# What makes Beethoven sound like Beethoven??



## LAS (Dec 12, 2014)

I've wished for a long time that I understood what makes certain types of music almost immediately recognizable as "that type." By "almost immediately," I mean within a few measures. For my own self I would include Bach, Beethoven, Mozart (or... if insure it's probably Haydn), Brahms, Appalachian shape note music, Copland, Shaker music. Here I'm talking about situations where I don't recognize the particular piece. I'm not talking about the Fifth Symphony.

Remember PDQ Bach? Peter Schickele sure understood whatever this was. Since the identity is detectable so quickly I'm guessing that orchestration is a huge piece of it.

I've looked for texts that might speak to this but haven't been successful. Do any of you have thoughts?

And, as a specific, would you agree with me here? I just listened to the Beethoven violin concerto and decided that the first movement was clearly "Beethovenish." I'm not always able to identify which great violin concerto I'm hearing on the radio, and I think I might wonder if the 2nd movement is Bruch or Mendelssohn or Dvorak. Then I can imagine wondering if the 3rd movement might even be Mozart. Does this ring any bells?

TIA
LAS


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## Phil loves classical (Feb 8, 2017)

Exaggeration of a certain feature, as I read somewhere. Heavy at times, light as a feather in others. Musical language still in the vein of the classical period. Interesting question, which I don't think is very easy to answer. Like a picture is worth a 1000 words, what is an excerpt of a piece of music?


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## LAS (Dec 12, 2014)

Phil loves classical said:


> what is an excerpt of a piece of music?


Not sure what you mean here. Are you asking me for an excerpt illustrating something?


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## Phil loves classical (Feb 8, 2017)

No, just comparing music to a picture.


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## beetzart (Dec 30, 2009)

I've often wondered this, LAS, and I have absolutely no idea. Each composer has their own 'genetic' musical make up that is unique to them but why it happens like this I couldn't say. It is strange because Beethoven's early compositions were in the mould of Haydn and Mozart yet you can still tell they are Beethoven. Later works, say from 1815 on sound similar to Schubert but even though Schubert was in awe of Beethoven his music is still very unique and on closer inspection is very different to Beethoven's. You know Schubert is Schubert and Beethoven is Beethoven like you know Bach is not Handel, Chopin is not Liszt or Brahms is not Bruckner. But I tell you what I have endless hours of enjoyment and pleasure in listening to all these masters.


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## LAS (Dec 12, 2014)

Thanks for the confirmation.


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## Bettina (Sep 29, 2016)

Phil loves classical said:


> Exaggeration of a certain feature, as I read somewhere. Heavy at times, light as a feather in others.


Yes, I love Beethoven's "exaggerated" musical effects. It gives his music a larger-than-life feel! Very monumental and dramatic. Everything is on such a epic scale.

Contrasting dynamics are a huge part of Beethoven's style. Sudden shifts between very soft and very loud passages. Also, his music has a lot of emphatic repetition (which I suppose is a type of exaggeration), where each motive is often repeated many times to drive the point home. This is especially pronounced in his "heroic-style" works such as the 5th Symphony, the Emperor Concerto, and the Appassionata.


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## LAS (Dec 12, 2014)

But this wouldn't account for the "Beethovenish" sound in the first 2 or 3 measures. Right?


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## Bettina (Sep 29, 2016)

LAS said:


> But this wouldn't account for the "Beethovenish" sound in the first 2 or 3 measures. Right?


Yeah, that's true...the repetition and contrasts wouldn't kick in until later. As for the very beginning, maybe the Beethovenish sound comes from the simplicity of his opening musical ideas. Instead of a complete melody, his pieces often start with a very basic motive, like a broken chord or a fragment of a scale.

The famous four notes of the 5th symphony are the most famous example of his "bare bones" openings--nothing but three repeated notes and then a drop down to a longer note. A lot of his pieces have these kinds of opening gambits. Then, later in the piece, this basic material usually develops into something more elaborate.


