Brig, Soren and Reidar- did you know that Beethoven was deaf when writing his most famous symphonies? The story of music, innovation, glory is incredible.

Today- even BLM is trying to cancel Beethoven, but learn how amazing he was. Greatness. You can be great too 🙂 Love Papa.

Then They Came for Beethoven

written by Daniel Lelchuk

This week, Vox published an article titled “How Beethoven’s 5th Symphony put the classism in classical music.” “Since its 1808 premiere, audiences have interpreted [its opening progression] as a metaphor for Beethoven’s personal resilience in the face of his oncoming deafness,” write Nate Sloan and Charlie Harding. But “for some in other groups—women, LGBTQ+ people, people of color—Beethoven’s symphony may be predominantly a reminder of classical music’s history of exclusion and elitism.” In the article, and an accompanying podcast, the two men ask “how Beethoven’s symphony was transformed from a symbol of triumph and freedom into a symbol of exclusion, elitism, and gatekeeping.”

The article has been widely mocked on social media—in part because the authors (both white men, from what I can tell) offer no real evidence for their claim. That’s odd given that they are purporting to redefine the cultural meaning of what is arguably the most well-known, widely performed, and beloved composition known to humankind. Hundreds of millions of people have fallen in love with this symphony over the past two centuries—many of them inspired by the fact that Beethoven managed to create it while he was succumbing to deafness.https://platform.twitter.com/embed/index.html?creatorScreenName=Quillette&dnt=false&embedId=twitter-widget-0&frame=false&hideCard=false&hideThread=false&id=1305919325275074560&lang=en&origin=https%3A%2F%2Fquillette.com%2F2020%2F09%2F19%2Fthen-they-came-for-beethoven%2F&siteScreenName=Quillette&theme=light&widgetsVersion=ed20a2b%3A1601588405575&width=550px

The writers begin their podcast by honing in on the symphony’s first movement—and its inclusion on the famous 1977 Voyager record that was put into outer space, in the hopes of transmitting the human legacy to some other alien civilization. (Other tracks on that recording included percussion music from Senegal, choral music from Georgia, a Night Chant by Navajo Indians, a Peruvian wedding song, selections from Louis Armstrong, Stravinsky, and much more.) In regard to Beethoven, one of the hosts asks rhetorically: “When an alien civilization discovers this golden record and we greet them with, like, dun dun dun DUNNNN… are we the conquering intergalactic empire? Is that what they’re going to think?”

To which the other responds: “It’s a great question, because not everyone feels that Beethoven is the best representation of our species’ collective achievement. For a lot of people, Beethoven’s 5th Symphony doesn’t represent triumph and resilience, but elitism and exclusion.”

I’m a professional cellist who—in non-pandemic times—performs classical music for people of all races. Beethoven’s music is precious to me. And it’s bizarre to hear these two men talk this way. None of what they say bears any connection to Beethoven’s actual work. And their call-and-response faux-curious dialogue about what aliens will think of Beethoven’s supposed “elitism” is embarrassing. Yet Sloan is a musicologist, and Harding is a songwriter.

They do, however, pay a backhanded compliment to Beethoven. This is what happens when a piece of art has such a gigantic influence on a society and its collective identity: The art’s story becomes our story. Naturally, those who demand that our story be rewritten to match a prescribed ideology or theme (such as, say, oppression and intersectionality) will also demand an overhaul in our understanding of the art that defines that story.

The hosts even accuse Beethoven—whose democratic ideals are well-known to anyone who has studied his life story—of empowering colonialism. Says one, “I can almost even see the sort of stride of empire, colonialism, industrialism, all those things that have sort of that same built in narrative of triumph and conquering.”

Really? That’s what you imagine when Beethoven’s 5th begins? I would be scared to imagine what flits though his mind during a performance of Wagner’s Parsifal.

In Japan—which, last time I checked, was populated by quite a few people of color—public performances of Beethoven are a holiday tradition. When asked why so many Japanese people have fallen in love with Beethoven’s 9th Symphony, a Tokyo choral director explained “Beethoven casts a spell on you. Many start off thinking, ‘I can’t do this,’ but then other members urge them to try harder, and working together they get it done. The feeling of accomplishment is sublime.”

