The long view

Yesterday, May 7, was the 200th anniversary of the premiere of Beethoven’s Symphony No. 9, “Choral.” I have some thoughts.

The piece was actually commissioned by the Philharmonic Society of London in 1817, but although Beethoven made a few sketches at the time he didn’t start seriously working on the piece until 1822 — a gap of five years. Was he just goofing off that whole time?

Hardly. Beethoven was many things, but lazy was not one of them. During this extended period of TASK AVOIDANCE, while working on other pieces, he would be making sketches, transferring musical ideas from his daily WASTE BOOKS into other, dedicated WASTE BOOKS, and just generally allowing the new symphony to gestate.

The lesson for artists, for Lichtenbergians, is that it is not necessary or necessarily desirable — or even normal — for one’s work to come spilling out of your head into reality all in one gush. Art has its own schedule, and sometimes the gaps in the shinyperfect thing your brain has fobbed off onto you take more time than you wanted it to take.

At any rate, yesterday was the 200th anniversary of the eventual premiere (in Vienna, not London), and I took to the labyrinth to celebrate.

Back in 2020 during lockdown, I decided to upgrade the sound system in the labyrinth. I ended up with one subwoofer and eight small speakers arranged around the labyrinth, all connected to a wireless controller in the house. It’s a beautiful system and much more powerful than I generally need, i.e., I rarely run the volume above 25% because even 40% is loud enough to be heard from the street. You can imagine what it can do at full blast.

My concert venue for May 7, 2024.

So I got a fire going, waited for the sun to get lower, and then cranked up the volume to about 60% and hit play on Beethoven’s Ninth.

Dear reader, it was transcendent. The beautiful evening, the setting sun in the trees, the fire, the labyrinth — and Beethoven’s cosmic yawp of universal brotherhood and love filling every crevice of everything. (Sidenote: His use of triangle and cymbals in the 4th movement, that little “marching band” interlude, was a deliberate evocation of Turkish bands, i.e., enemies of the Austrians.)

So here’s my second thought: The Ninth is two hundred years old and will likely still be played and listened to for at least another two hundred, and I’d be lying if I didn’t wonder what it would be like to have that kind of impact, to think that my music would still be thrilling AUDIENCES far after my death. You probably have the same thought on occasion.

As Steinbeck puts it in the last line of The Sun Also Rises, “Isn’t it pretty to think so?”

My usual admonition to artists is to remember that MOMA is not your AUDIENCE. Neither, I must remind myself, is the future. As the old hymn says, “Work, for the night is coming.” MAKE THE THING THAT IS NOT now, and let the future deal with it on its own.

And if you haven’t listened to Beethoven’s Ninth in a while, then get thee to YouTube and dive in.