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## Phil loves classical (Feb 8, 2017)

Bettina said:


> Yes, I love Beethoven's "exaggerated" musical effects. It gives his music a larger-than-life feel! Very monumental and dramatic. Everything is on such a epic scale.
> 
> Contrasting dynamics are a huge part of Beethoven's style. Sudden shifts between very soft and very loud passages. Also, his music has a lot of emphatic repetition (which I suppose is a type of exaggeration), where each motive is often repeated many times to drive the point home. This is especially pronounced in his "heroic-style" works such as the 5th Symphony, the Emperor Concerto, and the Appassionata.


Yup, is there anything on the piano as rip-roaring as the Appasionata? Amazing. I've read in one book that Beethoven is at his most personal in the piano sonatas. After listening to basically everything by Beethoven, I've come myself to that conclusion. In his Symphonies, I feel sometimes he is trying to prove something, and in the Ninth he proves it very eloquently. But his Piano Sonatas is like pure expression from his soul...:angel::devil:


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## Bettina (Sep 29, 2016)

Phil loves classical said:


> Yup, is there anything on the piano as rip-roaring as the Appasionata? Amazing. I've read in one book that Beethoven is at his most personal in the piano sonatas. After listening to basically everything by Beethoven, I've come myself to that conclusion. In his Symphonies, I feel sometimes he is trying to prove something, and in the Ninth he proves it very eloquently. But his Piano Sonatas is like pure expression from his soul...:angel::devil:


I agree about the piano sonatas. They were like his personal diaries. Also, they served as laboratories where he tried out different musical effects, which he then "imported" into his other genres. The 5th symphony, with its famous short-short-short-long motive, is an outgrowth of the techniques that he had developed a few years earlier in the Appassionata.


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## brianvds (May 1, 2013)

Bettina said:


> I agree about the piano sonatas. They were like his personal diaries. Also, they served as laboratories where he tried out different musical effects, which he then "imported" into his other genres. The 5th symphony, with its famous short-short-short-long motive, is an outgrowth of the techniques that he had developed a few years earlier in the Appassionata.


Rather curiously (I just looked it up) the Morse code for the letter B is long-short-short-short. 

What I find remarkable is that the distinctive 'Beethoven sound' is present even in some of his very early works. The piano quartets he wrote in his teens come to mind.


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## MarkW (Feb 16, 2015)

It varies genre to genre. Tovey wrote about being visited by a famous conductor, who spied B's Missa Solemnis open on his desk. The conductor pointed to the first measure (a C major chord) and remarked how amazing it was that one could recognize (even) any common chord orchestrated by Beethoven.


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## KenOC (Mar 7, 2011)

Many of our generalizations about Beethoven are based on a few "heroic" works of his middle period. Count 'em up, there really aren't that many. As for the rest, there's a tremendous variety and really no characteristic "Beethoven sound" that I can hear. The common thread in his music is a white-hot musical intelligence that has little to do with style, IMO.

As for his scoring of a common opening chord, compare the sound of the first massive chord in the Emperor Concerto with that of Haydn's 99th Symphony, also in E-flat. Beethoven peeked, the sly dog!


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## BabyGiraffe (Feb 24, 2017)

Dom 7ths, Diminished chord, secondary dominants.
It's not hard to make some kind of Beethoven pastiche - it would probably sound nice as a pop ballad or lyrical jazzy piece (if we add some extensions to the chords).
I'm not sure about his orchestrations - he was writing for the instruments of his own time and doesn't sound very good with modern instruments (and definitely can't compare to the great orchestrators like Korsakov, Ravel, Mahler, Strauss etc )


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## DavidA (Dec 14, 2012)

Beethoven! .


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## Animal the Drummer (Nov 14, 2015)

He has his musical fingerprints, of course, but any great art is more than merely the sum of its parts.


