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 the career of a world-famous New Yorker?
> Maybe they could have instead worked with some local cultural organization in Poland, which could have made the debut a significant local cultural thing?
I suppose the NYTimes could not be bothered to look for someone to work with in Poland or Europe generally (France would be another option), which is, indeed, a shame. In my home town Kraków we have a wonderful chamber music collective which performs music from this very period on historical piano fortes, so very much the kind of instruments Chopin would play on himself. I contacted them immediately after reading this article and before your comment appeared. I am hopeful we will hear the piece performed by them very soon!
Lang Lang doesn't need further promotion, but still his showmanship is really not in the spirit of Chopin's muisc.
I would like to hear an interpretation of it by someone who won International Chopin Competition in Warsaw in the recent years (like Blechacz or Liu for instance).
I thought that waltzes in classical music were meant to be danced to. Listening to the performance from the Times article, I'm not sure how one would dance to this. I'm not hearing anything that tells me which notes I should be syncing movement to.
What makes it a waltz instead of some other form that happens to be in 3/4 time?
Chopin is associated with waltzes and mazurkas, both of which are dance forms in triple meter.
A mazurka will emphasize either its measures’ second beats or third beats. This might be kind of difficult to identify in Lang Lang’s interpretation, but a waltz differs from a mazurka by having a more steady tempo and by placing the emphasis on the first beat of each measure, usually matching what you were probably expecting.
I’m not sure how many of Chopin’s dance-form pieces were meant for actual dancing, but it is fairly common for composers to write according to stylistic elements of a dance form without intending the work for an actual dance.
I agree w/ the first part: this is distinctly Chopin and beautiful.
Not sure why a critique of the NYT is needed; they wrote a great article and had a great performer perform it. Other "cultural organizations" can do what they wish and will not be harmed by this article (and indeed, may be helped, due to the word getting out).
I agree, maybe a more conservative performer than Lang Lang would've been good to hear the first run from. Love Lang Lang but he's a bit of an 'innovator' w/ the romantics.
I agree with you about this piece of music versus other found pieces. It is a sophisticated, hauntingly beautiful waltz...and distinctively Chopin in its nuanced romanticism.
My "edition" is definitely not an [urtext](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Urtext_edition). I made minor simplifications to the descending line at measure 8, following Lang-Lang's performance (which I believe is the correct decision - the arpeggiated diminished chord F-D-B-G#-F-D sounds better without any gaps, compared to what's in the scan, B-F-B-G#-F-D.), and added some phrasing where I thought it was obvious and perhaps went missing over the ages from the raw scan. The ornamentation in measure 20 was probably modified by Lang-Lang, but I think it fits the piece better than a plain mordant, so I notated it as played.
If I were to judge based purely on the music - minus all of the contextual clues like paper, ink, backstory - the probability of it being fake is ~10%. I say this only because it is shockingly similar to 34-2 in harmonic and stylistic elements, which is exactly the kind of thing an AI trained on a not-big-enough dataset would do. While AI utterly fails at longer pieces, it could plausibly render a coherent 24-measure piece in the style of Chopin, and DeepMind could plausibly be working in stealth on a really good music-composition AI. But in the end, the piece is too tightly composed, and I trust NYT's decision to trust the historians who are familiar with evaluating such artifacts.
I've played many Chopin waltzes in my time, and have heard the full collection of 19 (18?) known waltzes many times. As everyone is saying, it sounds very much like Chopin.
However, the article notes that it's unusually short, while still claiming it's complete. But beyond being short, to my ear it is simply thematically incomplete. It ends exactly at the moment that my ear expects the second theme, the B of an ABA form, to be introduced, possibly, though not necessarily in a new key. Here, we just have A twice. Where's the rest of it? Even the famously brief "Minute" waltz has room for an ABA form. It's essential for closure that we at least travel somewhere and probably come back again. This new one doesn't go anywhere, but simply ends. It ends lamely as such, but its ending would be perfectly appropriate as a transitional moment, leading to the next part.
Anyone else disagree with the experts and think this waltz is incomplete?
That was my reaction, too. I play piano, but Chopin has always been too hard for me, so I can’t offer any insights into how the notes on the page are or are not typical of Chopin. But I have listened to many recordings of Chopin by various pianists, and this short piece does indeed sound like Chopin to me.
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.
If you write a piece that "plays well", a player can play it well — and give a more compelling performance. What makes a piece "play well" isn't necessarily that it be "easy"; more that it be natural and idiomatic for the instrument... which will in turn be easy.
If you write a piece that a player struggles to play, that will sometimes come through via a muddled and strained performance. There are famous exceptions that prove the rule on this, such as the extremely high register opening bassoon passage from Rite of Spring through which Stravinsky intended to convey strain, or the trumpet squeals of Ray Nance at the end of many Ellington arrangements.
Generally, though, you want the players to be able to play your piece well. And "err on the easy side" is an effective way to do that, especially when writing for instruments you aren't personally an expert with.
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.
