# Beethoven's influence on modernity



## Mandryka (Feb 22, 2013)

A thread inspired by listening to Clarence Barlow's _fantasia quasi una sonata (con "Mantra" di Stockhausen)_


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## pianozach (May 21, 2018)

I listened to the first 60 seconds. 

OMG. That is a trainwreck of a piece. Sort of like Mozart, Beethoven, Chopin, Liszt, Brahms, and Keith Emerson collided in a dark room.

OK, I'm being a bit harsh calling it a train wreck. But it does seem like a pastiche of every piano style from Mozart to Khachaturian. The only style I don't hear is Gershwin.

So . . . I pressed "play" again and listened to another four minutes . . . my mind is not changed.


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## Mandryka (Feb 22, 2013)

So one way that Beethoven has influenced modernity is by pastiche. Are there other ways?


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## Mandryka (Feb 22, 2013)

Here's another very explicitly Beethoven influenced piece -- is it pastiche or something else. Michael Finnissy's Hammerklavier


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## EdwardBast (Nov 25, 2013)

Could you briefly explain how the Finnissy is influenced by Beethoven? Is it slicing and dicing pitch content from Beethoven's Op. 106? Or what?


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## Phil loves classical (Feb 8, 2017)

EdwardBast said:


> Could you briefly explain how the Finnissy is influenced by Beethoven? Is it slicing and dicing pitch content from Beethoven's Op. 106? Or what?


I already looked into it:

_Hammerklavier_ is inspired by Finnissy’s memories of the great Soviet pianist Sviatoslav Richter performing Beethoven’s ‘Hammerklavier’ Sonata in 1975, and by Richter’s secret queer life. 

I didn't know Richter was gay.


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## Mandryka (Feb 22, 2013)

EdwardBast said:


> Could you briefly explain how the Finnissy is influenced by Beethoven? Is it slicing and dicing pitch content from Beethoven's Op. 106? Or what?


Two centuries later after its composition, Beethoven’s piece provided inspiration for the modernists of the 1950s, in particular, the sonatas of Jean Barraqué—at that time the lover of Michel Foucault—and Pierre Boulez, whose “explosive, disintegrating, and dispersive” Second Sonata used Beethoven’s Hammerklavier as a program to “destroy the first-movement sonata form” from within. Finnissy continues this approach by seeking to “compose with Beethoven’s work as if it were my own”: a process of “re-interpretation, fragmentation, re-locating, estrangement, cubist-perspective.” Radically transforming quoted material—for instance, retaining only the rhythmic values of the Hammerklavier while totally changing its pitch content—Finnssy’s work is also composed “backwards,” beginning with Beethoven’s finale and ending with its famous opening movement. The result completely destabilizes the sonata’s narrative momentum, its dramatization of progress and struggle.

In 1975, Finnissy witnessed Soviet pianist Sviatoslav Richter perform Beethoven’s sonata to a standing-room only Royal Festival Hall. Coming on stage wearing what appeared to be carpet slippers and barely acknowledging the audience, Richter, Finnissy suggested in a prerecorded preconcert interview, played with an utterly uncompromising, unflashy focus, as if in private communion with Beethoven. “The pianist,” suggested Richter, “shouldn’t dominate the music, but should dissolve into it.” Finnissy has long pondered that intangible quality of Richter’s work, but in the light of subsequent revelations in Karl Aage Rasmussen’s 2007 biography Sviatoslav Richter: Pianist as to his queerness—his life partnership with soprano Nina Dorliak, herself queer, was not a sexual one—the obliqueness of his style took on new dimensions.

For Finnissy, Richter’s circumspection isn’t so much “the closet” as a kind of “spiritual” quality, expressed not within religious forms but through the wordless weight of tradition found in the music of Schubert, Beethoven, and others of whom Richter was such a profound interpreter. “I float on the waves of art and life,” he once said, “and never really know how to distinguish what belongs to one or the other or what is common to both. Life unfolds for me like a theater presenting a sequence of somewhat unreal sentiments; while the things of art are real to me and go straight to my heart.” Richter’s performance allows us to hear the silences and the absences that abide even in the heart of Beethoven’s most dramatic and clangorous of compositions as beacons of social, political, and spiritual hope.