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## LAS (Dec 12, 2014)

MarkW said:


> It varies genre to genre. Tovey wrote about being visited by a famous conductor, who spied B's Missa Solemnis open on his desk. The conductor pointed to the first measure (a C major chord) and remarked how amazing it was that one could recognize (even) any common chord orchestrated by Beethoven.


Exactly!!!! Can anyone articulate why his orchestration is different from Mozart or Brahms when it is its most Beethovenish??


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## Pugg (Aug 8, 2014)

LAS said:


> Exactly!!!! Can anyone articulate why his orchestration is different from Mozart or Brahms when it is its most Beethovenish??


I ma not sure if anyone can do that, that's what makes every composer unique.


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## Totenfeier (Mar 11, 2016)

My top three all-time favorites are Mahler, Bruckner, and Beethoven (in that order). I see Mahler as "musical ADHD;" he's excited and excitable and bipolar and look! Squirrel and...and..._endless depth of feeling and wonder_.

Bruckner is "meditatively titanic." One senses a giant, building something with great stones, over centuries, while thinking deep, slow thoughts and prayers (there, I managed to say "musical cathedrals" without saying "musical cathedrals").

Beethoven is _dark energy_. Power. Decisiveness. Coordinated, focused movement, like that of an army marching to battle. Agony and ecstasy. Inexorability that elevates and energizes.


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## DaveM (Jun 29, 2015)

BabyGiraffe said:


> Dom 7ths, Diminished chord, secondary dominants.
> It's not hard to make some kind of Beethoven pastiche - it would probably sound nice as a pop ballad or lyrical jazzy piece (if we add some extensions to the chords).
> I'm not sure about his orchestrations - he was writing for the instruments of his own time and doesn't sound very good with modern instruments (and definitely can't compare to the great orchestrators like Korsakov, Ravel, Mahler, Strauss etc )


I almost choked on my Cheerios.


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## EdwardBast (Nov 25, 2013)

DaveM said:


> I almost choked on my Cheerios.


Corn flakes for me.


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## pcnog11 (Nov 14, 2016)

Many people say that Beethoven has a lot of passion in his music, I do not disagree with it. However, I think his music has another aspect to it. I call this "FIRE". Beethoven has the FIRE that other composer do not have, it is a mixture of love, hate, resentment and emotional tension of various kind. This FIRE is beyond music, it is beyond passion, it is unique to Beethoven and you cannot find it a with another composer, it is contagious and transferable. I think there is FIRE in anyone who loves Beethoven. Beethoven made this FIRE easily identifiable in his music, no matter you listen to few bars or whole symphony. It stands out in the listener mind and engage the listener to hear more. It is magical, emotional and left the listening to want more. This may be why people collect his symphony recordings like a wine cellar. One person in this forum has over 60 sets of his symphonies, personally, I have only 5 sets. I think I need to listen to some Beethoven now since the FIRE is burning in me again.


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## Guest (Mar 9, 2017)

Beethoven makes Beethoven sound Beethoven.


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## Ethereality (Apr 6, 2019)

BabyGiraffe said:


> Dom 7ths, Diminished chord, secondary dominants.
> It's not hard to make some kind of Beethoven pastiche - it would probably sound nice as a pop ballad or lyrical jazzy piece (if we add some extensions to the chords).
> I'm not sure about his orchestrations - he was writing for the instruments of his own time and doesn't sound very good with modern instruments (and definitely can't compare to the great orchestrators like Korsakov, Ravel, Mahler, Strauss etc )


- Beethoven makes especial use of secondary dominants like I7, so his harmonic theory is strict but it modulates to surrounding keys
- He uses Classical structure predominantly as a servant to make his melodies more creative and countered. His priority often seems to be melody > harmonic theory > counterpoint, not excluding either of these but rather ie. the second building upon the first, the third building upon the second etc.
- His orchestration is about catchy, playful rhythms with instruments countering one another


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## larold (Jul 20, 2017)

The characteristic that most sets Beethoven apart is rhythm -- in particular the driving, unrelenting rhythm in his heroic or dramatic works. This was just as true in his earliest dramatic music, such as his cantata for Leopold, to his latest music such as the Ninth Symphony and Missa Solemnis.

