Evening Eclectic December 6, 2020 Inspired by Beethoven

This episode of Evening Eclectic features music inspired by Beethoven by living classical music  composers.  This follows the beginning political statement of Willie Nelson's "Vote them Out"  and C.G. Walden's "Joe Can't Do It Alone" both related to the January 5th Georgia Run-off Election.

Brett Dean’s Pastoral Symphony.

Writing in the Minneapolis Star Tribune, Larry Fuchsberg writes “Dean wrote "Pastoral Symphony" after returning to his native Australia (following a 15-year stint as a violist in the Berlin Philharmonic) and finding the natural environment under siege. It's a battering ram of a piece -- a vehement, unsubtle indictment of creeping urbanization that aims to change behavior, not to beguile the ear. At its center are Australia's gloriously musical birds, audibly threatened with extinction as their habitat disappears.  As Brett Deans writes "What at the beginning was birdsong, becomes by the end traffic noise within an aggressive industrial landscape."  And again Fuchsberg  compares the piece's final gesture to a guillotine.  

Julian Terrell Otis’ Beethoven was Black        

Julian Terrell Otis is a genre-defying musician dedicated to the advancement of Black Music in America. His fusion of styles brings new perspective to the creative music, jazz, commercial, and contemporary classical worlds.  He is a great singing actor as well as vocalist who pulls the drama out of each song he performs.  He blew me away in several live performances.   Truly a remarkable talent.  His album All the Pretty Flowers is a must listen set of 8 tunes which sends you on a cosmic sonic journey. In the song Beethoven was black he is both celebrating and questioning the canon of classical music which ethnic and racial minorities have to reach out of their own traditions to conquer before advancing the art of contemporary classical music.

Michael Gordon writes: Beethoven’s brutish and loud music has always inspired me. At the time it was written, it was probably the loudest music on the planet. The raw power of his orchestral writing burned through the style of the time.

A commission by the Beethoven-Fest Bonn gave me the opportunity to ask this question: What if someone, while writing a piece of music for orchestra, just happened to stumble over the same material that Beethoven used? What if someone unknowingly used this material in the course of writing his or her new work?

In Rewriting Beethoven’s Seventh Symphony, I retained one essential musical idea from each movement of the original work. From the first movement, I couldn’t resist working with the huge barbaric opening chords. From the second movement, I took the divine and other-worldly theme, adjusting it slightly so that when it ends, it is in a key one half-step higher. The theme continues to cycle around and slowly spirals up. From the third movement, I lifted the background accompaniment and brought it to the foreground. From the fourth movement I used the main theme.

Did this “rewriting” transform the music, or did the music transform me? Throughout the process I questioned, Who am I to take these precious notes and mash them into clay? But at a certain point I simply got lost in the material. I reveled in its power. I forgot about these questions in my mind. I forgot about Beethoven.

Kanto Kechua #2 - Gabriela Lena Frank

The String Quartet Brooklyn Rider writes about their album “Healing Modes”: The healing properties of music have been recognized from ancient greek civilization to the field of modern neuroscience, and expressed in countless global traditions. The slow movement of Beethoven’s Opus 132, ‘Song of Holy Thanksgiving From a Convalescent to the Deity in the Lydian Mode’ is among the most profound expressions of healing in the string quartet repertoire.”  They asked 5 composers to write works to write music inspired by the healing properties of the slow movement of Beethoven’s Opus 132 quartet. I heard the entire work featuring both the Beethoven’s Opus 132 quartet and the newly commissioned works in concert at the 2019 Big Ears festival sitting maybe 5 feet from Johnny Gandelsman, one of the violinists of the quartet – so I could read the music as he was playing.   

Wolfgang Mitterer’s Nine in One

All the themes from all of Beethoven’s symphonies, played live by an orchestra, concentrated into one hour and supplemented with electronics – that’s “Nine in One”. Or: a wild rollercoaster ride through the twists and turns of Ludwig van Beethoven’s brain.

Kevin Puts: Inspiring Beethoven 

Kevin Puts writes “Inspiring Beethoven is a musical tale, completely imagined, of Ludwig van Beethoven finding the inspiration to compose the first movement Vivace of his Symphony No. 7. The materials of this joyous movement—the shape of the melody, the sprightly dotted rhythm—are all there, but I have cast them in the darkest of colors, reflecting the grim, inescapable realities of the great composer’s life. Out of the darkness intensified by the despair of his ever-worsening deafness, hope and inspiration come like a beacon of light, without warning, as they always seem to. Who or what causes this sudden transformation, I leave to the imagination of the listener.”