> As practice gradually moved away from this insular model, and standing, virtuoso quartets replaced ad hoc groups as the chief vehicles of chamber music performance, Beethoven’s compositions became increasingly experimental (and daunting). Legend has it that when Ignaz Schuppanzigh—a well-known Viennese violinist and Beethoven supporter—complained about a particularly difficult passage in one of the Op. 59 quartets, the master retorted, “Do you suppose I am thinking about your wretched fiddle when the spirit moves me?”
maybe I don't use the words right, but go to each of their wikipedia pages and search for the word "court". You will see that Bach, Mozart, and Beethoven depended much more heavily on the favor of the various noble courts, while Chopin and the later Brahms were more commercial (not in a bad way, just in a historical way)
Another thing to remember is that the piano was very much an instrument being developed during Mozart and Beethoven's time. There's a reason why most of Beethoven's sonatas don't utilize the uppermost and lowermost part of the modern piano: he didn't have those keys then.
So, in a sense, these composers weren't writing for the same instrument.
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.
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".
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.
> 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.
Huh? Bach was the greatest recycler of all time. His keyboard suites were all styled after popular dances in Europe: the Allemande, the sarabande, courante and gigue. He just one upped them to a whole new level.
If you listen to Haydn's sonatas, do you feel the resemblance of Mozart's? Well, because Haydn taught both Mozart and Beethoven.
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.
They also have to forge the found document, or be in cahoots with someone that can do it. And have access to surreptitiously insert it into the document collection it was found in.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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].
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 the career of a world-famous New Yorker?
Thank you for this comment.
> Maybe they could have instead worked with some local cultural organization in Poland, which could have made the debut a significant local cultural thing?
I suppose the NYTimes could not be bothered to look for someone to work with in Poland or Europe generally (France would be another option), which is, indeed, a shame. In my home town Kraków we have a wonderful chamber music collective which performs music from this very period on historical piano fortes, so very much the kind of instruments Chopin would play on himself. I contacted them immediately after reading this article and before your comment appeared. I am hopeful we will hear the piece performed by them very soon!
Thanks ! Fantastic ! Please share it here when ready !
Lang Lang doesn't need further promotion, but still his showmanship is really not in the spirit of Chopin's muisc.
I would like to hear an interpretation of it by someone who won International Chopin Competition in Warsaw in the recent years (like Blechacz or Liu for instance).
> This is genuinely a good waltz
I thought that waltzes in classical music were meant to be danced to. Listening to the performance from the Times article, I'm not sure how one would dance to this. I'm not hearing anything that tells me which notes I should be syncing movement to.
What makes it a waltz instead of some other form that happens to be in 3/4 time?
Chopin is associated with waltzes and mazurkas, both of which are dance forms in triple meter.
A mazurka will emphasize either its measures’ second beats or third beats. This might be kind of difficult to identify in Lang Lang’s interpretation, but a waltz differs from a mazurka by having a more steady tempo and by placing the emphasis on the first beat of each measure, usually matching what you were probably expecting.
I’m not sure how many of Chopin’s dance-form pieces were meant for actual dancing, but it is fairly common for composers to write according to stylistic elements of a dance form without intending the work for an actual dance.
Lang Lang's rubato in the linked performance would make it much harder to dance to
I was going to write ‚Mazurek not mazurka’ but it seems official english name is a wrong noun declination…
This pianist is really manipulating the tempo.
I agree w/ the first part: this is distinctly Chopin and beautiful.
Not sure why a critique of the NYT is needed; they wrote a great article and had a great performer perform it. Other "cultural organizations" can do what they wish and will not be harmed by this article (and indeed, may be helped, due to the word getting out).
I agree, maybe a more conservative performer than Lang Lang would've been good to hear the first run from. Love Lang Lang but he's a bit of an 'innovator' w/ the romantics.
Agree. Lang Lang is all about theatrics, also.
I agree with you about this piece of music versus other found pieces. It is a sophisticated, hauntingly beautiful waltz...and distinctively Chopin in its nuanced romanticism.
I transcribed the score, available here:
https://www.moderndescartes.com/essays/chopin_waltz_posthumo...
editor's notes:
Very, very obviously a Chopin Waltz. The chord choices, usage of triplets/mordants, and the suspended pedal tones is characteristic. It's a mix of [Prelude Op 28 no 11](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=si5aT6FDPZ0)'s ephemeral brilliance and [Waltz Op 34 no. 2](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PGdpRmL2XUc)'s lilting, moody style.
My "edition" is definitely not an [urtext](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Urtext_edition). I made minor simplifications to the descending line at measure 8, following Lang-Lang's performance (which I believe is the correct decision - the arpeggiated diminished chord F-D-B-G#-F-D sounds better without any gaps, compared to what's in the scan, B-F-B-G#-F-D.), and added some phrasing where I thought it was obvious and perhaps went missing over the ages from the raw scan. The ornamentation in measure 20 was probably modified by Lang-Lang, but I think it fits the piece better than a plain mordant, so I notated it as played.