Some critics and musicologists label this as motoric but it is far more than that in Beethoven.

Certainly it is the linchpin aspect of his greatest work, the Fifth Symphony. It is also what sets him apart in his final piano sonata's final movement -- the nonstop rhythmic drive toward an unknown, then back to earth.

Beethoven creates a long line of tension through rhythmic inevitability that is unlike any other composer. Another poster just above said, "I call this "FIRE." It's the same thing.


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## Jacck (Dec 24, 2017)

his ruggedness .


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## hammeredklavier (Feb 18, 2018)

DaveM said:


> I almost choked on my Cheerios.


Brahms for me


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## Prodromides (Mar 18, 2012)

Sublunary said:


> Beethoven makes Beethoven sound Beethoven.


A beet farm is a beet farm is a beet farm ...


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## SONNET CLV (May 31, 2014)

There are those exercises in music composition classes where students are assigned to score a melody "in the style of ... Beethoven" or whomever. And the competent students do a good job of it, able to distinguish how Beethoven would have scored (for piano, string quartet, woodwind quintet, or orchestra ... or whatever combination) the melody in contrast to how Haydn, or Mozart, or Brahms, or Tchaikovsky, or Mahler ... et al. would have done so. It bubbles down to getting a grip on the harmonic structures favored by Beethoven (which chord inversions he prefers, which note holds the bass, where the tonic note is placed, and technical stuff the sort of I know little to nothing about), the way instruments are handled for their particular "color" (instrumental range, placement within chords, etc. etc.), tempos, melodic shapes ... a lot of technical stuff.

Because such things can be identified, nearly any competent composer can duplicate the sounds of famous composers (and generally, the famous composers all have particular, identifiable sounds. Many of us on this Forum can identify dozens of composers within a second or two of hearing a passage of their work (even a work we may never have encountered before). One of the things that seems to most mark a "greater" composer from a "lesser" one is that very sense of sound identity. Few of us will misidentify a fragment of Robert Schumann played alongside a fragment of Felix Mendelssohn or Hector Berlioz, all contemporaries. But don't expect the same results from a comparison of these three contemporaries (also contemporary with the above named composers, too): Joaquim Raff, Franz Berwald, and George Onslow.

I suspect that the composers out there can establish some viable markers that will aid a student in his or her analyses of the particular "sounds" of great composers.

By the way: one of the albums in my collection is the following:









This clever if banal disc features familiar Christmas songs for string quartet in arrangements styled after various composers. Part of the fun is recognizing the composer being mimicked. And it isn't very difficult.


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## ORigel (May 7, 2020)

This made me remember an AI that was fed Beethoven's orchestral works and composed a "symphony" in the style of Beethoven. The piece was terrible: it had some Beethoven-sounding passages but did not develop them. And the music would do something weird and then veer off in another direction. In the Youtube comments section, commenters tried to explain why the "symphony" was awful, but they were drowned out by a bunch of techies thinking that the Emmy program was as good as any human composer and that detractors would have loved the piece if ot had been touted as a lost Beethoven symphony.


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## Axter (Jan 15, 2020)

The opening of the 9th, 4th, 1st Symph. is what I associate as Beethovenian sound.


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## hammeredklavier (Feb 18, 2018)

Axter said:


> The opening of the 9th, 4th, 1st Symph. is what I associate as Beethovenian sound.


Yes, I think Mahler and Wagner were fascinated by that


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## Axter (Jan 15, 2020)

hammeredklavier said:


> Yes, I think Mahler and Wagner were fascinated by that


Well, now that you say it, I can draw some style parallels between Mahler's 1st Symph, 1st mvmt opening and Beethoven's 9th, 1st Mvmt opening.


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