ACADEMIA Letters “Roll over Beethoven, dig these rhythm and blues” Arnold Cusmariu People who don’t listen to classical music might still know, or think they know, that Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony starts with “dum-dum-dum-duuum.” Right? Well, as the gorgeous Brooke Burns exclaims on The Chase when “The Beast” messes up, “That is wrong!” Have a look at the score, available online. Aha! This famous music starts with … silence, a quarter-note pause. There is a reason the Fifth starts that way. In Beethoven, there is a reason for everything, which has kept musicologists, critics, and music teachers busy for some 200 years. In my view, the Fifth starts with silence because Beethoven sought to express a divine act in musical terms: creation ex nihilo. Try that one on for size, Chuck Berry (Paul McCartney, Elton John, Mick Jagger …) The Fifth Symphony is by no means the only work in which Beethoven creates music seemingly out of nothing. Two other famous examples are the opening of the second movement of the String Quartet Opus 59 #1, whose first three bars are a monotonous rhythm in the cello, acting as a foil for what happens later; and the opening of the Ninth Symphony, which are hushed tones, barely audible, coming not from the orchestra on stage but somewhere far away. Bruckner began his symphonies the same way. There’s absolutely nothing Beethoven couldn’t express in musical terms—just as there’s nothing Shakespeare couldn’t express in words. There’s no emotion that hasn’t found its way somewhere in Beethoven’s music. Often, movements of the same work express utterly different, even contradictory emotions. Within a single movement, emotive content shifts in rapid succession. The listener must work to keep up. “Ah, but Arnold” a friend asked once, “could Beethoven have written rock music?” I answered, “of course,” on the argument that, as far as musical ability is concerned, there is nothing the Bonn master couldn’t do. He had composed nine symphonies, sixteen string quarAcademia Letters, June 2021 ©2021 by the author — Open Access — Distributed under CC BY 4.0 Corresponding Author: Arnold Cusmariu, bravo323@gmail.com Citation: Cusmariu, A. (2021). “Roll over Beethoven, dig these rhythm and blues”. Academia Letters, Article 1248. https://doi.org/10.20935/AL1248. 1 tets, and thirty-two piano sonatas, masterpieces all. His output amounted to some two hundred compositions. Why wouldn’t Beethoven have been able to write something like “Peggy Sue,” “Love Is All Around,” and “I Can’t Get No Satisfaction”? However, there is a sense in which asking whether Beethoven could have written rock music is asking the wrong question. What’s the right question? The right question is whether Beethoven would have been interested in writing something like “Peggy Sue,” “Love is All Around” and “I Can’t Get No Satisfaction.” Had I been asked that question instead, I would have answered emphatically, “of course not.” So, why would Beethoven not have been interested in writing rock music? Some explanations are right, others are not. Starting with the wrong ones is more instructive. • Rock music is too loud. FALSE. Thayer’s Life of Beethoven contains contemporary accounts by various critics of the first performances of Beethoven’s music. One of the complaints was that the music is too loud, much louder than anything Haydn and Mozart wrote. Listen to the finale of the Seventh Symphony and you’ll see what I mean. The music is a veritable steamroller! • Rock music is too “in your face.” FALSE. This is another complaint found in contemporary accounts. The famous Eroica, for example, starts with two pistol shots—Beethoven’s version of “attention must be paid.” Sleeping at a Beethoven concert is impossible. Needless to add, it doesn’t get any more “in your face” than the opening of the Fifth Symphony. • Beethoven was not interested in writing for the voice. FALSE. Beethoven wrote a great deal of vocal music. On a grand scale, we have the opera Fidelio and two masses, one in C and the great Missa Solemnis. He also wrote several choral compositions on a smaller scale, such as the Choral Fantasy, as well as several dozen art songs (lieder) and some two hundred folk songs. Perhaps most famously of all, there is the choral finale of the Ninth Symphony, which broke the paradigm that “symphony” meant “orchestra only.” Mahler took note. • He was not interested in writing music with a beat. FALSE. One of the distinctive features of Beethoven’s music is its relentless drive and powerful accents, which shocked audiences used to genteel Haydn and Mozart. This is true not Academia Letters, June 2021 ©2021 by the author — Open Access — Distributed under CC BY 4.0 Corresponding Author: Arnold Cusmariu, bravo323@gmail.com Citation: Cusmariu, A. (2021). “Roll over Beethoven, dig these rhythm and blues”. Academia Letters, Article 1248. https://doi.org/10.20935/AL1248. 