If I were to judge based purely on the music - minus all of the contextual clues like paper, ink, backstory - the probability of it being fake is ~10%. I say this only because it is shockingly similar to 34-2 in harmonic and stylistic elements, which is exactly the kind of thing an AI trained on a not-big-enough dataset would do. While AI utterly fails at longer pieces, it could plausibly render a coherent 24-measure piece in the style of Chopin, and DeepMind could plausibly be working in stealth on a really good music-composition AI. But in the end, the piece is too tightly composed, and I trust NYT's decision to trust the historians who are familiar with evaluating such artifacts.
Fantastic! Thanks so much!
Thank you for the transcription. Might I suggest you add Chopin’s fingering where available in the original?
added!
I've played many Chopin waltzes in my time, and have heard the full collection of 19 (18?) known waltzes many times. As everyone is saying, it sounds very much like Chopin.
However, the article notes that it's unusually short, while still claiming it's complete. But beyond being short, to my ear it is simply thematically incomplete. It ends exactly at the moment that my ear expects the second theme, the B of an ABA form, to be introduced, possibly, though not necessarily in a new key. Here, we just have A twice. Where's the rest of it? Even the famously brief "Minute" waltz has room for an ABA form. It's essential for closure that we at least travel somewhere and probably come back again. This new one doesn't go anywhere, but simply ends. It ends lamely as such, but its ending would be perfectly appropriate as a transitional moment, leading to the next part.
Anyone else disagree with the experts and think this waltz is incomplete?
This is not about handwriting, the key thing is that this really sounds like Chopin - a true signature is there even if not written by hand.
I can't recommend more Alan Walker's "Fryderyk Chopin: A Life and Times", which I happen to be reading now.
> this really sounds like Chopin
That was my reaction, too. I play piano, but Chopin has always been too hard for me, so I can’t offer any insights into how the notes on the page are or are not typical of Chopin. But I have listened to many recordings of Chopin by various pianists, and this short piece does indeed sound like Chopin to me.
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.
If you write a piece that "plays well", a player can play it well — and give a more compelling performance. What makes a piece "play well" isn't necessarily that it be "easy"; more that it be natural and idiomatic for the instrument... which will in turn be easy.
If you write a piece that a player struggles to play, that will sometimes come through via a muddled and strained performance. There are famous exceptions that prove the rule on this, such as the extremely high register opening bassoon passage from Rite of Spring through which Stravinsky intended to convey strain, or the trumpet squeals of Ray Nance at the end of many Ellington arrangements.
Generally, though, you want the players to be able to play your piece well. And "err on the easy side" is an effective way to do that, especially when writing for instruments you aren't personally an expert with.
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.
Heh to quote Beethoven (from: https://brooklynrail.org/2007/07/music/third-party-beethoven...):
> As practice gradually moved away from this insular model, and standing, virtuoso quartets replaced ad hoc groups as the chief vehicles of chamber music performance, Beethoven’s compositions became increasingly experimental (and daunting). Legend has it that when Ignaz Schuppanzigh—a well-known Viennese violinist and Beethoven supporter—complained about a particularly difficult passage in one of the Op. 59 quartets, the master retorted, “Do you suppose I am thinking about your wretched fiddle when the spirit moves me?”
maybe I don't use the words right, but go to each of their wikipedia pages and search for the word "court". You will see that Bach, Mozart, and Beethoven depended much more heavily on the favor of the various noble courts, while Chopin and the later Brahms were more commercial (not in a bad way, just in a historical way)
Another thing to remember is that the piano was very much an instrument being developed during Mozart and Beethoven's time. There's a reason why most of Beethoven's sonatas don't utilize the uppermost and lowermost part of the modern piano: he didn't have those keys then.
So, in a sense, these composers weren't writing for the same instrument.
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. :)
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.)
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
Huh? Bach was the greatest recycler of all time. His keyboard suites were all styled after popular dances in Europe: the Allemande, the sarabande, courante and gigue. He just one upped them to a whole new level.
If you listen to Haydn's sonatas, do you feel the resemblance of Mozart's? Well, because Haydn taught both Mozart and Beethoven.
Nothing is new under the sun, my friend.
I think the only composer who sounds at all like Chopin is Scriabin.
Agreed, though I'm sure there were more obscure composers who imitated Chopin.
Scriabin's op. 11 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/24_Preludes%2C_Op._11_%28Scria... particularly shows Chopin's influence. I have to admit I like these Scriabin preludes more than Chopin's work.
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.
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.
I suspect a lot of new works by famous artists are going to turn up in the age of generative AI
If this is AI generated, we are in for some real treats in the coming years. I want Beethoven's tenth!
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.
They also have to forge the found document, or be in cahoots with someone that can do it. And have access to surreptitiously insert it into the document collection it was found in.
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
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.
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 do. There was nothing particularly special about Chopin's environment, yet he was cranking out brilliant, innovative works by his early teens.
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.
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
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
Have you tried the new Chopin podcast by Ben Laude?
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?
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
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
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.
Sounds like a great excuse to remaster/remake Endless Sonata.
Now for a solo classical guitar transcription…
Few slow tempo notes seems like i heard in some old indian drama hatim soundtrack
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.
From now on we must be wondering if AI was used to assist a forgery whenever we "discover" old lost music.