In his program note, Finnissy wonders: “Are there inroads into Beethoven’s work that are available to homosexual people that are not open to heterosexuals? . . . My own discourse about the Hammerklavier is underscored by my homosexuality. Do I ‘misread’ the work?” This is not a simple outing of Richter or a reclamation of another queer icon to add to the retrospective hall of fame. At stake are questions of representation: by whom, for whom, as part of what? “There’s very little written intelligently about gay composers, and dozens still in the closet,” Finnissy suggested to Gregory Woods in 2003. “How? Why? . . . Musicologists still ask, ‘Does it really matter whether x is gay or not?’’ In Finnissy’s Hammerklavier, his evocation of Richter takes shape around silence and invisibility as much as visibility, his allusions to Barraqué’s sonata encompassing the fitful rests that progressively puncture both pieces’ dense textures. Grace notes—extremely brief, ornamental figures that glide, unstressed into the principal note that follows—sound out alone into extended pauses, this juxtaposition of florid activity and abrupt stillness evoking the soundless intervals in the second movement of Barraqué’s sonata, if silence can be a quotation. But Finnissy’s silences—while they bespeak the gaps and absences that characterize the closet, the silences of Richter’s private life—are also openings onto something else: They look the void head on and make it speak its secrets.

In the accompanying film made by Finnissy’s former student Adam De La Cour, images from vintage male physique magazines appeared alongside footage of Richter performing and patterns projected onto a man’s nude body, all rendered as fragments of digitally abstracted footage, furtive and obscure. The performance involved watching and listening to something perpetually out of reach, a mystery that has its own erotic charge, exploring the shadows imposed on queer people throughout history while refusing a straightforward narrative of progress from the (white male) closet to (white male) assimilation. “How? Why?” Against pinkwashing, homonationalism, and cops at Pride, as well as the tired terms of contemporary “culture wars”—discursive attacks staged by an embittered and embattled right wing—this is a queer music that puts minds and ears on edge, a bruising and exhilarating torrent of thought and feeling, quicksilver and dense, transparent and thick; a space not for the reinforcements of canons, traditions, and prejudices, but for a sustained questioning of what it means to listen at all.


(Michael Finnissy reimagines Beethoven’s Hammerklavier - Artforum International )


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## Mandryka (Feb 22, 2013)

Interesting comment on Barraqué there. I know that Barraqué was keen on Beethoven, indeed I have his writings on Beethoven. But I wasn't aware that the big piano sonata was in some sense derived from a reflection on op 106.


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## Mandryka (Feb 22, 2013)

Here's more food for thought vis-à-vis Beethoven's contribution to modernity -- Stockhausen's Beethoven op 1970. Pastiche? Mockery? Or something else?


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## Mandryka (Feb 22, 2013)

Phil loves classical said:


> I didn't know Richter was gay.


Quiz question, you are *not *allowed to cheat. 

Who said _There are only Jewish, gay, and bad pianists?_


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## EdwardBast (Nov 25, 2013)

Mandryka said:


> Two centuries later after its composition, Beethoven’s piece provided inspiration for the modernists of the 1950s, in particular, the sonatas of Jean Barraqué—at that time the lover of Michel Foucault—and Pierre Boulez, whose “explosive, disintegrating, and dispersive” Second Sonata used Beethoven’s Hammerklavier as a program to “destroy the first-movement sonata form” from within. Finnissy continues this approach by seeking to “compose with Beethoven’s work as if it were my own”: a process of “re-interpretation, fragmentation, re-locating, estrangement, cubist-perspective.” Radically transforming quoted material—for instance, retaining only the rhythmic values of the Hammerklavier while totally changing its pitch content—Finnssy’s work is also composed “backwards,” beginning with Beethoven’s finale and ending with its famous opening movement. The result completely destabilizes the sonata’s narrative momentum, its dramatization of progress and struggle.
> 
> In 1975, Finnissy witnessed Soviet pianist Sviatoslav Richter perform Beethoven’s sonata to a standing-room only Royal Festival Hall. Coming on stage wearing what appeared to be carpet slippers and barely acknowledging the audience, Richter, Finnissy suggested in a prerecorded preconcert interview, played with an utterly uncompromising, unflashy focus, as if in private communion with Beethoven. “The pianist,” suggested Richter, “shouldn’t dominate the music, but should dissolve into it.” Finnissy has long pondered that intangible quality of Richter’s work, but in the light of subsequent revelations in Karl Aage Rasmussen’s 2007 biography Sviatoslav Richter: Pianist as to his queerness—his life partnership with soprano Nina Dorliak, herself queer, was not a sexual one—the obliqueness of his style took on new dimensions.
> 
> ...


