Radiohead and Philosophy - Brandon W. Forbes [107]
Time Signature and Mood in Chopin
Born in 1810 and living until 1849, Chopin lived and worked in the middle of nineteenth-century romanticism. Other great composers of this movement include Ludwig Beethoven, Richard Wagner and Franz Schubert. Like theirs, Chopin’s music celebrates the creative capacity of the human spirit while recognizing how short life can be. Nineteenth-century Europe was wracked by wars, political instability, widespread disease and economic upheaval. Romantic authors and composers therefore celebrated the achievements we are capable of during such short and fragile lives. For Chopin it is the subtlety and poetry of his piano music that captures this spirit and sets him apart from his contemporaries.
Chopin achieved distinction for his virtuosity, but it was mostly his nocturnes that secured his fame. Nocturnes were a new musical genre that are inspired by the night—the time when things slow down and we can reflect upon the activities of the day and the shortness of life. Chopin’s sound is melancholy and nostalgic, at least partly because Chopin himself was prone to such moods. Exiled from his homeland, Poland, by fortune and war, he moved to Paris to continue his musical education and establish his career as a composer and performer. Lest he forget his homeland, Chopin collected a small silver cup of his native soil and carried it with him for the rest of his life. During his journey to Paris, that soil became bloody as Poland erupted in civil war and, in what was to become known as the November Uprising of 1830-1831, Polish nationalists revolted against the Russian-backed government. They were defeated, however, and Chopin never went back to his homeland.
Chopin’s use of various time signatures and signature changes reflects his melancholy and nostalgia for his beloved homeland, their other-worldly tone evoking a far-off, forbidden place. The term nostalgia is comprised of two Greek works, nostos, for returning home, and algos, for pain. Literally, it refers to the feeling of pain we get when we think of home or the longing for a return to our home. Often, we find ourselves nostalgic for a time past or event long ago; we wish to return to more youthful days of spring or when times were better. If we give in to the pain of our longing for places or times not present, our mood can darken into melancholy. We become sad and lethargic, not wanting to see or do anything. We sit on our hands and remember times past and rue that we cannot return to better times. In works like Nocturne in G, op. 37, No. 2 we find Chopin at his most ethereal, painting idyllic auditory landscapes a child might imagine. In Nocturne in C minor, op. 48, No. 1, there is a note of despair. Chopin’s contemporary Jan Kleczynski described it as “the tale of a still greater grief told in an agitated recitando” and calls it “The Contrition of a Sinner.”
This comment takes us a step closer to the philosophical significance of these Nocturnes. For what is needed for confession or contrition is precisely some account of one’s life as it has unfolded in time—a remembrance and phenomenological self-awareness. In order to understand his exile, Chopin had to remember and long for the home to which he could never return. His nocturnes seem to do just this.
Temporality
Crucial to this kind of self-awareness is an awareness of time itself. Chopin uses changes in time signature to this effect in his Nocturnes and so does Radiohead in “Pyramid Song.” Both are drenched in feelings of nostalgia and a burgeoning awareness of our existence in time. By disturbing the regular rhythms we are accustomed to feeling in our everyday lives, these peculiar, otherworldly works demand that we sit up and take account