe things could be both archived and lost.
Indeed, I'm a jazz musician. There's huge amounts of material created for the so called "big band" that exists only in someone's basement, or is learned about by word of mouth.
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/10/27/arts/music/chopin-waltz-d...
https://vp.nyt.com/video/2024/10/15/127974_1_chopin-find-353...
https://archive.is/tjk6Q
This is genuinely a good waltz.
Sometimes, they will discover a lost piece by some known composer, and the media will pick it up. But imo, when you have a listen, it often turns out that the piece had been lost for a reason.
What makes this waltz remarkable as a new discovery, in my opinion, is that it is more or less a finished work; the composition is so distinctively a work by Chopin; and the work brings something novel to the oeuvre.
——
As for the debut, I think someone involved could have been more thoughtful. It feels as if some people in NYC saw a chance to be the first to debut, and they ran with it. It was published in the NYTimes, with a New York-based pianist, with New York’s “Steinway Hall,” which reads like a product placement. Chopin wrote these intimate pieces for the acoustics of small, intimate settings, and for nothing like a modern Steinway concert grand piano.
Maybe they could have instead worked with some local cultural organization in Poland, which could have made the debut a significant local cultural thing? Maybe taking the chance to promote an early-career pianist from Chopin’s homeland, rather than that of a world-famous New Yorker?
I transcribed the score, available here:
https://www.moderndescartes.com/essays/chopin_waltz_posthumo...
I wonder if music experts could have identified it as a work by Chopin just by the sound? Obviously it's a bit late now, but it would have been an interesting experiment - to ask 100 "professors of music" to guess which composer out of [1] wrote this newly discovered piece.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:19th-century_classica...
Composers have very distinct styles my teacher would joke Mozart adored the triad, Beethoven the octave and Chopin the tenth.
A fun game I like to play myself is "guess the composer". I think I shocked my friend the most when I watched West World with him and after seeing the intro only once I guessed correctly that it was the same composer as the Game of Thrones intro.
Sometimes I second guess myself too much between late Mozart and early Beethoven but I think most the composers have their own hallmarks.
Chopin in particular was quite idiosyncratic because his piano writing was fairly innovative. He came up with a lot of new ways to play the piano and his polish influences and focus on salon music is very distinct
If you haven’t already heard of it, you might enjoy the Piano Puzzler podcast[0]
“Bruce Adolphe re-writes a familiar tune in the style of a classical composer … [someone calls in and] listens to Bruce play his Piano Puzzler™. They then try to do two things: name the hidden tune, and name the composer whose style Bruce is mimicking.”
Of course, you can play along at home as you listen.
[0] https://www.npr.org/podcasts/381443927/performance-today-s-p...
This reminds me of Hidden Melody from an old British quiz show that I loved as a child: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Face_the_Music_(British_game....
I like this one: https://youtu.be/WRfsibwR5x4
>Chopin in particular was quite idiosyncratic because his piano writing was fairly innovative
I bow to your superior knowledge, just want to add for the poor shlubs who are even dumber than me:
Chopin was not simply a composer, but a virtuoso piano player, and i guess because of that he wrote what he wrote for the piano; in contrast to say Mozart who performed at the piano but mostly composed for orchestras, etc.
And the periods of time were different wrt, when Chopin was active, Mozart, Beethoven et al's music innovations already existed, along with larger audiences to play for, which created Chopin's niche
or something like that, i'm not a music guy
Mozart, Beethoven, Bach and Brahms (as well as many other composers) were all virtuoso piano or keyboard players.
Chopin is unusual in that he wrote almost exclusively for the piano.
My understanding is that when writing for an orchestra, a composer needs to adjust to the orchestra's skill level and likely err a bit on the easy side for good measure.
Most composers, most of the time. Beethoven, on the other hand, refused to rewrite portions of the Ninth that were maybe too high for some to sing, and you can probably find difficult instrument parts if you chat to, say, Bassoon players.
There was a time when I was rather good at guessing the composer from hearing a snippet of music I hadn't heard before. We had a group exercise where I had a streak going of guessing correctly every time. Then our instructor tricked us by playing a snippet of a Chopin Concerto that didn't have any piano in it. :)
Oh wow I had no idea westworld and got were the same guy! Both themes were very noticeably a cut above; that totally explains it.
Is the joke accurate in this example? Are there many tenths?
