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CHOPIN DREAMS
Program Note by Bruce Adolphe

I spend a lot of time, nearly every day, at a piano and have done so for about 54 years now. I may be improvising to get into the composing zone, playing jazz, reading through Bach for inspiration, or looking for odd musical connections to use in my piano puzzlers. It is not uncommon for my hands to be playing something while my mind is completely elsewhere.

My relationship to the piano, which began when I was six years old, is one of exploration: exploring the inner workings of the great piano repertoire; exploring the infinity of sensuously resonant harmonies; discovering my own deepest thoughts through dreamlike improvisations that continue to evolve over the years, like a giant chronicle of my subconscious.

A few composers have defined the way the rest of us use the piano—the way fingers move, how the instrument resonates, what its textures are, what the pedal is for, and even the way we think about what music for the piano means. A very short list of such seminal piano composers would have to include Chopin, the master of nuance, of delicate filigree and beguiling harmonies — the creator of the unique musical mixture of nobility and vulnerability, available only in his precious, pedaled perfume.

As the public radio piano puzzler on Performance Today, I have disguised over forty familiar melodies in the style of Chopin and also merged quite a few popular tunes with actual piano pieces by Chopin.  But composing Chopin Dreams has nothing to do with piano puzzlers. This was not a matter of using Chopin’s works for crafty comedic combinatorial composition; this instead was the far more intense process of communing with Chopin’s art for the purpose of composing my own personal statements about this extraordinary music.  Chopin Dreams is not a tribute to Chopin, but something more emotionally charged. To compose this work, I imagined Chopin alive today, living in New York, perhaps making some money at a jazz club rather than teaching so many students.

Chopin’s enchanting cascades of notes that fall in graceful rhythmic independence over a steady bass are very like an inspired jazz pianist’s fluid melodic ornaments hovering over a groove. Did Chopin ever play a blue note, as it is called in jazz?

To answer that question, I turn to a description of Chopin improvising at the piano, written in the diary of the painter Eugène Delacroix, one of Chopin’s closest friends:

“Little by little our eyes become filled with those soft colors corresponding to the sweet modulations taken in by our auditory senses. And then — the blue note resonates and there we are, in the azure of the transparent night.”

Whether that particular blue note was a jazzy flatted third hanging out over a dominant seventh chord we will never know, but it may well have been, because the exact same blue note of jazz music does in fact exist in Chopin’s music. It usually appears as an appoggiatura leaning on the minor 9th above a dominant seventh chord in a minor key. For a simple example, take a look at the very first bar of the G Minor Mazurka, Opus 67, No. 2. That little F-natural is a blue note. And that sort of thing helped inspire my Chopin Dreams to go much further.

In composing Chopin Dreams, I used several approaches:

I used particular works of Chopin as models and source material for three of the movements: Brooklyn Ballad uses Chopin’s G Minor Ballade as raw material; Jazzurka is based on the A minor Mazurka Opus 17, No. 4; Quaalude is modeled on Chopin’s Prelude No 3.
I imagined Chopin as a jazz pianist playing a new kind of nocturne for New York Nocturne.

I picked two dance forms Chopin never heard of to create Piano Popping (based on some hip-hop rhythms) and Hora (I wondered what Chopin would play at a Bar-Mitzvah.)

Finally, it was inspiring to imagine Carlo Grante playing the music as I composed it, bringing his penetrating virtuosity and precise pianism to every phrase. It is my pleasure to dedicate Chopin Dreams to maestro Grante.

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