7 ms·
A Chopin waltz unearthed after nearly 200 years
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- pvg 2y agohttps://archive.is/tjk6Q https://archive.is/tjk6Q
- dangsux 2y ago[dead]
- mouse_ 2y agothanks
- atribecalledqst 2y agoIs it possible to view the music clip from this? Am I missing something?
- perihelions 2y agoHere's a direct link if nothing else works, https://vp.nyt.com/video/2024/10/15/127974_1_chopin-find-35399_wg_1080p.mp4 https://vp.nyt.com/video/2024/10/15/127974_1_chopin-find-353... (.mp4)
- epolanski 2y agoThis 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.
- iamnotsamaltman 2y agoobviously AI
- ageitgey 2y agoIt'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.
- epolanski 2y ago[dead]
- BobAliceInATree 2y agoThey 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.
- atribecalledqst 2y agoThank 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...
- munchler 2y agoHere 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-discovery.html?unlocked_article_code=1.VU4.qMWU.WB258UGaseNu&smid=nytcore-ios-share&referringSource=articleShare https://www.nytimes.com/2024/10/27/arts/music/chopin-waltz-d...
- pama 2y agoIs there a link to the complete music score somewhere?
- marcel_hecko 2y agoOn the very first screen via link. 80 seconds of music.
- desdenova 2y agoThe link is under a paywall, though.
- marcel_hecko 2y agoOn the very first screen via the archive link https://archive.is/tjk6Q https://archive.is/tjk6Q The original is not paywalled for me!?
- melagonster 2y agoThey offer limited number of free article
- rzzzt 2y agoThe original showed me a "We have updated our terms" pop-up over a cookie permission pop-up over a login overlay.
- pama 2y agoThanks! https://www.themorgan.org/music/manuscript/452191/1 https://www.themorgan.org/music/manuscript/452191/1
- stevage 2y agoSeems pretty plausible to me. But as usual, there's a reason this piece wasnt published - it's not great.
- praptak 2y agoMediocre 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.
- mathgeek 2y agoDo 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?
- detourdog 2y agoI 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.
- stevage 2y agoI do. There was nothing particularly special about Chopin's environment, yet he was cranking out brilliant, innovative works by his early teens.
- mvkel 2y agoGreat 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
- Jabbles 2y agoI 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_classical_composers https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:19th-century_classica...
- eXpl0it3r 2y agoVery 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 https://youtu.be/SAtZawkqBG8
- throw0101d 2y ago> See for example Nahre Sol [1] Related to her, perhaps see her video "Is Chopin JAZZ?!": * https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YcfRqsjQA-4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YcfRqsjQA-4 > [1] https://youtu.be/SAtZawkqBG8?si=ZObBERSyYD29w4y4 https://youtu.be/SAtZawkqBG8?si=ZObBERSyYD29w4y4 Meta: The "si=ZObBERSyYD29w4y4" parameter is tracking. When cutting-pasting you may wish to remove it.
- perihelions 2y agoThis is topical: https://www.thepianofiles.com/the-valse-melancolique/ https://www.thepianofiles.com/the-valse-melancolique/ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_Mayer_(composer) 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."
- mathgeek 2y agoSounds like a great excuse to remaster/remake Endless Sonata.
- benjamaan 2y ago[flagged]
- andrewstuart 2y agoI always assume these”long lost works” are fakes. How do they know they aren’t?
- detourdog 2y agoI bought an old school building from The Broude Brothers sheet music archive. https://imslp.org/wiki/Broude_Brothers 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.
- analog31 2y agoIndeed, 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.
- Bud 2y ago[dead]
- lioeters 2y agoRhymes 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#Rediscovery https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ganz_kleine_Nachtmusik#Redisco... (Sept 2024)
- Aidevah 2y agoYes, 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 https://www.hyperion-records.co.uk/dc.asp?dc=D_CDA68460 [2] https://doi.org/10.1093/em/caad055 https://doi.org/10.1093/em/caad055
- 43natashalog 2y agohuh
- G_o_D 2y agoFew slow tempo notes seems like i heard in some old indian drama hatim soundtrack
- rurban 2y agoKirill 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.
- visarga 2y agoFrom now on we must be wondering if AI was used to assist a forgery whenever we "discover" old lost music.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- plunderer 2y agohttps://www.nytimes.com/2024/10/27/arts/music/chopin-waltz-discovery.html?unlocked_article_code=1.VU4.qMWU.WB258UGaseNu&smid=nytcore-ios-share&referringSource=articleShare https://www.nytimes.com/2024/10/27/arts/music/chopin-waltz-d... https://vp.nyt.com/video/2024/10/15/127974_1_chopin-find-35399_wg_1080p.mp4 https://vp.nyt.com/video/2024/10/15/127974_1_chopin-find-353... https://archive.is/tjk6Q https://archive.is/tjk6Q
- jb1991 2y agoAs 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.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- brilee 2y agoI transcribed the score, available here: https://www.moderndescartes.com/essays/chopin_waltz_posthumous/ https://www.moderndescartes.com/essays/chopin_waltz_posthumo...
- brilee 2y agoeditor'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 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=si5aT6FDPZ0)'s ephemeral brilliance and [Waltz Op 34 no. 2](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PGdpRmL2XUc)'s 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 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.
- pama 2y agoThank you for the transcription. Might I suggest you add Chopin’s fingering where available in the original?
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- odyssey7 2y agoThis 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?
- gdevic 2y agoAgree. Lang Lang is all about theatrics, also.
- tzs 2y ago> 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?
- alkyon 2y agoThis 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.
- tkgally 2y ago> 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.
- keeganpoppen 2y agoawesome-- thanks for the rec!
- SimianLogic 2y agoI suspect a lot of new works by famous artists are going to turn up in the age of generative AI
- Upvoter33 2y agoIf this is AI generated, we are in for some real treats in the coming years. I want Beethoven's tenth!
- shiroiushi 2y agoI can think of a few rock bands where I'd like to hear more music from certain eras of their work.
- nhlx2 2y agoNow for a solo classical guitar transcription…
- cvoss 2y agoI'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?
- system2 2y agoImagine this being Ai generated. We can't even believe anything anymore.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- eleveriven 2y agoChopin's relatively limited output makes each new discovery even more significant! And I think Lang Lang's performance adds a beautiful depth to this piece
- Obscurity4340 2y agoHow are all these new unearthed pieces being randomly discovered recently. There was just a new Mozart piece recently also
- anjc 2y agoSeems more like a typical Chopin mazurka than a waltz
- greenimpala 2y agoA really incredible find! It's a massive shame it was plugged with Steinway and Lang Lang, but that's the world we live in.
- renecito 2y agoso many new creatives discoveries lately, make me think if is not just fancy forgery using latest AI technologies.