2 just of the first movement of the Fifth, the first and last movements of the Seventh, and the second movement of the Ninth—heard on NBC Nightly News at one time. For sheer energy and controlled mayhem, Beethoven’s music is hard to, well, beat. • Beethoven couldn’t write a good tune. FALSE. The Ode to Joy theme of the Ninth is perhaps the most famous tune in all classical music, which is saying a lot. Once you hear it, it can be difficult to get it out of your head, like a catchy tune in a Verdi or Puccini opera. The opening of the Moonlight Sonata is another famous and memorable tune, likewise the song “Für Elise.” The happy-go-lucky tune opening the String Quartet Op. 59 #1 is another example, and one of the longest melodies Beethoven ever composed. • Catering to the audience was not Beethoven’s thing. TRUE. Beethoven famously ignored complaints that his music was too hard to play or comprehend. The first public performance of the B flat piano sonata opus 106 (Hammerklavier) was in 1836 by Franz Liszt. It was written in 1818. • Rock music is just about emotion. TRUE. The emotional impact in Beethoven’s music comes about as a result of an intellectual effort to grasp form. This might sound like a contradiction in terms, yet Vivaldi, Bach, and Handel did it time and again. Haydn and Mozart created the classical style by expanding old forms and adding and perfecting new ones. Haydn practically invented the symphony and the string quartet. He was one of Beethoven’s teachers in Vienna. • Rock music is about instant gratification. TRUE. A rock song is typically in A-B-A form and lasts three to five minutes. Rock music audiences seek entertainment, want instant gratification, and have no interest in grasping key relationships, changes in tonality or other musical concepts. We play “Love Is All Around” a second or third time for its emotional impact, not to make sure we didn’t miss anything. It’s all obvious the first time. It’s supposed to be. All rock music is. To expand on this a bit, complex musical structures such as sonata form, the fugue, the canon, theme-and-variations, and the rondo cannot be squeezed into a five-minute ABA song. As great as he was, Schubert knew it couldn’t be done and didn’t even try. Maybe Elton John can have a go and let us know how it went. Billy Joel didn’t get far trying to sound like Chopin. Well, Chopin was a poet; Billy Joel isn’t. Academia Letters, June 2021 ©2021 by the author — Open Access — Distributed under CC BY 4.0 Corresponding Author: Arnold Cusmariu, bravo323@gmail.com Citation: Cusmariu, A. (2021). “Roll over Beethoven, dig these rhythm and blues”. Academia Letters, Article 1248. https://doi.org/10.20935/AL1248. 3 • Rock music lacks humor. TRUE. Beethoven and his predecessors Haydn and Mozart all had a sense of humor, which found its way in their music. A classical symphony has a movement—usually the third— labeled “scherzo” (“joke,” in Italian), whose purpose is to lighten the mood from the previous two and prepare the listener for what is to come. In Beethoven, the final movement is often as long and complex as the first. On the other hand, I can’t think of a single piece of rock music that exemplifies humor or is even upbeat, which is not surprising considering the influence of rhythm and blues, as Chuck Berry noted. Listening to blues all day will have you jumping off a bridge. • Rock music is elementary. TRUE. As hard as it is to write a good tune, it is much harder to produce a harmonious whole out of overlapping thematic material. The technique to pull this off is counterpoint. Rock music would have taught Beethoven nothing about it, without which he could not have written even his Op. 1 piano trios. George Gershwin realized he didn’t know enough counterpoint to orchestrate Rhapsody in Blue. Ferde Grofé did it for him, contributing greatly to its popularity. Ravel orchestrated Mussorgsky’s Pictures at an Exhibition, originally a piano suite. A Beethoven symphony lasts over an hour. As to why someone would want to write a piece of music that lasts that long, whose components are different in form and content yet add up to a coherent whole, it’s the same reason Homer composed The Iliad and The Odyssey; Tolstoy wrote War and Peace; and Proust wrote Remembrance of Things Past: to do something monumental, something that by its sheer size, complexity and originality would prove that the human mind is capable of creating that is almost divine. Academia Letters, June 2021 ©2021 by the author — Open Access — Distributed under CC BY 4.0 Corresponding Author: Arnold Cusmariu, bravo323@gmail.com Citation: Cusmariu, A. (2021). “Roll over Beethoven, dig these rhythm and blues”. Academia Letters, Article 1248. https://doi.org/10.20935/AL1248. 4