Awash

Personally, I couldn’t give a rats-ass whether Beethoven was a heady composer or an intuitive one, or more than likely some combination thereof. He spoke of the “Spirit” moving him and was supposedly called an asshole among the musical elite for handing the concept of form to the audience, which had been kept a secret for so long.

In his first symphony, third movement, which I”ve studied to the point where it may never sound like music to me again — the argument is that he’s decided that the theme is going to be the modulation to Db from C Major. It’s a shaky C major at best in the first place, though eventually establishes itself as such in a definite way. Since I don’t think this simple point got the attention it deserves I’m going to say it loud and clear on this quiet little website — as for the most dominant voice of the first phrase, the melodic voice, the first violin, what it pronounces loud and clear is a G MAJOR SCALE. everyone get that? never heard a theory from anyone as to why he started the piece that way. no-one knows how to put that tidbit in line with any neat pile of theories.

So I’ve looked at this thing to where my instructor admits that I know it well — never minding that he thinks my argument is way off base. My argument — what was my argument? — probably that Beethoven was working more intuitively than intellectually. Or perhaps as intuitively as intellectually.

Picking these pieces apart and denying anything spontaneous in them is a crock of shit — maybe that’s what I was saying, not really sure but he lost interest as soon as I suggested that the dynamic markings were exaggerations of the human body’s natural response to the insane melody he had created. Some people do write melodies before they write harmonies you realize. And that the forte was a natural progression given the ascending line, rather than a crescendo which cleverly lands on the flat 2 — marked as a C# in this case — strikes me as completely ridiculous. He wasn’t going for a quick build in volume, which is certainly what comes through the speakers, given the recording we have — what Beethoven wanted, according to my teacher, was to make sure musicologists for centuries could use this piece to drill through students foreheads, and then feel smug by noting that the forte of a few bars worth of crescendo happens to land on the flat two — that’s right — this fast moving piece hits a tiny bit harder on the C# than it did on the C so Beethoven could tell the musical elite that “HEY — AREN’T I JUST THE CLEVEREST LITTLE SOUR-KRAUT you ever did hear? I put a little tiny extra bit of punch on the flat two in the middle of a six note, mostly chromatic run, and GET THIS — I’m going to modulate to the flat two later in this same PIECE!!!!! Aren’t I just the cutest little neat freak that ever let his own excrement pile up in his flat for weeks at a time?”

If I ever listen to this thing again after I conduct it against my will, I hope I hear what I heard in the first place — a maniac on piano dreaming up a mockery of the minuet form, nothing else. HE WAS REALLY REALLY GOOD AT PLAYING PIANO. HE DID SO WITH THE ORCHESTRA IN MIND. If he laid out a strategy on where the heavy hits were going to happen based on the harmonic form of his piece, that is his own personal, and I think rather embarrassing business, ’cause writing to the likes of people such as my fearless leader in conducting is no better than writing to the John Cage fans clotting up our programs with the ideas that you don’t have to learn to play an instrument to be a musician.