Musical notes from a small island blog 142 – Decoding Chopin

I have been trying to memorise a challenging section from Chopin’s stunningly beautiful Etude no. 3 in E major.

The only way I have been able to approach this is to make a fairly detailed analysis of the music to find out what is going on in what is clearly a complicated section of the piece.

To anyone who does not read music this will look like some sort of complex code – which of course is exactly what it is; a code that musicians are trained to understand and interpret.

The first thing I did was photocopy this section and cut it up into smaller sections to make the whole thing a little less daunting.

Realising that this section is a series of diminished 7ths was of course the easy bit with the two hands making mirror images of each other. I focused on the right hand part and blocked out each chord change as you can see in green – and a pattern emerged.

All the changes in diminished 7ths are a semitone apart except for one in the middle of the section which is a tone – however sometimes the semitone move is up and sometimes down; again a pattern emerged.

The final piece of the puzzle was to realise that sometimes each musical phrase goes up then down – and sometimes down then up; with an ABA structure for each 6 chord phrase. I ended up with my own ‘code’ for the structure as follows.

(2+2)  

u(2+2+2)

d2 / d2

d(2+2+2)  ut(2+2+2)

d2 / d2

d(2+2+2)  u(2+2+2)

d2 / d2 / d2 / d2

pattern down   pattern up

u = up semitone   d = down semitone ut = up a tone

This ‘code’ breaking put me in mind of the astonishing story of the code breakers at Bletchley Park during the second world war. If you ever have a bit of time on your hands and live near Milton Keynes I strongly recommend a visit – it is an extraordinary story.

There are many many recordings of this beautiful music but is it hard to find better than Lang Lang – enjoy.