Chapter Eleven - Chopin’s Modular Forms

Summary

In The Romantic Generation, closing the last of threechapters on Chopin, Charles Rosen remarks:

That is the true paradox of Chopin: he is most original in his use of themost fundamental and traditional technique. That is what made him at thesame time the most conservative and the most radical composer of hisgeneration.

Rosen is referring to Chopin’s tendency to transform the traditionalidea of musical “line” in order to “demonstrate theintimate relation between line and color in music.” But hischaracterization applies equally to many aspects of Chopin’s work,including his conception of form. Near the end of his book, Rosen commentsmore generally on the Romantic view of such matters:

In music, the most original minds of the 1830s were ill at ease withthose Classical procedures conceived as valid for a large variety offorms, and which can therefore be projected in advance… . Theaspects of their large forms which are conventional tend to beperfunctory—we can have few expectations of what directions themore original inventions in the large form will take because we havealmost no precedents on which we can rely. It is true that the Romanticcomposer had models with which he worked, but he often triedsuccessfully to make it seem as if the music had been created suigeneris.

For Rosen, Chopin obviously belonged with the “most originalminds,” and his comment points to a strange conjunction in thecomposer: a paradoxical ability to preserve Classical techniques whiletransforming them into something sui generis. In this paperI will explore one aspect of this paradox in relation to Chopin’s“forms,” a word I, along with many others, use to encompassessentially all aspects of the music: tonality, texture, rhythm,articulation, and the like. More specifically, I want to examine a number ofcompositions—among Chopin’s most interesting andoriginal—that retain the Classical notion of musical repetition yetreinterpret it in a “modular” fashion, producing significantdepartures from Classical practice.

One does not normally associate Chopin with modular thinking: that is, theuse of fixed musical units repeated both at pitch and in transposition, withor without superficial alterations, and in different juxtapositions andcombinations.