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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