Eroica

I have a memory of my Form and Analysis professor walking the class through the form of one of Beethoven's piano sonatas. It was interesting to see what rules he breaks, to read through an extended coda.... What stuck with me, though, was a comment our professor made regarding the ability of Beethoven's contemporaries (the audience, more or less) to hear the return of the tonic as it repeats throughout the piece. I'm still skeptical that the average Austrian listener could hear the changes going by in his symphonies; but on the other hand, I'm sure Haydn could hear the music progressing, or whoever else may have been listening with trained ears. I wonder if musical training in the early 1800s entailed learning to hear chord progressions. Were listeners able to hear what was going on on a first listen or only at subsequent performances? A difficult feat even in our time, but back then, who knows when you would get a chance to hear his first symphony again. Would you have to wait a year? Two? Maybe you could find a piano reduction? Or you could make your own reduction out of the score...? Ouch.

Hmmm.... A thought just occurred to me. Maybe the anger (anger?) or criticisms flung at great composers such as Beethoven stemmed from the audience's not being able to hear the changes. Maybe you learned to hear the theme repeat (at the dominant? relative minor? I don't remember the standard form...) in more typical classical works and when Beethoven's piece would modulate to the minor sixth, or something odd like that, it threw his listeners out of their comfort zone, giving them the experience I imagine everyone has now when they listen to a symphony; that is, they don't know what the fuck's going on. Even most musicians, I think, just hear themes repeating, recurring motifs; I'm sure some can hear that a modulation has taken place, but I'm also sure that few (at least, those without perfect pitch) could tell you to which key the orchestra has moved.

Did more people have perfect pitch in the nineteenth century? I guess that depends on when their musical training began and how much ear training was involved.

So, anyways, I've decided to try and get more out of my listening of classical music, starting with Beethoven's symphonies, starting with the Eroica, starting with the first movement....of the Eroica. Play, pause, play, pause, rewind, play, rewind, play. I'm trying to do it without a piano as much as possible, but a couple times I've given in. I finally know what the first chord is after the Eb major chord (a second inversion g diminished chord). This is exciting.

Two hours later.... I've finished with 6 minutes of the first movement (really, that's cheating, though, since the first 3 minutes repeat without any changes...), and I roughly know the chords as they're going by. The piece is really stunning. I'm pretty sure this project is going to be a success, since already I feel like I'm appreciating what I'm listening to a lot more. I wish I had learned this in school.

So many neat things. The dissonant large chords I now know to be (ready?) diminished chords on top of the tonic. So, F# diminished over Bb. I love how every section builds ineluctably to a chord you can't see coming. A lot of...chord, up a half step diminished, up a half step-chord, up a half step-diminished, and a lot of lines, even some rotations. Some of it reminds me of Charlie Parker. And I love the little punch on the last Bb7 chord right before the restatement of the...exposition? I think? I can't remember what it's called. And who cares?

I just had an interesting thought about music, tangentially related. I've been reading a number of essays about Ulysses that explore the relationship (or lack thereof) between signifier (word) and signified (that to which the word refers). I'm not as up on my literary theory as I'd like, but I think this has to do with post-structuralism.....? Anyway, the cool thing, I guess, according to these papers, about Ulysses is that it starts to dismantle the relationship between words and their objects in the "real" world. The words are, sometimes, content to refer to themselves, to gererate meaning through their sounds and their relationships to one another. I'm not sure I agree with all of this, or if I've got it all right (too, it is getting pretty late, so I'm not thinking totally clearly). Something about Derrida....

In any case, the whole idea about signifier and signified will, I promise, pull me back to Beethoven eventually. So Joyce's next book Finnegans Wake makes little immediate sense beyond the associations it pulls up in the reader's mind; the sound of the words, the portmanteaus, the vague undercurrent of the text, a collective unconscious recreated. My point is that, when reading it, I imagine one can make little sense of the signifiers (words) themselves but, at the same time, can get some general impression of what they collectively signify, or at the very least, create a signification of one's own, regardless of Joyce's intent (....well, honestly, this seems to be his intent). The result, with this book and with, to a lesser extent, Ulysses too for that matter, is very different from a reader's usual novel-reading experience. Here is what I'm getting at (blah blah blah blah): The reader doesn't understand the sentences (or even the words sometimes), but reaches a meaning, nevertheless.

Like music, right? Most listeners don't understand the harmony. Even most professional musicians don't follow the chordal movement of Beethoven's symphonies without some preparation first, and even then...
So, here we have a lay audience that is probably consciously missing even the repetition of motifs but still appreciates the beauty of the sounds, and we have an audience of musicians who recognize the musical ideas (words) but consciously are unaware of the progession of keys. Or, even if they are aware of the harmonic movement, they (myself included) don't know exactly what key they're in at any given moment.

So that's 99% of all listeners who aren't able to put the words they're hearing into sentences. How many books could you stomach reading in that manner? Concerts are only so long for a reason. Read beautiful nonsense for more than two hours straight and see how patient you can be.

So, a first step; now I can hear-read the sentences of the first 6 minutes of Beethoven's 3rd. Time for bed. Far past time for bed.