I'm sorry I asked. What a despicable performance — by which I mean the music, the concept, and the mind-numbing excretion of words by which he explained it.


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## Symbol (3 mo ago)

Mandryka said:


> Quiz question, you are *not *allowed to cheat.
> 
> Who said _There are only Jewish, gay, and bad pianists?_


To the best of my knowledge, that was Horowitz.


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## Phil loves classical (Feb 8, 2017)

Mandryka said:


> Two centuries later after its composition, Beethoven’s piece provided inspiration for the modernists of the 1950s, in particular, the sonatas of Jean Barraqué—at that time the lover of Michel Foucault—and Pierre Boulez, whose “explosive, disintegrating, and dispersive” Second Sonata used Beethoven’s Hammerklavier as a program to “destroy the first-movement sonata form” from within. Finnissy continues this approach by seeking to “compose with Beethoven’s work as if it were my own”: a process of “re-interpretation, fragmentation, re-locating, estrangement, cubist-perspective.” Radically transforming quoted material—for instance, retaining only the rhythmic values of the Hammerklavier while totally changing its pitch content—Finnssy’s work is also composed “backwards,” beginning with Beethoven’s finale and ending with its famous opening movement. The result completely destabilizes the sonata’s narrative momentum, its dramatization of progress and struggle.
> 
> In 1975, Finnissy witnessed Soviet pianist Sviatoslav Richter perform Beethoven’s sonata to a standing-room only Royal Festival Hall. Coming on stage wearing what appeared to be carpet slippers and barely acknowledging the audience, Richter, Finnissy suggested in a prerecorded preconcert interview, played with an utterly uncompromising, unflashy focus, as if in private communion with Beethoven. “The pianist,” suggested Richter, “shouldn’t dominate the music, but should dissolve into it.” Finnissy has long pondered that intangible quality of Richter’s work, but in the light of subsequent revelations in Karl Aage Rasmussen’s 2007 biography Sviatoslav Richter: Pianist as to his queerness—his life partnership with soprano Nina Dorliak, herself queer, was not a sexual one—the obliqueness of his style took on new dimensions.
> 
> ...


I found Finnissy's notes more entertaining than his performance. Hehe.


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## Mandryka (Feb 22, 2013)

Phil loves classical said:


> I found Finnissy's notes more entertaining than his performance. Hehe.





EdwardBast said:


> I'm sorry I asked. What a despicable performance — by which I mean the music, the concept, and the mind-numbing excretion of words by which he explained it.



I just you both to get beyond your taste and your perceptions of worth, and start to think about the impact of Beethoven on modernity. I know this is social media open to the public, so a certain level of response is to some extent inevitable, but if this thread is just going to consist of people saying "I like" or "I no like", then it's not very interesting to me personally.


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## hammeredklavier (Feb 18, 2018)

""My string writing is indeed very traditional," muses Richter. "I listen to a lot of Purcell. And if there's a model for the big string piece on The Blue Notebooks, which is 'On The Nature Of Daylight', it's late Beethoven. I'm looking for that incredible intensity and clarity, using the minimum amount of notes possible."


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## Mandryka (Feb 22, 2013)

hammeredklavier said:


> ""My string writing is indeed very traditional," muses Richter. "I listen to a lot of Purcell. And if there's a model for the big string piece on The Blue Notebooks, which is 'On The Nature Of Daylight', it's late Beethoven. I'm looking for that incredible intensity and clarity, using the minimum amount of notes possible."







I think the first minute or so of this is so close to Beethoven that, though very agreeable, it seems to me no more than an exercise of style, not real art. Like when you say to the students: write me a piano sonata in the style of Haydn.


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## Symbol (3 mo ago)

Maybe I don't quite get the intention of this thread, but isn't Beethoven's influence on modernity of far more general nature?

