No. 2 A minor

Next of the Chopin preludes is No. 2, which is in A minor. Sort of.

As you can see by the opening measures, this decidedly not A minor.

However, when we look at the last line, particularly the last three bars, we have E major going to B major going back to E major, then to E dominant 7, finally ending on A minor. So, in the last few bars, we have the chords V - V/V - V - V7 - I in the key of A minor. So, what's the deal? What key were we in up until that point? I tried looking at the harmonies, but that led to some difficulties. To be honest, I had a difficult time interpreting the harmonies that Chopin used. I could not see the logic behind his chord choices, not to say that there isn't one, it's just that as of now, I do not understand it. But, when looking at the melody, I was able to extract something.

I think it's important to look at the last time the melody shows up first, because at this point, the harmony is undoubtedly in A minor, and removes any ambiguity as to what the melody is in. So, looking at the melody from the third and fourth bars from the end, we have D-F-E-D-A-B. Which, when changed to solfege syllables in reference to A minor, are Fa-Le-Sol-Fa-Do-Re. This motive pops up three other times throughout the piece.

So, with the last iteration of the motive, it's set in A minor. If we go to the first time it shows up, we have a line very similar, except with one minor alteration.

Instead of having an F natural, we now have an F#. This turns the A minor motive into an A major motive.

The second time that the motive appears, it's been transposed to E major.

When we look at the third time that the melody appears, we see that it is in C major. So, when looking at all the keys that Chopin goes through in the melody, we have A major-E major-C major-A minor. A-E-C-A. Those are pretty interesting key choices. When you order the keys by stacking the thirds, you get A-C-E. I don't know about you, but to me, that looks like Chopin just spelled out an A minor triad with the keys he traveled through in the melody. Which if you ask me, is a pretty clever thing to do.

No. 1 C major

Before I began my work on the first piece in Chopin's collection of preludes, the worry of making mistakes, or only seeing surface details came to mind. When I first looked at the score, my initial goal was to find something significant in the music. When nothing jumped out, I decided to take a step back, and simply break down what I could (after all, this is a LEARNING experience. I should expect to make mistakes and miss things), and that is when I started making actual discoveries. So, let us begin our tour of the Chopin preludes.

One of the first things I attempted was to label chords. Things went smoothly. That is until I hit the fourth and fifth measures of the piece.

It was as this point that I felt the need to segment parts off. The first set of triplet sixteenth notes would make up one section, the last sixteenth note, and then the rest would be it's own.

Now, the reason I segmented the green is because when I began labeling chords, I initially thought that the last note was something extra, a non-harmonic tone. But, as I looked at what led to these "non-harmonic tones" I saw that the two notes were always the same, and approached the same. Almost as if parallel octaves.

Without failure, the sets of notes mimic each other, up until the last 6 measures, where the pattern changes. Now, what exactly does the mean for interpreting the harmonies? Well, these act as points of resolution, and through repetition, create an expectation. So, now chords are going to be interpreted retroactively.

So, if we interpret as the Gs not going to a non-harmonic tone, but rather the C major chord moving to the relative, A minor, we have a new harmonic motion happening above the bass line. Now, if we understand that the bass line as being independent from the rest of the piece, we are now have an explanation for measures such as this...

where we have an F+ leading to D minor over top of F major. This separation of harmonies has led to interesting cadences in the music, such as where in the bass line, we have a cadential 6/4 going to a V7, followed by a tonic chord pedal with the occasional F in the line to color things up, and the last few measures creating a plagal cadence with the upper voice rocking back and forth between F major, and C major.