I am one incident closer to having an imaginary best friend named Wilson because I cannot find what I am hearing over and over and over again in my head.

As the title suggests, I heard a Chopin (or was it Rachmaninov?) composition with both left and right hands playing octaves starting on C# then C (half-step down), then up to F# and then a half-step down to F and this repeated up the keyboard....


What is it? I am going mad...I've been listening to all my CDs and still cannot come up with it.

Thanks,
-Wilson's friend.

off the very top of my head, the last Rach etude-tableau from opus 33... but that's not exactly what you're describing either :-/

I HATE it when this happens. for 2 weeks I had the second Rach sonata stuck in my head, this one part in the 1st movement, and I couldn't think of what it was for the life of me

Etude 33/8...no that's not it. The octaves were in rapid succession and no other notes were played....

ah man, this is horrible.

Chopin's Polonaise Op.44? It's not that horrible!

THAT'S IT!!!!! 10 points for Cocobill.

No, the polonaise is an excellent composition...but not being able to put a name and opus to it was horrible.

I clearly see that you have a hard time with names.

I had never noticed the Rachmaninoff prelude ressembled this piece so much

which prelude?

Op. 23 n°5 sorry Haven't listened to it in a while, but it kind of struck me when I heard the Chopin Polonaise.

The Op.44 Polonaise doesn't go C#-C-F#-F. Even though the double-octave sections do resemble this pattern a little.

True.



You are understating it. That sequence is indeed there, not literal, but transposed and interposed with repeated notes: A-G#(-G#)-D(-D)-C#. Transposition can be an issue only if you have absolute pitch, and repetitions of course don't influence a melodic pattern diastematically.

A-men.

in my ears C#-C-F#-F sounds close to A-G#-D-C#, but I know it's not the case. Regardless, just the octaves were giving me a few sleepless nights because I couldn't identify where it came from.

Yeah, I was thinking of the 1st movement of Beethoven's Op. 13 at first (the bass notes while you've got tremolo octaves in the right hand, toward the end of the development), but I knew he wasn't looking for Beethoven, and it wasn't in octaves like he said. But then I couldn't get that out of my head.