That quote appeared in the Japan Times, which, as one might expect, featured a wide array of interviewees to demonstrate the writer’s point. The Vox piece, by contrast, is sourced to the co-authors’ own vague thoughts. To the extent outside authorities are invoked, the attempted smearing of one of history’s great composers is attributed to the “many” (unnamed) people who, we are assured, share the authors’ animus.

I am always happy to praise the universality of Beethoven, and of music more broadly—and never more so than right now, when music is about the only thing we have to fall back on for a sense of collective joy. I have been playing cello since I was five years old, and I remember the first time I played Beethoven’s 5th complete in concert—as a high-school freshman with my youth orchestra in Boston. Since then, I have been fortunate to play it many times, in many parts of the world, to audiences of every skin color. The thrill of the music that I felt that very first rehearsal, up in the woods of Maine at our pre-season retreat—that thrill has never left me. When people ask me if I ever get tired of playing the 5th, I answer—truthfully—that each time I play it, it leaves me more invigorated.

Audiences feel this thrill, too, notwithstanding the suggestion that the enduring popularity of the symphony is owed to snobbish habit. It is one of the few pieces of music that people from all walks of life ask our symphony to play more often. As well as spanning all of the planet’s races, Beethoven’s fans span young and old, and rich and poor. I know this, because I have often given out my complement of free tickets to people who cannot afford to attend but are dying to do so. There is something about the composer, and specifically about this piece, that can cause an audience member to leave the concert hall a different person.

Whenever I think of our capacity to love music—even on first hearing—I remember the time when I was in Qatar, playing with my orchestra. We were rehearsing the overture to Wagner’s Tannhaüser. The orchestra had put a clip of the rehearsal online, and I was watching it that evening when a Filipino hotel worker came to offer turndown service. He didn’t speak English fluently, but we fell into conversation. I pointed at the iPad I was using to play the video, and put on the part of the overture where the brass are playing a huge, soaring theme, and the violins are almost fighting back, playing a thicket of notes, like an uprising against the brass—a thrilling passage. The worker told me he’d never had the chance to hear any classical music in his life, yet found himself in tears by the end of the passage. I don’t know if he ever heard a single note of classical music since our meeting. But where the power of music is concerned, that one brief moment speaks for itself.

Beethoven is a truly odd target for progressive critics, because his views on geopolitics are known to have been, by the highly regressive standards of his time, quite progressive. It would make far more sense to target someone such as Wagner, whose personal defects and despicable views are well-known. And in that Qatari hotel room, I certainly could have held forth with a speech about all this. But what interest would that have served, except stripping the beauty from a fine piece of music?

I really wonder what Sloan and Harding have to say about the Afghan Women’s Orchestra, which in 2017 performed Beethoven’s Ninth at the World Economic Forum. Please watch the brief YouTube clip, which appears below, and ask yourself whether you find yourself inspired—or, channeling Vox’s musical experts, tsk-tsking at all these misguided women paying homage to white supremacy.https://www.youtube.com/embed/yhiSnE1s85A

Music of this type has no fixed story. It has infinite stories, as the possibilities of fantasy and enchantment are endless. There is no set program, no agenda. And if Beethoven’s 5th makes Sloan and Harding imagine the world’s people of color crushed under western jackboots, perhaps that’s something they might like to work on privately. Don’t blame the music.

When I interviewed Walter Isaacson for the first episode of my recently-launched podcast, I asked him if we needed to do a better job defending the integrity of the humanities. His answer was optimistic: The humanities “naturally defend themselves.” Given Beethoven’s power to inspire, his was the last cultural citadel I expected to see besieged. Yet here we are. Next month, maybe Mozart. Or Bob Dylan. Or Britney Spears. Once we agree to subordinate our love of art to the dictates of joyless ideologues, all of the limits fall away.

