What a Little Song Can Do!
Listen to Chopin Stix
Chopin Stix
The piano had seen better days — a fellowship-hall veteran with missing ivory, a hymnal propping up one leg, and no particular interest in being admired. It was there to be used. So when a bored child wandered over and began pounding on it, no one was surprised. But then another child claimed the bench, placed two fingers on neighboring keys, and began the familiar pulse: one-two-three, two-two-three. Heads turned. Recognition spread. Chopsticks had arrived, as it always does — not taught so much as discovered.
Few pieces travel so widely with so little baggage. Built from little more than two alternating chords and a handful of steps, it survives any treatment: triumphant, timid, comic, or catastrophic. Written in the nineteenth century by a teenage girl as a light parlor waltz, it escaped its origins and settled into the collective memory wherever unattended pianos exist — living rooms, school music rooms, church basements. It asks nothing but two fingers and a willingness to repeat.
My orchestral arrangement, Chopin Stix, begins by circling the tune rather than stating it outright. Fragments appear, hesitate, and hide. When the melody finally surfaces, it does so gently on harp, as if embarrassed by formal attire. From there the orchestra plays with color instead of harmony — strings smoothing the percussive edges, winds adding brightness, brass briefly inflating the whole affair into mock grandeur. At one point the piece even turns into a round, letting simple repetition generate its own complexity.
In the end, nothing essential changes. The tune winds down, the chopping figure returns, and the music settles back into its original simplicity — older, perhaps, but intact. The title is only a pun, placing the humblest keyboard ritual beside the loftiest Romantic tradition. Both, after all, begin the same way: hands on keys, listening for what happens next. And somewhere, even now, a child is discovering that two notes, played again and again, can still make a room lean in and listen.