For instance, Beethoven's expressivity was certainly of significant importance to early modernism, in particular Schoenberg and Stravinsky.

It is also hard to imagine the modern string quartet without Beethoven taking the genre to the level of his late quartets.

Would Boulez' piano sonatas have been possible without Beethoven's big 32 for the instrument?

And so on...

But maybe I just don't get what this is about?


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## Mandryka (Feb 22, 2013)

Symbol said:


> Maybe I don't quite get the intention of this thread, but isn't Beethoven's influence on modernity of far more general nature?
> 
> For instance, Beethoven's expressivity was certainly of significant importance to early modernism, in particular Schoenberg and Stravinsky.
> 
> ...


This is exactly the sort of thought I'd like to explore. I know that Schoenberg mentioned Beethoven as an inspiration in his early, pre-modern, music like Gurrerlieder and Pelleas. I don't know that that influence continued as his musical thinking evolved into various forms of non-tonality. I don't know anything about Stravinsky. 

I will think about what you said about Boulez and the string quartet.


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## EdwardBast (Nov 25, 2013)

Mandryka said:


> I just you both to get beyond your taste and your perceptions of worth, and start to think about the impact of Beethoven on modernity. I know this is social media open to the public, so a certain level of response is to some extent inevitable, but if this thread is just going to consist of people saying "I like" or "I no like", then it's not very interesting to me personally.


Finnissy's piece has nothing to do with Beethoven's influence on modernity. It's an infantile theatrical statement in which Beethoven is used as a prop.


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## RICK RIEKERT (Oct 9, 2017)

Beethoven greatly influenced Stravinsky’s Piano Sonata, especially in the Adagietto (second movement). According to his Autobiography, at this point in his career (1924) Stravinsky was renewing his contact with Beethoven. Stravinsky is said by Alfredo Casella to have used the phrase ‘Beethoven frisé’ for the ornamental style that he emulated in the second movement. Charles Rosen has suggested that the second movement of Beethoven’s Op. 54 was a model for the third movement of Stravinsky’s Sonata. Also, Stravinsky’s reverence for Beethoven’s Diabelli Variations is well known.

Bartók was often candid about Beethoven’s powerful influence on his compositions: “In my youth my ideal for what was beautiful was not so much Bach’s or Mozart’s creations as those of Beethoven.” In his article,“Beethoven and Bartók–A Structural Parallel”, John Meyer shows how Bartók modeled the second movement of the Second Piano Concerto after the second movement of Beethoven’s Fourth Piano Concerto. In both works, soloist and orchestra are treated as opposing forces that avoid dialogue and maintain dramatically contrasting characters. In terms of texture, Beethoven achieves the contrast by pairing the sempre staccato block chords of the orchestra against the molto cantabile solo entry of the piano. In the Bartók, the block chords of the muted strings playing non-vibrato sharply contrast the dolce solo piano. Beethoven achieved further contrast between piano and orchestra by avoiding exact repetitions of thematic material in favor of variation. Meyer suggests that by developing their own thematic material, each musical agent (soloist or orchestra) is less reliant and subsequently more independently defined in terms of musical identity. In both pieces, the respective thematic material of each musical agent maintains its own continuity regardless of being interrupted by the contrasting other. We see this play out in the Bartók, the way the strings of the Adagio return unchanged after each interaction with the piano’s peasant melody. And in her essay in The Cambridge Companion to Bartók, “The Piano Concertos and Sonata for Two Pianos and Percussion,” Nicky Losseff suggests Bartók’s development of arch form was heavily influenced by Beethoven’s use of related themes appearing throughout a work in order to give it cohesion (the conflict-resolution model), such as when resolution only arrives in the finale’s coda of the Second Piano Concerto.


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## Monsalvat (11 mo ago)

Boulez's second Piano Sonata was specifically modeled on the _Hammerklavier_ I believe, though _that_ is a work that _really_ goes over my head. It's atonal and I thought that while not a strict serialist piece it used elements of a tone row; instead of two contrasting thematic groups in the opening movement, there are two contrasting _textural_ groups. Boulez said he wanted to use the sonata form self-destructively. It boggles my mind that this was written _before_ the _Vier letzte Lieder_ of R. Strauss.