Daniel Lelchuk is Assistant Principal cellist of the Louisiana Philharmonic Orchestr

vox article

How Beethoven’s 5th Symphony put the classism in classical music

Beethoven’s most famous work changed the way we listen, and how we’re supposed to listen.By Nate Sloan and Charlie Harding Updated Sep 16, 2020, 2:11pm EDT

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Three elitist classical music fans wear monocles and fancy dress while thought bubbles above their heads show what’s not allowed in a concert hall, including casual clothing or cheering from audience members.

Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony starts with an anguished opening theme — dun dun dun DUNNNN — and ends with a glorious, major-key melody. Since its 1808 premiere, audiences have interpreted that progression from struggle to victory as a metaphor for Beethoven’s personal resilience in the face of his oncoming deafness.

Or rather, that’s long been the popular read among those in power, especially the wealthy white men who embraced Beethoven and turned his symphony into a symbol of their superiority and importance. For some in other groups — women, LGBTQ+ people, people of color — Beethoven’s symphony may be predominantly a reminder of classical music’s history of exclusion and elitism. One New York City classical music fan wrote in the 1840s, for example, that he wished “all women shall be gagged by officers duly licensed for the purpose before they’re allowed to enter a concert room.”

Before Beethoven’s time, classical music culture looked and sounded quite different. When Mozart premiered his Symphony 31 in the late 1700s, it was standard for audiences to clap, cheer, and yell “da capo!” (Italian for “from the beginning!”) in the middle of a performance. After Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony debuted in the early 1800s, these norms changed — both because the rising industrial merchant class took ownership of concert halls and because of shifts in the music itself.

As we explored in episodes I and II of the Switched On Pop podcast series The 5th, the musical complexity of Beethoven’s symphony required a different kind of listening. The Fifth’s four-note opening theme occurs and recurs in variations throughout the symphony, slowly shifting from minor to major keys and mirroring Beethoven’s experience with deafness. The Fifth’s creative rule-breaking — subverting the classical sonata form in the first movement, for example — requires close listening to fully grasp.

In Mozart’s day, each movement in a symphony was self-contained, like a collection of short stories. Beethoven’s Fifth acted more like a novel, asking audiences to follow a single story that unfolded over an entire four-movement symphony. New norms of concert behavior developed in turn. Sitzfleisch, or “sitting still,” became the ultimate desideratum for showing one’s understanding of the new language of classical music. Over time, these norms crystallized into a set of etiquette rules (e.g., “don’t clap mid-piece”) to enhance the new listening experience.

In the third episode of The 5th, we explore how Beethoven’s symphony was used to generate the strict culture of classical music — and the politics that undergird those norms of behavior.

Though concert etiquette that evolved in response to the Fifth may have had the goal of venerating the music, it can also act as a source of gatekeeping. “Polite society” first emerged as a set of cultural standards developed during the mid-18th century as bourgeois class signifiers. In Beethoven’s time, new social etiquette extended into the concert hall.

Today, some aspects of classical culture are still about policing who’s in and who’s out. When you walk into a standard concert hall, there’s an established set of conventions and etiquette (“don’t cough!”; “don’t cheer!”; “dress appropriately!”) that can feel as much about demonstrating belonging as appreciating the music.

For classical music critic James Bennett II, Beethoven’s popularity and centrality in classical culture is part of the problem. “As you perpetuate the idea that the giants of the music all look the same, it conveys to the ‘other’ that there’s not a stake in that music for them,” he says.

New York Philharmonic clarinetist Anthony McGill, one of the few Black musicians in the ensemble, agrees that Beethoven’s inescapability can make classical music appear monolithic and stifling. He likens the inescapability of the Fifth Symphony to a “wall” between classical music and new, diverse audiences.

“If you pretend like there’s no other music out there, that Beethoven is the greatest music that ever will matter,” says McGill, then orchestras will alienate new listeners, since “we’re not promoting any of the composers alive today that are trying to become the Beethovens of their day.”

Find out how Beethoven’s Fifth went from symbolizing freedom to a more complicated legacy — and how the symphony’s original meaning might be recovered — in Movement III of The 5th, available now.