Patterico's Pontifications

6/25/2019

Classical Music Fans: What Is This Piece?

Filed under: General — Patterico @ 7:59 am



On the heels of writing down the piece my dad wrote when he was 12, my sister asked me to write down another piece he used to play. This one is not his, but I can’t figure out who actually wrote it. I have a memory of having once owned the sheet music but I lost it years ago and have spent the last several years asking friends if they know what it is.

I knew how to play it once and wrote it down last night (incorrectly) from memory. I know I have some of it wrong — surely the actual piece lacks all these parallel octaves and fifths — but it’s close enough to recognize if you know the piece. It sounds like something from Schumann’s Album from the Young or the like, but that’s not it. I always thought it was Beethoven but I’ve looked through all his piano works online and I don’t think it’s his.

Can you solve my dilemma and tell me what this is?

Here’s my imperfect rendition of the sheet music:

[pdf-embedder url=”https://patterico.com/app/uploads/2019/06/Mystery-Song.pdf” title=”Mystery Song”]

(Hit the arrows at the bottom left of this embedded image to scroll back and forth between the two pages. You have to hover the cursor over the image to see the arrows.)

And here’s a MIDI file that robotically renders the sheet music.

P.S. I wrote it down in F but it may actually be in C. I just can’t remember. I think it’s F though. It also might be in 3/4 instead of 3/8, but I put it in 3/8 because it goes along at a fast enough clip that 3/4 seemed odd.

There should be rubato throughout and a ritardando at measure 24, but I could not figure out how to make the program slow down and then go back to a tempo.

UPDATE: Solved. Beethoven’s Farewell to the Piano, Anh. 15. I could not find it before because the authorship is disputed and it has no opus or even WoO number.

5 Responses to “Classical Music Fans: What Is This Piece?”

  1. “I only know two tunes. One is Yankee Doodle and the other isn’t.”
    – Ulysses S. Grant

    That’s two more than the number of classical music pieces I know…

    Dave (1bb933)

  2. Don’t worry, Dave. I have considerably more than two classical music pieces on my shelves, and I don’t ever remember hearing of this piece. But there seems to be a considerable number of videos of it being played by amateurs on YouTube….

    kishnevi (496414)

  3. I can only conclude that it doesn’t exist, because if it did I would know it.

    MikeyParks (722b11)

  4. whatever it it, it ain’t that good. I can tell you who it’s not: Mozart, Beethoven, Weber, Chopin, Schubert, Schumann, Bartok, Shostakovich, Glass or ANYONE who made a living writing music. It’s dull, pointless, lacks development and the only interesing thing is that little inappropiate hitch about 3/4 of the way through. Glad I could help.

    elliott (58d663)

  5. Glad I could help.

    I deleted the link to your Web site. Go sell your books somewhere else. Glad I could help.

    Patterico (115b1f)


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