And it just _looks_ bloody violent on the page. I always liked the “pulvériser le son” instruction, it’s an amazingly graphic description of what Boulez asks for. Every note here has a precisely specified articulation. And forget about a time signature. This is three-part counterpoint if you could call it that.
View attachment 176754

Certainly a far cry from Beethoven.


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## pianozach (May 21, 2018)

I'm don't know if attempting to 

Are you

Um, playing Beethoven in a "gay" way. This whole line of thought seems rather . . . 

You know, never mind.


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## Mandryka (Feb 22, 2013)

Monsalvat said:


> Boulez's second Piano Sonata was specifically modeled on the _Hammerklavier_ I believe, though _that_ is a work that _really_ goes over my head. It's atonal and I thought that while not a strict serialist piece it used elements of a tone row; instead of two contrasting thematic groups in the opening movement, there are two contrasting _textural_ groups. Boulez said he wanted to use the sonata form self-destructively. It boggles my mind that this was written _before_ the _Vier letzte Lieder_ of R. Strauss.
> 
> And it just _looks_ bloody violent on the page. I always liked the “pulvériser le son” instruction, it’s an amazingly graphic description of what Boulez asks for. Every note here has a precisely specified articulation. And forget about a time signature. This is three-part counterpoint if you could call it that.
> View attachment 176754
> ...


Interesting how the Hammerklavier keeps coming up. Boulez, Barraqué, Finnissy.


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## Mandryka (Feb 22, 2013)

EdwardBast said:


> Finnissy's piece has nothing to do with Beethoven's influence on modernity. It's an infantile theatrical statement in which Beethoven is used as a prop.


But you can hear the Beethoven in the Finnissy! What I mean is, Beethoven’s influence is in the music, not in the commentary, the statement. And Finnissy is a modern composer obviously - one of the composers at the top of the tree I’d say, in terms of establishment and peer group recognition.


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## Mandryka (Feb 22, 2013)

pianozach said:


> I'm don't know if attempting to
> 
> Are you
> 
> ...


Who’s playing Beethoven in a gay way?


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## pianozach (May 21, 2018)

Mandryka said:


> Who’s playing Beethoven in a gay way?


Perhaps I"m reading too much into these two posts:





”Phil loves classical said:


> _ Hammerklavier_ is inspired by Finnissy’s memories of the great Soviet pianist Sviatoslav Richter performing Beethoven’s ‘Hammerklavier’ Sonata in 1975, and by Richter’s secret queer life.
> 
> I didn't know Richter was gay.





”Mandryka” said:


> In 1975, Finnissy witnessed Soviet pianist Sviatoslav Richter perform Beethoven’s sonata to a standing-room only Royal Festival Hall. Coming on stage wearing what appeared to be carpet slippers and barely acknowledging the audience, Richter, Finnissy suggested in a prerecorded preconcert interview, played with an utterly uncompromising, unflashy focus, as if in private communion with Beethoven. “The pianist,” suggested Richter, “shouldn’t dominate the music, but should dissolve into it.” Finnissy has long pondered that intangible quality of Richter’s work, but in the light of subsequent revelations in Karl Aage Rasmussen’s 2007 biography Sviatoslav Richter: Pianist as to his queerness—his life partnership with soprano Nina Dorliak, herself queer, was not a sexual one—the obliqueness of his style took on new dimensions.


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## EdwardBast (Nov 25, 2013)

RICK RIEKERT said:


> Beethoven greatly influenced Stravinsky’s Piano Sonata, especially in the Adagietto (second movement). According to his Autobiography, at this point in his career (1924) Stravinsky was renewing his contact with Beethoven. Stravinsky is said by Alfredo Casella to have used the phrase ‘Beethoven frisé’ for the ornamental style that he emulated in the second movement. Charles Rosen has suggested that the second movement of Beethoven’s Op. 54 was a model for the third movement of Stravinsky’s Sonata. Also, Stravinsky’s reverence for Beethoven’s Diabelli Variations is well known.
> 
> Bartók was often candid about Beethoven’s powerful influence on his compositions: “In my youth my ideal for what was beautiful was not so much Bach’s or Mozart’s creations as those of Beethoven.” In his article,“Beethoven and Bartók–A Structural Parallel”, John Meyer shows how Bartók modeled the second movement of the Second Piano Concerto after the second movement of Beethoven’s Fourth Piano Concerto. In both works, soloist and orchestra are treated as opposing forces that avoid dialogue and maintain dramatically contrasting characters. In terms of texture, Beethoven achieves the contrast by pairing the sempre staccato block chords of the orchestra against the molto cantabile solo entry of the piano. In the Bartók, the block chords of the muted strings playing non-vibrato sharply contrast the dolce solo piano. Beethoven achieved further contrast between piano and orchestra by avoiding exact repetitions of thematic material in favor of variation. Meyer suggests that by developing their own thematic material, each musical agent (soloist or orchestra) is less reliant and subsequently more independently defined in terms of musical identity. In both pieces, the respective thematic material of each musical agent maintains its own continuity regardless of being interrupted by the contrasting other. We see this play out in the Bartók, the way the strings of the Adagio return unchanged after each interaction with the piano’s peasant melody. And in her essay in The Cambridge Companion to Bartók, “The Piano Concertos and Sonata for Two Pianos and Percussion,” *Nicky Losseff suggests Bartók’s development of arch form was heavily influenced by Beethoven’s use of related themes appearing throughout a work in order to give it cohesion (the conflict-resolution model), such as when resolution only arrives in the finale’s coda of the Second Piano Concerto*.


This is equally clear in the Concerto for Orchestra where the subject of the brass fugue from the first movement returns to cap the more elaborate subject of the finale fugue. In the second concerto I love how he saves the most mysterious, quiet, extensively ramified stretto passage to set up the finale's ending. Reminds me of those deep breaths before a plunge in Beethoven, like the oboe recitative interrupting the recap of the principal theme in Beethoven's 5th/i.


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## Mandryka (Feb 22, 2013)

pianozach said:


> Perhaps I"m reading too much into these two posts:


The thing is nobody is playing the Hammerklavier at all! Finnissy has made a composition which owes something to his experience of the Hammerklavier.


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## Mandryka (Feb 22, 2013)

Here’s another one - Chris Newman’s first piano sonata - interesting to compare with the Max Richter posted earlier


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## Enthusiast (Mar 5, 2016)

How do you identify influence over two points 200 years apart? I quite often hear "the voice of Beethoven" in modern and contemporary works but I am clear that this is just me (it's very subjective) and I'm not sure it is that useful either. It is just something I sometimes hear.


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## Monsalvat (11 mo ago)

The influence of Beethoven is easiest to hear closer to his lifetime, in the works of Schumann and especially Brahms's _First_. The opening _Allegro_, in C minor, features triplets in the timpani very reminiscent of Beethoven's _Fifth_, surely not coincidentally in the same key. And there's the _Allegro non troppo, ma con brio_ theme reminiscent of the chorale theme of Beethoven's _Ninth_. These are all well-known and Brahms consciously knew Beethoven was his primary model. But of course this will be diluted or distorted as one moves further and further away from Beethoven's time. But even if Brahms pays homage to Beethoven, he has his own voice throughout and I don't hear the "voice of Beethoven" in his works. Though perhaps it is easier to detect Beethoven's influence by listening to Beethoven's own works and coming up with comparisons, rather than listening to a modern work and trying to concoct a connection where only a tenuous one may exist.


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## EdwardBast (Nov 25, 2013)

This is indirect, but the doctrine of Socialist Realism as practiced for decades in the USSR as it applies to instrumental forms was based largely on a century of Beethoven criticism and interpretation.


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## Mandryka (Feb 22, 2013)

Here's a homage to Beethoven, Daniel Moreira - Rhythmic Study 4b (Ludvan ven Beethowig)


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## Mandryka (Feb 22, 2013)

Nono's Fragmente Stille was was commissioned by the city of Bonn for the 30th Beethovenfest and includes the performance instructions _mit innigster Empfindung_ and _sotto voce_ borrowed from the slow movement of B's op. 132. The composer said _much more important to me was Beethoven's idea of using a special kind of material, the Lydian mode, for this thanksgiving. And I, too, have used a special material, the scala enigmatica by Verdi [from his Ave Maria], in order to thank various people in various ways.





