Score of Chopin's Waltz in A minor (2024)
Originally posted 2024-10-27
Tagged: music
Obligatory disclaimer: all opinions are mine and not of my employer
As reported in the New York Times, a Waltz by Chopin, discovered posthumously in 2024, transcribed by yours truly from the raw scan and Lang-Lang’s performance.
Editor’s notes
Very, very obviously a Chopin Waltz. The chord choices, usage of triplets/mordants, and the suspended pedal tones is characteristic. It’s a mix of Prelude Op 28 no 11’s ephemeral brilliance and Waltz Op 34 no. 2’s lilting, moody style.
My “edition” is not an urtext. I added some phrasing where I thought it was obvious and perhaps went missing over the ages from the raw scan. The ornamentation in measure 20 was probably modified by Lang-Lang, but I think it fits the piece better than a plain mordant, so I notated it as played.
If I were to judge based purely on the music - minus all of the contextual clues like paper, ink, backstory - the probability of it being fake is ~10%. I say this only because it is shockingly similar to 34-2 in harmonic and stylistic elements, which is exactly the kind of thing an AI trained on a not-big-enough dataset would do. While AI utterly fails at longer pieces, it could plausibly render a coherent 24-measure piece in the style of Chopin, and DeepMind could plausibly be working in stealth on a really good music-composition AI. But in the end, the piece is too tightly composed, and I trust NYT’s decision to trust the historians who are familiar with evaluating such artifacts.