Yes, and it can be quite a stretch when playing. Similar to Rachmaninoff in terms of "reach" (but absolutely not in style).
(Am pianist, too.)
Check out Emmit Rhodes. My only music conspiracy theory is that he was a ghost writer for Paul McCartney. The musical similarities are absolutely uncanny.
You wouldn't have to be a professor of music for this.
Chopin has a unique style and it is a waltz.
This would have been a trivial question for any piano music lover.
The only reason I might not have have guessed Chopin first is it seems too obvious and easy if I had been asked. A new Beatles song might be harder to guess than this.
I think it sounds pretty good too but I would want to hear it performed by a pianist who I like the way they play Chopin to judge it better. It sounds quite good considering I don't really like the sound of the piano that is being used.
This is topical:
https://www.thepianofiles.com/the-valse-melancolique/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_Mayer_(composer)
There was another (attributed) Chopin Waltz that was discovered about a century ago, and "professors of music" argued whether it really sounded like Chopin or not. I think they reached a consensus that it wasn't Chopin, but an unrelated contemporary called Charles Mayer.
- "In an email exchange we had relating to this discovery, Stephen Hough wrote (and gave me permission to publish) the following comments:"
- "It was not so much the structure which made me think from the first time I saw the piece (1936 edition) that it couldn’t be by Chopin but the compositional mistakes. Chopin was fastidious about such things and there is false note-leading, inaccurate spelling of accidentals and rough harmony (too many thirds, bad spacing). I also never thought it sounded Chopin-esque but much more Russian. I only put it on as a curiosity and insisted that the notes explain its doubtful attribution."
Chopin is pretty distinctive. I think the question would be if someone could identify it as “actual lost Chopin” vs “modern composer trying to imitate Chopin”.
The question is, if someone who is a grand master in identifying the “modern composer trying to imitate Chopin” knows so much that his own Chopin imitations become (statistically) undistinguishable from Chopin's own compositions for anyone else. (Except for experts who know every piece of Chopin and thus do not need to identify them by style, but can use “brute force”.)
AI will help/hinder this depending on individual views.
I think the only composer who sounds at all like Chopin is Scriabin.
Very likely. I'm nowhere near a professional nor am I giid at recognizing pieces/composers, but some people have such a deep understanding of yhe music from various composers, that they likely categorize it correctly.
See for example Nahre Sol [1] who plays the same piece in the style of different composers. In order to do that, you need to have a deep understanding of each composer's "quirks".
[1] https://youtu.be/SAtZawkqBG8
> See for example Nahre Sol [1]
Related to her, perhaps see her video "Is Chopin JAZZ?!":
* https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YcfRqsjQA-4
> [1] https://youtu.be/SAtZawkqBG8?si=ZObBERSyYD29w4y4
Meta: The "si=ZObBERSyYD29w4y4" parameter is tracking. When cutting-pasting you may wish to remove it.
> Obviously it's a bit late now, but it would have been an interesting experiment - to ask 100 "professors of music" to guess which composer out of [1] wrote this newly discovered piece.
They'd have guessed correctly. But you already know ahead of time that this newly discovered piece is not, say, juvenilia written by Scriabin specifically to imitate a Chopin waltz. And in that case, 100 professors would have guessed wrong because it would not have been the obvious answer.
Guessing composers based on sound/musical content alone is problematic for many reasons:
1. Common practice vs. composer's idiosyncrasies. Even separating Mozart's oeuvre from Michael Haydn's (Joseph's brother) has been non-trivial-- scholars have gotten it wrong over the centuries. Also-- IIRC there is a research paper about stylistic analyses leading to circular dependencies in the attribution of works of Josquin. E.g., A is Josquin because it sounds like Josquin's B, and B is Josquin because it sounds like Josquin's A...
2. Cross-contamination. Mozart knew Michael and his music, and was highly influenced by it. Compare the initial fugue at the beginning of Haydn's Requiem in C minor to Mozart's, plus the upward cascade of vocal entrances. Additionally, Schumann was influenced by Chopin, who was influenced by Liszt/Schumann/Mozart/Bach/etc. The problem gets worse as you go forward in history-- the next generation can take a composer's entire output and use it as their bible, which leads to...
