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An Oops

So I finished labeling chords today as I worked to memorize the last couple of pages of the B-flat minor nocturne. At some point I realized that I've been playing a couple of notes all wrong for ... who knows how long? I thought maybe I'd been playing them wrong from the very beginning, but I could see that Deborah had circled the correct notes in my Schirmer edition. So it's possible that I wanted to play the wrong notes but she was trying to get me to play the right ones.

These are near the end of the piece. As in the beginning, we go from B-minor to F7 ... or do we?

This is what you have in the beginning:


That second set of notes is an F7 chord over the B-flat bass note: F, E-flat, A, F, and F. An F7 chord consists of F, A, (C,) and E-flat. Those notes in the red boxes? All F's.

So that's what I was playing at the end. But look at what's actually written at the end:


Over the B-flat bass note, we have G-flat, E-flat, and A. Those notes in the red boxes? All G-flats. I'm not going to try to figure out what chord that is supposed to be, and which notes are (and aren't) properly in the chord. All I know is I've been playing the F7 (with F's instead of G-flats) all this time.

Oops.

Not that I've played it that often in the past 14 years ... say, once or twice every six to eight months. But still!

How embarrassing. I'm glad I figured it out.

And ... I can now play the whole piece from memory. Now, for the fun part: practicing playing the whole thing from memory!

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