Chess Music

[Derleth]

You can translate chess (algebraic) notation into music using a clever method and play chess games as if they were music pieces. MP3s are available for download.

Here’s how he did it:

The eight columns of a chess board correspond to the eight audible octaves. E.g., C4 is a middle square on the chess board and C4 is “middle C” on the piano…

[snip]

[The diatonic scale goes from A through G, but a chess board goes up to [del]eleven[/del] H. That’s one higher, innit?]

Fear not! We’ll simply use the Northern European system of musical notation, where an “H” indicates a B Natural, and a “B” indicates a B flat. This is the notation that composers from Schumann to Lizst used to sign the name “B-A-C-H” into their music (see BACH motif).

The remaining task is to assign note values. What makes a quarter note, a half note, and a whole note?

The relative value of chess pieces is Pawn = 1, Knight = 3, Bishop = 3, Rook = 5, Queen = 9, and King = Infinity.

Assigning these exact ratios to note values will create some rather annoying polyrhythms. So let’s round off the ratios a tiny bit and assign the following note values to the chess pieces: Pawn = 1/16th note, Knight = 1/8th note, Bishop = 1/8th note, Rook = 1/4 note, Queen = 1/2 note, and King = rest.

To put the icing on the cake, let’s condense the 8 registers into a single octave to make the chess melodies more tolerable. If a note is doubled (as in 1. e4 e5), let’s jump the second note up an octave to provide some flavor.

Here’s how he described the games’ musical versions:

“The Immortal Game”:

I set blues chords in the left hand to justify the constant tonal shifts from B to b flat in this chess game. The chords modulate from C Major to F Major and finally end in B Flat Major.

“The Opera Game”:

This bouncy, modal melody seemed to lend itself to a Baroque invention. So I added in a left hand melody using Species Counterpoint.

Game 6 of the World Chess Championship 1972 (Fischer beats Spassky):

This chess game produced a wild jumble of syncopated sevenths and minor seconds. I tried to find order in the atonal chaos by laying in major ninth and suspension chords. My hope was to somehow evoke the major seventh chord sound of the 1970s, when this game was played. It came out sounding like if Schoenberg wrote intro music for a morning talk show.

To top it off, he reverses the process to play Ode to Joy on a chessboard.