Music Theory

A while back I bought a set of CDs of all nine symphonies by Ludwig Van Beethoven. On long solo car trips I can now listen to them instead of trying to find a radio station which won't fade out after ten miles. I know — welcome to the 1990s. That's not the point.

As a result of my automotive Beethoven immersion, I've come up with my own explanation of why he was possibly the greatest composer ever.

I think Beethoven was a cheapskate.

Seriously: I think he was perpetually convinced that his musicians were slacking off, and so he wrote music to make them work. "That kettle drum player think's he's putting one over on me, sitting through the whole piece just to hit the drums two or three times at the end. I'll show that goldbrick. I'm gonna make him sweat in my Seventh Symphony." I imagine him watching rehearsals, taking notes to himself. "The horns aren't doing anything in this section. I'm paying them and they're not doing anything. Time to give them a counterpoint!"

This also applied to tempo. He famously wrote the Fifth Symphony for a tempo of 108 beats per minute. I suspect the math went something like this: "I'm paying those bums twelve groschen an hour. If I make them play twice as fast, that means I'm getting more notes for my groschen!"

And of course one sees this in the final movement of the Ninth Symphony, with the singers. "I'm paying those featherbedders to sing, not inhale!"

I'm not even joking when I say that creative endeavors are improved by this kind of artistic pennypinching. Writers should always strive to get the most work out of their words. A scene, or even a line of dialog, should do at least two jobs at once — more, if you can manage it. Hamlet's soliloquy shows what kind of a man he is, shows how depressed he is, and expresses some genuinely profound ideas, all while setting up for the next scene. Shakespeare was a manager as well as a playwright, and wasn't going to waste his actors' time or the audience's.

 

Comments

[William H. Stoddard]

Personally, I get more out of Bach. But Beethoven played a big part in expanding the internal space of musical works. It rather strikes me as a classical analog of what the punks called "long boring guitar solos."

[Joshua Clement Broyles]

Interesting theory about Beethoven. I have suspected the same thing about Brian Ferneyhough. It seems like he could pay players just about anything and he would still be underpaying them for what they have to do.