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I started some chopin preludes, just to relax a little, instead of doing more serious pieces.

I have a question with opus 28, No 20. In measure Five, there is a weird notation where the octave is quickly followed by another two notes. Help- why isn't this a crushed note or grace note?

I don't have the score in front of me, but perhaps it is meant to be played simultaneously? Sometimes when there's a lot of notes in one place they print some of the notes next to another set of notes but they are all on the same beat. Just guessing here.

Chopin's preludes aren't for relaxing. They're short but they're demanding. Over half of them are grade 8 and above. Even the least difficult of them deserves your most conscientious effort.

What I meant are that the ones I chose aren't technically demanding, but in my opinion, more pretty and touching than A maiden's prayer or something like that song./piece

I looked up the sheet music and am not following your question. Perhaps I am mistaken. Or maybe the site I looked at has it mixed up. Is it in c Minor (Eb deleted)? http://ccrma.stanford.edu/~craig/keyscape/chopin-op28no20/index.html

Sean :

I don't understand your question either, and your explanation doesn't help. In measure 5, on the third beat, there is an octave (D) with an internal voice, a dotted eighth (Ab) followed by a sixteenth (F#). If that's what you're refering to, then the Ab is played with the octave notes D, and the F# is played in time, just a sixteenth-note before the next chord. Meanwhile, you hold the octave D for the full third beat.

It's exactly the same timing that you have in the first measure in the RH on beat 3: Eb/G played on the beat, and the F/D played one-sixteenth-note before beat four, all the while holding the G/Bnatural for the full beat. In fact, this rhythmic pattern occurs in every measure. It's just straightforward "musical arithmetic".

If that doesn't answer your question, please clarify.

Regards,

IT is this piece http://www.sheetmusicarchive.net/compositions_b/pre28_20.pdf

But mine seems to be a simplified version also!? It doesn't have Four finger chords, but three. Hmm.

Yes, it is measure five in that.

Sean,

That's the same version I have and it's not simplified. The description of how to play the 5th measure is precisely as BruceD described it.

Perhaps you could be clearer about what your problem seems to be.

Ed

Sean :

epf (Ed) is right: that's the "original" version of this Prelude. What are you saying that there are no "four finger chords" in this piece? The first line of the right hand is almost nothing but four-note chords, with a couple of five-note chords thrown in for good measure!

Now, in measure five, what is the problem?

Regards,

I think my question is (and maybe Sean's too), why is measure 5 and measure 3 written differently ("inner voice" versus "not inner voice" ?), if they actually mean the same?

The way measure 5 is written, it gives the impression that the first note of the "inner voice" (A) should be played ahead of the octave (D). Come to think of it, Scriabin does this a lot, and in his case, the notes should be played separately.

Thank you newport for posting this. I haven't tried Scriabin yet. I hadn't looked at it that way. I don't understand your thought about measure 3.

In measure 5 the D octave and A appear to line up to me (maybe I need my eyes checked.) I think I'd need a magnifying glass to tell that they are not perfectly aligned. You may be overlooking the fact that the A is a dotted eighth because it is within the staff on the same space as the A and the stem is there.
BruceD gave a great explanation of the rhythm.

In all "conventional" music, that is, music that is not extremely avant-garde and that doesn't resort to unusual writing techniques, one relies solely on the counting out of beats within measures to determine where/when notes should be played. In this instance, the D octave and the Ab within the octave come exactly on the third beat, no matter how they might be "lined up" in your particular copy of the score. The Ab is definitely not played before the beat, ahead of the D's.

If you think about it, there is no other way to notate this except as it has been done. How else could you show a dotted eighth-note (Ab) followed by a sixteenth-note (F#), given that the dotted eighth-note occurs at the same time as the quarter-note octave? You could not join the Ab to the octave stems (quarter notes) because that would suggest that the Ab is then a dotted quarter! In print, the dotted-eighth Ab has to be separated from the D octaves, because the D octaves have a single stem, meaning they are quarter-notes.

If you don't trust my long-winded attempt at explaining this, listen to any recording of the work and you'll hear that this measure is to be played as I have tried to describe it.

Regards,

Actually, measure three is written differently because the dotted-eighth plus sixteenth are the top voice; they don't have to be separated from the quarter-note stem that joins the two quarter notes (Ab and C). But they are written exactly the same way as the inner voice in measure five: a dotted-eighth plus a sixteenth joined together in the same manner with the single 'bar' (sometimes called flag) for the eighth-note and the double 'bar' (flag) for the sixteenth note.

Regards,

BruceD .. you are absolutely right. Thank you.

Actually this one is not that difficult and should be quite obvious to me. Sorry for the confusion.

BTW, what I said about Scriabin's music score should be a different story (e.g., his sonata no.3). It's just impossibly complicated for me .

Sean,

Let's try again. Here's measure 5:

I've circled in red the portion that I think is what you are talking about. You would play all three notes together as if it were a single chord. Note, however, that the Ab has a shorter duration (dotted 8th instead of quarter) and, thus will "expire" sooner. As soon as it does, play the F# while continuing to hold down the D octave. The two notes together (Ab + F#) have the same duration as the octave D that is being played.

This is simply how one notates the idea of two voices. The fact that the stems go up for one voice and down for the other helps to clarify the idea of two voices.

This is precisely what BruceD was telling you. I'm just adding the graphic to help make it clear(er).

Ed

It's interesting that you mention "grace note,"
because the F# essentially functions like
a grace before the final D G D chord in
the r.h. This in fact could have been
written instead as a grace on the final chord--
was that actually your question?

Note that in playing there is great freedom
in time as to how you actually play that F#.
This in fact may be why it's written as a 16th
rather than as a grace. A standard grace
would imply less freedom in time, that is,
just your run-of-the-mill "crushed" grace note.
But here, being part of a quasi-4-16th
note figure, this fairly screams at the
player: "this is a key passage, employ
rubato!" The ubiquitous 4-16th note
figures in Chopin's music almost always imply
heavy rubato.