Beethoven's Moonlight Sonata but the bass is a bar late, and the melody is a bar early

boing
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Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2018/12/21/beethovens-moonlight-sonata.html

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Interesting result but doesn’t improve on the original.

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Theme song to our darkest timeline?

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I wonder how someone who hasn’t heard the original would like it. For me it’s impossible to think away how it’s supposed to sound.

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Sounds darker…and occasionally ironic. Very interesting.

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I expected this to be the product of clever digital manipulation. This person played the out-of-phase parts at the same time? I can’t even type and read what I typin at sam tym.

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Seconded.

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There are some who hear the birth of boogie woogie in Beethoven’s Piano Sonata No 32, his last sonata, the greatest piece of music Alec Guinness knew.

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Really amazing stuff around 5min forward. Overall I like the sense of delirium pervading this interpretation of the first movement of the Moonlight Sonata.

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You don’t have to go home, but you can’t stay here!

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Some of the comments are gold, like “Bill Evans left hand version.”

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hang on hang on hang on

the melody is a bar ahead AND the bass is a bar behind?
(bass two bars behind the melody)

or

the melody is a bar ahead SO the bass is a bar behind?
(bass one bar behind the melody)

i think it’s the latter - it’s not like there’s a rhythm guitar in the middle

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Yay. I was going to suggest the op 111, but I checked, and that is Sonata 32. If anyone doubts the boogie boogie connection, there is a good Uchida performance on You Tube. Start about 15 minutes in and you can hear the boogie, and just before minute 16, he lets it rip.

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I guess you could learn to play the piece “conventionally”, play it on a digital keyboard, record all the MIDI signals, shift selected ones around, and then send them back to the keyboard to re-perform all the notes exactly as you played them, just at different times.

Or you could edit the score to shift the left hand’s notes back and the right hands notes forward, print it out, and learn it the altered way.

I mean, “one” could. I sure couldn’t.

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Yes there is, in the form of arpeggiated chords. You don’t hear three voices?

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Looks like he did exactly that; there’s a link on his soundcloud to the sheet music on dropbox.

And what a funny little world this is: this dude is an acquaintance of mine. We haven’t been in touch for ages, but it’s nice to see him out there still doing stuff.

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I’m pretty sure you’re right - I can’t actually play piano worth a damn, but the slow pacing of the piece does make it easy to follow along with the sheet music for the first few bars (I used this PDF http://www.mutopiaproject.org/ftp/BeethovenLv/O27/moonlight/moonlight-a4.pdf) and the bass does clearly come in just one bar later than the melody, not two.

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I agree, but I don’t think the goal was to improve on Beethoven but rather to create something with a different mood by making two simple changes.

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Sounds a bit weird, but not bad at all.

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I think you could argue that this is an original work. This isn’t the melody to moonlight sonata, even though it’s exactly the same.