A Tokyo University of the Arts Composition Graduate Seriously Tries Writing a Chopin-Style Waltz

Background

At the end of 2024, I joined the online year-end party of LAPRAS Inc., a company I work with regularly.

One of the party games was modeled on a certain Japanese TV show where contestants have to tell the real thing from the fake,
and I created the music question for it.

Time spent creating it: about 2 hours

Question: Which One Is the Real Chopin???

It got a great reaction, so I recently posted it on X
and turned it into a quiz using the poll feature.

〜勝手に音楽格付け👑チェック2025〜

クラシック好きな人ぜひチャレンジしてみてください。

「「「本物のショパンはどちらでしょう？」」」

片方は本物のショパンの曲で、
もう片方は僕が書きました。

回答は↓から🙏 pic.twitter.com/FWhWdOzXu0

— ʏᴏɢᴏ (@yogo_yuichi) January 2, 2025

The answer is here

A Side Note: About the Composition Department at Tokyo University of the Arts

I think I managed to make it pretty convincing—even professional musicians were split about half and half on the quiz 🙌
(The poll on X also split roughly 60:40 out of about 200 votes.)

So why can I make a question like this well? Because I (Yogo) actually graduated from the Department of Composition at Tokyo University of the Arts, and while preparing for the entrance exams I did a lot of analysis and style imitation of works by established composers like this.

People often ask me, "What is the composition department at Tokyo University of the Arts like?"
Roughly speaking:

• Its alumni include Rentaro Taki and Ryuichi Sakamoto
• The entrance exam consists of the National Center Test plus four rounds of exams (about 30 hours of exam time in total?)
• By the time you pass the entrance exam, you have already acquired most of the practical skills, so there is actually very little left to learn after you enroll

That's the kind of place it is.

The entrance exam in particular is so extremely difficult that you wonder, "They make high school students do this?" So let me briefly introduce what it involves.

First, across all of the composition entrance exams, pianos and anything that makes sound are completely prohibited.
The exam room is an ordinary classroom, like the ones used for standardized tests, stocked with piles of blank staff paper. All you can use are a pencil, an eraser, and a ruler, and for the entire exam everyone silently scratches away at their scores. It's a truly bizarre space 🤦

Here is a rough overview of rounds 1 through 4:

Round 1

An exam on harmony (chords).
It is split into a bass exercise and a soprano exercise, about 6 hours in total.

Round 2

An exam on counterpoint (the technique of layering melodies on top of each other).
In my year, we had to write a fugue, and it took about 5 hours.

Round 3

Free composition (not completely free).
You are given a simple motif, and almost everyone writes a sonata based on it.
About 8 hours.

Round 4

A piano exam, dictation (writing down notes that are played), sight-singing (singing written music at first sight), music theory (basic musical knowledge), an interview, and more.
There was a lot of waiting around too, and as I recall it took almost the whole day…

That's roughly how it goes.

Actual past exams (Japanese): https://admissions.geidai.ac.jp/data/past-exams/music/2023-2/

Isn't Composition About Sensibility?

By the way, some of you might wonder, or object: "Judging something as creative as composition as good or bad… isn't that just personal taste?"
In fact, I used to think so too.

But after years of private composition lessons, where various teachers taught me the traditional "craft" of classical writing hands-on and by word of mouth, I came to understand that the composition entrance exam is not about personal taste.

What the composition department at Tokyo University of the Arts looks for in the entrance exam is pure "skill": how faithfully you can trace the style of, out of all the music on Earth, "the music that was popular in the West roughly from the 17th to the 20th century onward" ☘️
And precisely because they are looking at pure "skill," the answers of those who pass tend to look alike, and I think anyone "in the know" who looked at the answers would grade them in much the same way.

Interestingly, when I hear music on TV in everyday life, I can often tell, "Ah, this was written by someone from our side (the people who studied classical Western music)."
In other words, you could say that passing or failing the composition exam comes down to whether you can join the circle of people who share a common understanding of that style (idiom).

And since the composition entrance exam only looks at one style from one era, there's no need to feel down if you fail. Passing doesn't guarantee you'll write masterpieces, either, nor does it mean you're good at everything from EDM to folk music 🙅‍♂️

Getting back on topic: something like the "Chopin idiom" covered in this article is right in the sweet spot of the styles the composition department expects you to master for the entrance exam, so I had a lot of fun working on it while recalling everything I studied back then 😊

If I get the chance, I'd also like to try "Which One Is the Real Beethoven?" or "Which One Is the Real Bach?" (For the record, Bach is the one I'm most confident about.)

See you next time!