[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:19th-century_classica...
A fun game I like to play myself is "guess the composer". I think I shocked my friend the most when I watched West World with him and after seeing the intro only once I guessed correctly that it was the same composer as the Game of Thrones intro.
Sometimes I second guess myself too much between late Mozart and early Beethoven but I think most the composers have their own hallmarks.
Chopin in particular was quite idiosyncratic because his piano writing was fairly innovative. He came up with a lot of new ways to play the piano and his polish influences and focus on salon music is very distinct
“Bruce Adolphe re-writes a familiar tune in the style of a classical composer … [someone calls in and] listens to Bruce play his Piano Puzzler™. They then try to do two things: name the hidden tune, and name the composer whose style Bruce is mimicking.”
Of course, you can play along at home as you listen.
[0] https://www.npr.org/podcasts/381443927/performance-today-s-p...
Reminded me that nowadays I listen to less classical music than I did so a modification of the game I enjoy playing with myself is "guess the influencing composer". For example I hear so much Prokofiev influence via harmonic language in the early Harry Potter movies and I was listening to Rachmaninoff the other day and thought "oh gosh that reminds me a lot of Kingdom Hearts" and did a quick check and lo and behold Yoko Shimomura cites Rach as a major inspiration. Similarly I often hear shimmers of Ravel in Masashi Hamauzu
(Am pianist, too.)
I bow to your superior knowledge, just want to add for the poor shlubs who are even dumber than me:
Chopin was not simply a composer, but a virtuoso piano player, and i guess because of that he wrote what he wrote for the piano; in contrast to say Mozart who performed at the piano but mostly composed for orchestras, etc.
And the periods of time were different wrt, when Chopin was active, Mozart, Beethoven et al's music innovations already existed, along with larger audiences to play for, which created Chopin's niche
or something like that, i'm not a music guy
Chopin is unusual in that he wrote almost exclusively for the piano.
> As practice gradually moved away from this insular model, and standing, virtuoso quartets replaced ad hoc groups as the chief vehicles of chamber music performance, Beethoven’s compositions became increasingly experimental (and daunting). Legend has it that when Ignaz Schuppanzigh—a well-known Viennese violinist and Beethoven supporter—complained about a particularly difficult passage in one of the Op. 59 quartets, the master retorted, “Do you suppose I am thinking about your wretched fiddle when the spirit moves me?”
If you write a piece that a player struggles to play, that will sometimes come through via a muddled and strained performance. There are famous exceptions that prove the rule on this, such as the extremely high register opening bassoon passage from Rite of Spring through which Stravinsky intended to convey strain, or the trumpet squeals of Ray Nance at the end of many Ellington arrangements.
Generally, though, you want the players to be able to play your piece well. And "err on the easy side" is an effective way to do that, especially when writing for instruments you aren't personally an expert with.
Wiki entry on his teacher:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wojciech_%C5%BBywny#:~:text=....
So, in a sense, these composers weren't writing for the same instrument.
Makes me think that a way for a popular artist to do something "new" would be to take a year off and just play music from artists with a totally different style to theirs. After the year they could attempt composing again and maybe their internal style would have been updated.
https://www.thepianofiles.com/the-valse-melancolique/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_Mayer_(composer)
There was another (attributed) Chopin Waltz that was discovered about a century ago, and "professors of music" argued whether it really sounded like Chopin or not. I think they reached a consensus that it wasn't Chopin, but an unrelated contemporary called Charles Mayer.
- "In an email exchange we had relating to this discovery, Stephen Hough wrote (and gave me permission to publish) the following comments:"
- "It was not so much the structure which made me think from the first time I saw the piece (1936 edition) that it couldn’t be by Chopin but the compositional mistakes. Chopin was fastidious about such things and there is false note-leading, inaccurate spelling of accidentals and rough harmony (too many thirds, bad spacing). I also never thought it sounded Chopin-esque but much more Russian. I only put it on as a curiosity and insisted that the notes explain its doubtful attribution."
See for example Nahre Sol [1] who plays the same piece in the style of different composers. In order to do that, you need to have a deep understanding of each composer's "quirks".
Related to her, perhaps see her video "Is Chopin JAZZ?!":
* https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YcfRqsjQA-4
> [1] https://youtu.be/SAtZawkqBG8?si=ZObBERSyYD29w4y4
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Chopin has a unique style and it is a waltz.
This would have been a trivial question for any piano music lover.
The only reason I might not have have guessed Chopin first is it seems too obvious and easy if I had been asked. A new Beatles song might be harder to guess than this.
I think it sounds pretty good too but I would want to hear it performed by a pianist who I like the way they play Chopin to judge it better. It sounds quite good considering I don't really like the sound of the piano that is being used.
It was mostly a prank on the music industry, but nonetheless, mimicry of style was involved, and was enough to fool many people for years.
Prokofiev Symphony No. 1 is one of the more famous. It mimics Mozart and Haydn (obvious choices!)
Stravinsky’s Octet is another.
There are plenty of other examples. Those are just two of the more obvious ones. Bach did it. Beethoven did it. Mozart did it.
But if some unpublished work mimics a certain style, I would assume that it is an exercise to gain a better understanding of that style.
If you listen to Haydn's sonatas, do you feel the resemblance of Mozart's? Well, because Haydn taught both Mozart and Beethoven.
Nothing is new under the sun, my friend.
They'd have guessed correctly. But you already know ahead of time that this newly discovered piece is not, say, juvenilia written by Scriabin specifically to imitate a Chopin waltz. And in that case, 100 professors would have guessed wrong because it would not have been the obvious answer.
Guessing composers based on sound/musical content alone is problematic for many reasons:
1. Common practice vs. composer's idiosyncrasies. Even separating Mozart's oeuvre from Michael Haydn's (Joseph's brother) has been non-trivial-- scholars have gotten it wrong over the centuries. Also-- IIRC there is a research paper about stylistic analyses leading to circular dependencies in the attribution of works of Josquin. E.g., A is Josquin because it sounds like Josquin's B, and B is Josquin because it sounds like Josquin's A...
2. Cross-contamination. Mozart knew Michael and his music, and was highly influenced by it. Compare the initial fugue at the beginning of Haydn's Requiem in C minor to Mozart's, plus the upward cascade of vocal entrances. Additionally, Schumann was influenced by Chopin, who was influenced by Liszt/Schumann/Mozart/Bach/etc. The problem gets worse as you go forward in history-- the next generation can take a composer's entire output and use it as their bible, which leads to...
3. Experts are also composers, and the most highly trained ones can write in the style of any composer whose works they have access to. E.g., Scriabin's set of Preludes was obviously written to be the sequel to Chopin's Op. 24 Preludes, (e.g., Chopin's no. 1 has a few fleeting quintuplets at the end, Scriabin's no. 1 is OMG all quintuplets phrased across barlines till the very end [engine_revving.wav]!). He understood Chopin's formal and textural affinities, could match his virtuosity at the keyboard, and fully immersed himself in Chopin's harmonic language.
I have no doubt if Scriabin had wanted to do a prank (or, more likely, an exercise) by writing a piece to fall convincingly into Chopin's oeuvre, he could have done so at any point in his career.
Plus...
4. Confirmation bias. I really want this to be a newly discovered waltz by Chopin![1]
These are the reasons an article like this mentions things like paper, ink and handwriting analysis.
1: Digression-- scholars also like to omit things that they feel don't reflect well on their favorite composer. For a fun example, see: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mozart_and_scatology
Scriabin's op. 11 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/24_Preludes%2C_Op._11_%28Scria... particularly shows Chopin's influence. I have to admit I like these Scriabin preludes more than Chopin's work.