Saturday, June 21, 2014
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.
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Ah, this is such a mean piece to throw at students--but so instructive, too! =D I'm going to give you two prompts to address on this one:
ReplyDelete1. Is there any way to make sense of the harmonic implications of the accompaniment? Believe it or not, it is MOSTLY triadic, with some very dissonant elaborating tones (particularly lower chromatic neighbors). Try analyzing the chords without the neighbors, and also pay attention to linear processes (such as suspensions that then resolve) and let's see what you notice.
2. Due to the harmonic wonkiness and dissonance of the accompaniment, I recommend that you isolate the melody, play and sing it, and see if your musical instincts lead you to apply solfege (and thus define the key) of each melodic statement. There have been recent arguments in pop/rock analysis that we theorists sometimes pay too much attention to the chords and not enough to the melody when determining "keys" of a piece--is something similar happening here? Does the melodic/bass counterpoint give us any useful clues to what may be a very early "rock" prelude by Chopin? ;)
1. Now that I look at it that way, I am able to find triadic harmony. It's similar to Chopin's E minor prelude, in that it is using linear motion to move between chords. Separating all the cluster, I found that the harmony moves from E min- G maj- D maj- B min- F# full dim7- D7- B half dim7- A min- then to the cadence in the last three bars
ReplyDelete2. Is there more? I thought I had figured out that Chopin had moved to keys that spell out the A minor triad.
Tell you what--you tell me the solfege syllables for each of the following short melodic statements, and then let's see if you can answer your own question #2 there: mm. 5-6, mm. 10-11, mm. 17-18, and mm. 20-21.
ReplyDelete