Beethoven 250

The cancellation of classical music's sestercentennial of Beethoven's birth is the best thing to happen to music in years and years and years.

It's not that Beethoven doesn't deserve it, but so do literally thousands of other musicians over a period of a thousand years, and this year would have been just one more go round of music we already know too well while a whole catalogue of unperformed genius continues to gather moss, generation after generation, waiting to be discovered because a few artists rule over the rest of us like kings, some artists from whom, like Beethoven, would find any ideology which places them as gods over everyone else an horrific anathema. And for those who feel like they've missed something terrible, don't worry, we'll have to do the whole thing over again in seven years for the bicentennial of his death.

There is something creepy in the celebration of dead artist birthdays. It's a bit like celebrating the birth of Christ or of Kim-Jong Un, only our theocratic dictator becomes the artist. These are not the celebrations of a friend but of a god, who views us as his slaves, and looks down upon us from the skies as toys for his own gratification as he coerces the faithful into appreciating him as though our lives would have no meaning at all if not for his presence. But if these artists - be they Beethoven or Shakespeare or Rembrandt, have any relation to our personal lives, it's not because of the awe their creation provokes but because the emotions they provoke are relatable to us as human beings. They're not gods or idols, they're friends, they're family, they're neighbors, sometimes they're antagonists, they're inescapable facts of our lives, and like any inescapable fact of life, sometimes they provoke extreme irritation or even feelings of hurt, rage, and betrayal. And in reality, the only people who would ever think to keep celebrating the birthdays of people after they die are quacks who go to seances.

I recently had a very weird interaction on a contemporary classical music forum where I got caught between two opposite trolls. When I mentioned that the cancellation of the Beethoven may turn out to be a blessing in disguise, I got a troll who accused me of 'trying to look cool' by being snarky against a genius. Now I can probably write out a couple dozen Beethoven works in full score with reasonable accuracy, while he could just troll online, so obviously my devotion to classical music is unequal to his. But then, when I proved that I knew more about Beethoven than that maladjust, I encountered a second malcontent, who used my comment as a screed to claim that Beethoven is the music of 200 years ago, and therefore has nothing to contribute to the present day.

The internet obviously brings out the worst in the worst of us, perhaps even the worst in the best, but whatever our pathology, the internet will magnify it. With every post on the internet, there are really three people who post: the person we are, the person we wish to present ourselves as, and the person our fears create. The more we want to present ourselves as person #2, the more person #3 takes over. Everyone who posts on the internet to virtuously fight for the greater good, whatever our political orientation, has never yet found a shred of evidence yet that they've improved the world, and encounters wall-to-wall evidence that all it's ever done is entrench in their ways those who disagree exponentially more so than they would be if we weren't yelling our opinions at them. We think what we are posting is our better angels, but angels have nowhere near the cunning of demons, and rage can so easily convince itself it's righteousness.

Beethoven would not recognize the details of this new world, but he would easily taste the revolutionary flavor, and far more than his most fervent devotees (probably far more than I) he would welcome it and do everything within his power to accelerate the process. It is not hard to imagine Beethoven being overwhelmingly distracted by social media, getting into the most heated debates over trivial insignificance, pouring all his potential for new Eroicas and Appassionatas into some social media screed, forgetting that the world probably has far more need of his art than his specific opinoins. What is the story of Beethoven's renunciation of the Eroica's dedication to Napoleon but Beethoven's way of saying "I wanted him to be Bernie Sanders, I didn't expect him to be Trump!"?

New technology does not change human beings, it reveals new dimensions of what human beings already are. Just as there would be no French Revolution and Napoleon without the Industrial Revolution to unleash the world's latent passions, there would be no Internet and Information Revolutions without these revolutions unleashing whatever dreadful revolutions and reactions likely to come in their wake.

Just as happened in Beethoven's era, when industry overtook feudal rurality as it was practiced for a thousand years, today's era of information overtakes the world of straightforward narratives like the written word and notated music and creates a world composited through data accumulated by the trillions and therefore with potential to evolve at trillions of times the speed. What hope has musical notation as we understand it to keep up with the developments of a new world in which any musical sound can be reproduced with digital immaculacy, then filtered, spliced, edited, compressed, and distorted into millions of musical worlds not yet visited? It is a cultural quantum leap for which not even Beethoven prepared us, and even if Beethoven still is, as I believe he is, the greatest musical artist in the history of the world, it is time for Beethoven to retire from his solo position and take his place as a still much honored member of the choir.

We live in the shadow of 1800. On the one side, the Enlightenment world of Mozart, Voltaire, Kant, Hume, Adam Smith, Johnson and Boswell, Newton and Leibniz, Spinoza and Locke, Lavoisier, Montesquieu, Goethe, Burke, and and the 'Founding Fathers' who used reason to conceive the possibility of a better world than the absolutes of monarchy and divine right and command, worlds of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. But humans act by the dictates of reason only with the most titanic struggles, and it was not the enlightened who put the overthrow into place but those messy revolutionaries and romantics: Beethoven, Robespierre, Rousseau, Hegel, Keats, Coleridge, Byron, Blake, Delacroix, Goya, Berlioz, Pushkin, Mickiewicz, Emerson, Caspar David Friedrich, the Brontes, the Shelleys, Poe, and Napoleon, a revolution of liberty, equality, and fraternity procured for our future by the morbidly agonizing death of their present.

Where do we stand now that 1800's most promising nation has become yet another ancien regime, and seems increasingly like all of us could start losing our heads at any moment? When everything we thought we knew about whole world is no longer true, then all that remains is new possibilities, and the ability to evolve apace with the growth of a new world before that new world demands a revolution that can kill everything we ever loved.

Whatever the field, be it music or be it politics or be it science, it means that if we want to preserve old certainties, we have to let them go, and accept that many of the old are going to die. Nowhere in the world is there a place which more embodies the spirit of those old certainties than classical music, where orchestral boards and easy money have kept audiences fundamentally embalmed in 1913 long after the world before 1913 is guaranteed to pay to keep the lights on.

But no one in the world would have been more welcoming of that development than reliable old Beethoven. Like all great geniuses, and surely Louie was among the greatest, he is always ahead of us, and in this case, part of being ahead of us is the realization built into his music's DNA that huge changes to all of our lives are an inevitability. For those of us in the increasingly miniscule and destitute world of classical music, that means realizing that we have long since become dinosaurs, and our inability to move apace with the times has been a curse on music, not just ours but everyone's, millions of people who could have been deeply affected by Beethoven moved into popular music which, by its very nature, does not tell people what they don't want to hear, and deliberately keeps awareness of history's seizmic shifts and shocks at bay. (yeah, yeah, yeah... it's more complicated...)

It's been a hundred years since music needed massive orchestras to make massive sound. It's been a hundred years since music needed musical notation to demonstrate great virtuosity. It's been a hundred years since the great fissure between classical and popular, high and low, un-self-conscious erudition and un-self-conscious enjoyment, and Beethoven would have been scandalized by the whole thing. He'd want to seize us all by the throat as irresponsible custodians of this artform we claim to love, which he worked so hard to give a future rather than merely a present, and which we are allowing to die along with all the other certainties of an era that may yet kill us along with any future for Beethoven.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z9WaIKdqIU4