_


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## Mandryka (Feb 22, 2013)

In Nicholas Hodges paper "A Volcano Viewed from Afar: The Music of Salvatore Sciarrino", _Tempo _No. 194 (Cambridge 1995.) we read the following comment on Salvatore Sciarrino's _Come vengono prodotti gli incantesimi?

The piece describes a curve which grows in density and solidity throughout, starting with unblown key taps and becoming denser through, at first, the intensification of movement and widening of harmonic range, and then the intervention of blown notes, becoming more and more prominent in the texture. In 'Entretien avec Salvatore Sciarrino', in Entretemps No.9. (Paris 1991) Sciarrino mentions in connexion with this the tradition of final movements which represent a virtuosi culmination - a tradition which can be traced through late Haydn and late Beethoven (a preoccupation of Sciarrino's) to Liszt - and many others of his works bear an active, conscious relationship with this tradition. In the present case the piece confounds expectations of a final pyrotechnic display: it completely loses its confidence, and retreats into mournful tremolo warbles. There are a few brief attempts at a repeated intensification - which fail, leaving the piece to end unresolved.

This is an explicit formal reference, not for reference's sake, but to make a point about perception. Sciarrino notes that 'in order to hold the attention it is necessary always to escalate; and that is what the piece contradicts.'_


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## sasdwf (Feb 6, 2021)

I recently attended a concert by the vocal group Conspirare and the Miro Quartet performing primarily recently composed works, many influenced directly or indirectly by Beethoven. It was a great concert! The Conspirare website described the project


Conspirare and the Miró Quartet come together to invoke music’s restorative power, commissioning 15 diverse composers across North America to create works for voices and string quartet that respond to our time and the stresses in it. Featuring world premieres from Alex Berko, Abbie Betinis, Christopher Cerrone, Saunder Choi, Carlos Cordero, Eliza Gilkyson, Jocelyn Hagen, Ted Hearne, Craig Hella Johnson, Shara Nova, Gabriela Ortiz, Graham Reynolds, Michael Schachter, Derrick Skye, Dale Trumbore, and Dorothy Walters.
This response to our times originated with a look back two centuries – at the life and work of Ludwig van Beethoven. Composers responded to Beethoven’s music, to Beethoven himself, or set Beethoven aside and responded to the times we’re all living through. Craig Hella Johnson encouraged composers to “Write what you need to write right now, write from the soil of you.” Musical selections will also include movements from Beethoven's late string quartets.


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## EdwardBast (Nov 25, 2013)

Sorry I forgot to mention some obvious things: The cyclic thematic plan of Shostakovich's Tenth is based on that of Beethoven's Fifth. In both, a crucial scherzo theme derived from the symphony's first notes returns in the development section of the finale to inject dramatic tension before the final resolution. Prokofiev's First Violin Sonata likewise reprises a stressful scherzo theme at the same juncture in its finale for the same purpose. Soviet composers adapted musical narrative structures from Beethoven, as filtered through Hoffmann, A. B. Marx, and Tchaikovsky — but that's a story for another time.


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## hammeredklavier (Feb 18, 2018)

EdwardBast said:


> adapted musical narrative structures from Beethoven


I won't argue about the value of Beethoven's achievement, influence, impact, -but I think Knecht also deserves some mention as well. I mean, this is the only context (that I can think of at the moment) he can get any mention at all, (although I've been listening to his opera, Die Aeolsharfe, titled "Romantic opera in 4 acts", which includes a nonet, and have been trying to find out things about it that I can recommend to other people).






the continuity across movements:
www.youtube.com/watch?v=a5SD_UXyB4M&t=12m30s
www.youtube.com/watch?v=a5SD_UXyB4M&t=18m30s
www.youtube.com/watch?v=a5SD_UXyB4M&t=20m50s

the cyclic thematic plan:
www.youtube.com/watch?v=a5SD_UXyB4M&t=1s
www.youtube.com/watch?v=a5SD_UXyB4M&t=20m4s
www.youtube.com/watch?v=a5SD_UXyB4M&t=58s
www.youtube.com/watch?v=a5SD_UXyB4M&t=9m40s


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