3. Experts are also composers, and the most highly trained ones can write in the style of any composer whose works they have access to. E.g., Scriabin's set of Preludes was obviously written to be the sequel to Chopin's Op. 24 Preludes, (e.g., Chopin's no. 1 has a few fleeting quintuplets at the end, Scriabin's no. 1 is OMG all quintuplets phrased across barlines till the very end [engine_revving.wav]!). He understood Chopin's formal and textural affinities, could match his virtuosity at the keyboard, and fully immersed himself in Chopin's harmonic language.
I have no doubt if Scriabin had wanted to do a prank (or, more likely, an exercise) by writing a piece to fall convincingly into Chopin's oeuvre, he could have done so at any point in his career.
Plus...
4. Confirmation bias. I really want this to be a newly discovered waltz by Chopin![1]
These are the reasons an article like this mentions things like paper, ink and handwriting analysis.
1: Digression-- scholars also like to omit things that they feel don't reflect well on their favorite composer. For a fun example, see: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mozart_and_scatology
I gotta say that with Bach and Mozart, I feel like I could id their pieces consistently. They have a distinct pattern of symphony and motifs no other composers could mimic.
No famous composers would want to mimic. Plenty of unknowns can mimic.
Famous composers mimicked other composers plenty, or parodied other composers, copied them or played homages. Mimicked, yes, famous composers definitely did mimic other composers.
Prokofiev Symphony No. 1 is one of the more famous. It mimics Mozart and Haydn (obvious choices!)
Stravinsky’s Octet is another.
There are plenty of other examples. Those are just two of the more obvious ones. Bach did it. Beethoven did it. Mozart did it.
I guess the subtle distinction here is that these great composers probably did it because they simply could do it as one deliberate choice among many. Lesser composers may be stuck mimicing a few styles because they lack the skill to go beyond them.
But if some unpublished work mimics a certain style, I would assume that it is an exercise to gain a better understanding of that style.
Fritz Kreisler faked some old composers'---e.g. Vivaldi's---work, claiming to have discovered some unpublished manuscripts, but later revealed that they were his own compositions all along.
It was mostly a prank on the music industry, but nonetheless, mimicry of style was involved, and was enough to fool many people for years.
Not now that AIs can generate music that sounds like any composer.
Not any. If you are careful listener, you can hear musically nonsense (AI hallucinations) compositions. Of course it depends on genre.
https://archive.is/tjk6Q
Here is a gift link to the full article on the NY Times site. This should allow people to hear the music.
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/10/27/arts/music/chopin-waltz-d...
Is it possible to view the music clip from this? Am I missing something?
Here's a direct link if nothing else works,
https://vp.nyt.com/video/2024/10/15/127974_1_chopin-find-353... (.mp4)
This is either a true Chopin composition or there's some brilliant musician out there able to make compositions that sound like one.
A great execution too from Lang Lang.
It's funny now divisive Lang Lang is with classical people. The Reddit classical threads are full of people outraged that they had him play this and declare him the worst possible person in the world to debut a Chopin piece.
obviously AI
Thank you! I tried looking for a link in the HTML source for the archive.is page but couldn't find it. Maybe I just wasn't looking hard enough...
thanks
[dead]
As far as Chopin waltzes go, this is certainly not among his best. It almost feels unfinished. I wonder if he dashed it off quickly as a gift (suggested in one of the articles about it) rather than ever as an intent to have published.
Rhymes with the "new" Mozart composition rediscovered last month.
> While compiling the Köchel catalogue's newest edition – an authoritative list of all of Mozart's documented musical works – classical music researchers rediscovered the manuscript of the previously unknown piece from the Carl Ferdinand Becker collection in Leipzig's music library.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ganz_kleine_Nachtmusik#Redisco... (Sept 2024)
Yes, although they are either juvenilia or relatively small pieces that would not greatly change our understanding of the composer in question.
On the other hand there is another piece of music "recovered" this year not by rediscovery but by recomposition/restoration, and it's quite a substantial piece that should provide quite a useful new perspective on the composer[1][2].
[1] https://www.hyperion-records.co.uk/dc.asp?dc=D_CDA68460 [2] https://doi.org/10.1093/em/caad055
Is there a link to the complete music score somewhere?
On the very first screen via link. 80 seconds of music.
Thanks! https://www.themorgan.org/music/manuscript/452191/1
The link is under a paywall, though.
On the very first screen via the archive link https://archive.is/tjk6Q
The original is not paywalled for me!?
