Posthumous Perk

Isn’t it ironic that the best Nocturnes Chopin composed were the ones that he swore would never be out on “his dead body”?

Refer to Chopin’s posthumous nocturnes, the ones in C# minor and C minor, and you’ll see the best of chop-chop’s flow. I even picked up a slight Arab twist to the tune - but that’s just me, there’s nothing like Erik Satie’s Gnossiennes, especially the first and fourth that have that, but anyway – and what’s ironic is that those were one of his posthumous nocturnes, as in he withheld their publication, probably because he felt they weren’t up to his standard at that time, which is perfectly understandable since composers in the revolutionary turn of the Romantic era fought for prominence, so copycats were all over the place. The weird tone of the nocturnes probably intimidated Chopin, he had a reputation to keep and some eccentric nocturne was not worth the risk now is it?

Which got me thinking, isn’t is quite ironic that the best of Chopin’s work is the scribble he hid for not being good enough? Those crumpled papers with the math equation deciphering trials…How many times do we do that everyday? Re-sitting a test, deleting a line for the umpteenth time because it sounded too cliché in your head when you picture people’s faces reading it, adding a thousand aromas to the recipe that no human nose, no matter how developed their sense of smell is, could tell apart, or just, I dunno, fixing your hair in place in every mirror you can find on your way from the bedroom to the door… We all do it everyday, we all hide those non-stereotypical yet ingenious nocturnes just because they didn’t sound good enough when in fact they might have been just perfect… The art of ruining, the massacre, is in fact the editing not the scribbles. The dissonance and chromaticism that was hated at the time – Unsurprisingly because they didn’t sit well with the ordinary things they heard everyday –  instead of all the harmonic boring crap.

I mean, you wanna hear beauty, raw unedited elaborate beauty that has outstripped all others, listen to Debussy’s work. I mean, there’s a reason that dude’s name is the only one that pops up in your head when anything about the “Impressionism” phase pops up in a conversation? Breaking the boundaries of the classicals that were not only drained and exhausted by repetition during that time, that dude, perceived as nuts and actually driving other people nuts like Rebikov who thought Debussy was actually copying him! but then again he also thought he was haunted… so yeah that that doesn’t really count. What I’m trying to say is, if you’re mad enough to come out with something Unique, don’t trim it beyond recognition to fit the status-quo, for God’s sake have some balls and come out with it, it could be the next posthumous nocturne!