(Both images from Wikimedia Commons).
I know what you're thinking: the diatonic scale has seven notes "A" through "G," but the chess board goes up to "H." So how can we overlay chess notation with pitch notation?
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).
So we now have a system for mapping the moves of a chess game onto a piano keyboard. For example, Anderssen's "Immortal Game" begins with 1. e4 e5 2. f4… which maps to E natural in the 4th register, E natural in the 5th register, and F natural in the 4th register.
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.
In "The Immortal Game," Adolf Anderssen gave up both rooks, a bishop, and ultimately his queen, in order to checkmate Lionel Kieseritzky using only his three remaining minor pieces - a bishop and two knights.
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.
In "The Opera Game," Paul Morphy bested the German Duke Karl of Brunswick and Count Isouard during the Opera "Norma" at the Italian Opera House in Paris.
Morphy won with a snazzy queen sacrifice in what is considered one of the most brilliant combinations in chess history.
This bouncy, modal melody seemed to lend itself to a Baroque invention. So I added in a left hand melody using Species Counterpoint.
Bobby Fischer bests Boris Spassky with an aggressive queenside attack. Spassky joined the audience in applauding Fischer's win and called it the best game of the match.
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.
UPDATE: By reader request, I've translated Beethoven's "Ode to Joy" into a chess game. Click the link to see the video.