Aside from Bach, Chopin is my favorite dead white European male composer. He isn’t as overtly “jazzy” as Debussy or Ravel, but his music shares many of the qualities of jazz that I like: miniature-scale forms densely packed with rhythmic and harmonic excitement, in the service of organic-sounding melodies. Chopin’s Nocture Op 9 No 1 in B-flat Minor is particularly hip.
All this metrical instability is easier to parse over a steady beat, so I made this remix:
I thought that a “nocturne” was supposed to evoke the night, or dreams or something, but no, it just means “a piece of music meant to be played at night,” like in a salon setting.
Here’s my MIDI visualization of Arthur Rubinstein’s recording.
Chopin destabilizes its meter right in the first bar, because it starts on beat three rather than beat one where you’d expect. As a result, it takes me several bars to start hearing the melody as lining up with the bar lines. If I had to guess, I’d put the downbeat on the third note of the piece, but no, that note falls on beat five. The actual first downbeat is where the left hand arpeggios begin.
Beyond their overall metrical instability, the opening four bars have some startlingly weird rhythms at the local level too. In the third measure, there’s an 11:3 tuplet, eleven notes in the space of three beats. The fourth measure has a 22:6 tuplet, twenty-two bars in the space of six beats. These two tuplets blend together when you hear them into a 33:9 “mega-tuplet.” That is bananas! But when you hear it, there’s more musical logic than may be apparent on the page.
The mega-tuplet is a mutation of the melody in the first two measures. You can see that the 11-tuplet starts with the same three notes as the melody in measure one. The beginning of measure five is the same as the beginning of measure three. In between, Chopin has taken the melody from the first two bars and dressed it up with a lot of chromatic embellishment. He makes the tuplets by cramming all the extra notes into the same number of beats as the un-embellished melody.
In measure six, things settle down noticeably, as the key changes to relative D-flat major. The mood stays wistful and mysterious, though, thanks to the Gbm6 chords from parallel D-flat minor.
At measure 10, Chopin reprises the opening B-flat minor part, but with some added harmonic excitement. In measure 14, he lifts up to E-flat minor, then quickly over to F, and back to B-flat minor. In measure 18, there’s an unexpected slide up to B major. It’s like an augmented sixth chord preceded by its dominant, very hip.
In measure 20 in the second D-flat major section, Chopin uses a weird chord that I hear as a Dbm(#11) coming from the D-flat diminished scale. I don’t know whether Chopin ever heard the blues, but this chord sounds bluesy.
In measure 24, there’s another delightful harmonic surprise: the melody falls a half-step from F to E at the same time that the key center shifts up a half-step from D-flat to D. That is so fresh!
In measure 36, the key moves to E-flat minor again, but this time it’s functioning locally as the ii chord in D-flat, rather than the iv chord in B-flat minor. There’s a beautiful lift up to A-flat major/D-flat Lydian in measure 39.
Then, in measures 44-51, Chopin does something magnificently strange and unexpected: he sits on a static Db7 chord for about half a minute. You can see the bassline in the MIDI, it’s as unvarying as an arpeggiated synth part. Apparently Chopin is quoting here from a Polish folk song called “Chmiel.”
Of course, this is only weird by Western European standards. It’s comfortingly familiar to me as a listener to rock, jazz, funk and other Afrodiasporic musics. Jacob Gran argues that this whole section is a very long V/IV chord, but there isn’t a IV chord until ten measures after this ends. To be fair, Gran says that it’s a deceptive cadence that only really resolves when we get to the B-flat minor section in measure 63. But that is definitely not how I hear it. Not everything has to be a cadence! It makes more sense to me as a modal drone, in keeping with the folk music feel.
In measures 52 to 59, Chopin continues the same ideas as he used in the Mixolydian passage, but this time in plain-vanilla D-flat major. In measure 60, he darkens the mood with some A major chords, the bVI chord in parallel D-flat minor. It’s super cinematic.
That last A chord resolves uneasily up to B-flat minor for the closing section. I guess you could hear it as a rootless voicing of F7#5?
In measure 72, there’s another B chord functioning as an augmented sixth, but briefly tonicized by F#7. Then in measures 73 and 74, there are B7 chords that work more as tritone substitutes. At the very end, there’s a Picardy third, a key change to parallel B-flat major. But Chopin calls back to B-flat minor when he puts a G-flat on top of the second to last Bb chord.
Jacob Gran says we should be hearing this ending as a V chord that resolves to E-flat major at the beginning of Nocturne Op 9 No 2. That piece is more famous than this one, but it’s much less hip.
I diagrammed out all of the harmony in flowchart form:
The diagram shows the scale each chord is generated from, with its tonic at the 12 o’clock position in the circle. Two-headed arrows mean that the chords occur in both orders. You can generate your own Chopin-Nocturne-esque chord progressions just by picking any chord and following the arrows. Listening to Chopin is delightful, but his main value in my musical life is as a source of fresh new ideas.