Temperaments

[David W. Pitsch]

I know this Chopin piece.  All in 6ths.  I defy anyone to give an harmonic (or
inharmonic) analysis.

Les Smith wrote:

> On Fri, 30 Jan 1998, robert sadowski wrote:
>
> > Les,
> >      Just a thought - I've always felt that Debussy was the first "jazz
> > cat".  I guess I'll have to listen to more Chopin.
> >
>
> Hi, Bob. No 'bout a doubt it (!), Claude was an "original". It's just that
> he wasn't the original original. Chopin was. An important distinction to
> be made between Chopin and jazz however is this. The piano technique and
> harmonic innovations Chopin introduced never intruded on the important
> thing--the music itself and what it was saying. Or, to put it another way,
> the technique and the harmonic devices Chopin used were the servants of
> the music he wrote, they were never the music itself. In much of the pro-
> gressive jazz I hear today, I often get the feeling that the harmonic
> devices and the technique have become the music. Much of what I hear re-
> minds me of elaborate variations on the same up-tempo Czery etude. I
> never got that feeling when listening to the music of Brubeck, or Des-
> mond, or their likes, but of course, they went "mainstream" long ago.
> Further, as someone once pointed out, "Once you write down the notes,
> it's no longer jazz". (Of course Erroll Garner might have said that
> because he COULDN'T write down the notes!). :) Just how progressive
> was Chopin? Consider the following sketch.
> ============================================================================
> Chopin's back in the same smoke-filled club I mentioned in an earlier
> post. He's dressed in all black, including a beret pulled down low
> over his brow and he's smoking a hand-rolled cigarette of indeterminate
> origin. Once again he's seated at his high-end, state-of-the-art,
> Steinway D-sampled, digital piano and basking on the glow of a 15-watt,
> orange spotlight. Suddenly, you hear the drums and a soft high-hat
> lay down an insane beat and Chopin begins to play. It's the last move-
> ment from his sonata in Bb  minor--except for Liszt, a piece his
> contemporaries just couldn't understand. And no small wonder, because
> in it Chopin was anticipating what "progressive" jazz would be doing
> more that a century and a half later! Chopin once described the piece
> as "Night winds whispering over a graveyard". Today, a fan in the audi-
> ence would describe it as "totally radical" and "outta sight"!
>
> Listen. See for yourself.
>
> Les Smith
>
> PS For those of you out there wondering: yes, Chopin still has an
> acoustic piano, too. It's a concert grand and he keeps it at his
> condo on the beach.