The original showed me a "We have updated our terms" pop-up over a cookie permission pop-up over a login overlay.
They offer limited number of free article
Seems pretty plausible to me. But as usual, there's a reason this piece wasnt published - it's not great.
Mediocre pieces by otherwise great creators have huge value at the meta level. They add to the evidence that greatness is more than just being born a genius and then just cranking out masterpieces.
Great point.
Vonnegut comes to mind in literature. In one of his novels, he even grades his other works A-F based on how good he thinks they were. His grades seem remarkably accurate, too, given my subjectivity as a reader, and his bias as the author.
Seems like the passage of time has a role in accentuating the genius of artists
> passage of time has a role in accentuating the genius of artists
That makes sense, I think genius is time evolving process.
One pattern, I have seen in high performers, is that they are competing only with themselves, using introspective feedback to continuously improve in an ego free way.
Yes. If you come to conclusions independently and those conclusions survive positively for hundreds of years, credit is due
Do folks generally still believe that the "masters" are/were born great, rather than being born with an advantage of some sort (whether by nature or environment) and then leveraging that to achieve mastery of some craft?
I don't know about born "great" but born with a different perspective seems reasonable. The perspective maybe nurtured by the environment. I think the environment could be a repetitive task or plenty of leisure time.
I believe luck with timing is the biggest determination.
1) I absolutely loved the execution by Lang Lang of it.
2) You're really looking at this in terms of modern music industry, which is nonsense, Chopin created music for his friends too and would send them the scripts.
Chopins posthumously published Nocturne in C# minor is a very popular piece to play/listen to. I also think there are several Debussy pieces he didn’t want published but are very popular now (maybe Reverie is one if my memory serves me)
Ok that's fair, I play it myself. Though it's also pretty weird in its middle section.
After decades of liking his work, I learned one of his little preludes recently and now he's just freddy the disconsolate schmaltzmeister to me. the discovery seems too late, nobody is going to be that maudlin again.
I was obsessed with Chopin for a while then went off his music for many years. I have had a resurgence in my interest in his music. Probably due to the Chopin competition rekindled it alongside with finally getting hold of a piano again.
The etudes are timeless
Maybe unintentionally, the word ‘little’ is quite dismissive. Perhaps you’re thinking of one of the three very minor Preludes which no one plays and not included in the 24 Preludes Opus 28.
If you do mean something like the 4th Prelude in E Minor for instance, should it be prefaced with a trigger warning that ‘you're about to hear music that is - effusively sad or full of self-pity; extremely sentimental or 'tearful; easily moved to tears; exciting to tears; excessively sentimental; weak and silly? (American Heritage Dictionary definition of maudlin).
Written much later, would you regard Rachmaninov's Vocalise (1915) or Barber's Adagio (1936) as 'maudlin' not to mention a vast number of other compositions that explore the kind of intensity of feeling that is expressed in the 4th Chopin Prelude. Given that the pianist Alfred Brendel considers ‘Chopin’s Preludes as the most glorious achievement in piano music after Beethoven and Schubert’ you might wonder why he takes a somewhat view from you. Could you be missing something?
Kirill Gerstein played it Friday in his Tschaikowsky concert in Dresden. I didn't like it that much, compared to Tschaikowsky's 1st and a Rachmaninoff. And the two modern pieces by Fagerlund and Lutosławski. Esp. Fagerlund blew away all the others.
Few slow tempo notes seems like i heard in some old indian drama hatim soundtrack
Sounds like a great excuse to remaster/remake Endless Sonata.
From now on we must be wondering if AI was used to assist a forgery whenever we "discover" old lost music.
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huh
I always assume these”long lost works” are fakes.
How do they know they aren’t?
I bought an old school building from The Broude Brothers sheet music archive.
https://imslp.org/wiki/Broude_Brothers
In addition to all the publishing activities they also acted as verification service. Apparently it was common for Conductors to modify compositions which over time drifted from the original.
My understanding was that the family collection of sheet music stretched back in time so they could verify the modifications.
The building had about 12,0000 square feet stacked floor to ceiling sheet music.
Much of the sheet music ended up at the library of congress. I can believe things could be both archived and lost.
Indeed, I'm a jazz musician. There's huge amounts of material created for the so called "big band" that exists only in someone's basement, or is learned about by word of mouth.