A secret code may have been hiding in Beethoven's manuscripts

https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2024/04/beethoven-code-dynamics-manuscript/677964/

by tintinnabula • 2 years ago

80 36 2 years ago

kidbomb• 2 years ago

odyssey7• 2 years ago

Tldr: the code is systematic nuances that appear in the dynamic markings on his manuscripts, rather than hidden messages.

nomel• 2 years ago

Background: sheet music is inadequate in what it can express, so much so that musicians can only reproduce the original performance if they've heard an accurate rendition of that original performance.

jb1991• 2 years ago

Beethoven didn't hide anything. He was obsessed with making sure people played his music as he intended. He would never have intentionally hidden the true instructions on how to play it. He didn't even like it when people performed his music from memory for fear they would miss something on the page. He was very explicit.

jackbravo2• 2 years ago

this is addressed in the article:

But whether Kitchen is correct remains up for debate. Jonathan Del Mar, a Beethoven scholar who has worked extensively with the composer’s manuscripts, told me in an email that any anomalous marks in Beethoven’s manuscripts were merely “cosmetic variants” of standard notations. Beethoven was a stickler for precision, Del Mar explained, especially when it came to his music, and if he’d cared about these marks, he would have made sure they appeared in the published versions. “I am absolutely convinced that, indeed, no difference of meaning was intended,” Del Mar wrote.
Jeremy Yudkin, Lockwood’s co-director at the Center for Beethoven Studies, also initially viewed Kitchen with skepticism. “When I first talked to him, I thought he was nuts,” Yudkin told me. But Kitchen’s close and careful research won him over. Yudkin now believes that Kitchen has discovered a previously unknown layer of meaning in Beethoven’s manuscripts: “There are gradations of expression, a vast spectrum of expression, that music scholars and performers ought to take into account,” he said.

jackbravo2• 2 years ago

oh! and also at the end, some "proof" ^_^

At this point, Kitchen believes he knows the code well enough that he can hear it in music. Once, at a concert in Hong Kong, he was listening to a performance of Beethoven’s Piano Sonata No. 23 in F Minor, Op. 57—the “Appassionata.” He noticed an unstable chord that seemed especially ominous and unsettling—the kind of quiet but emotionally powerful moment that Beethoven often noted with one of his bespoke abbreviations.
“I said, ‘I bet you that’s a two-line pianissimo,’” Kitchen recalled. After the performance, he checked. Sure enough: Scrawled below the disconcerting bass note troubling the otherwise serene chord, Beethoven had written a double-underlined pp. Two hundred years later, maybe Kitchen finally understood exactly what he’d meant.

seanhunter• 2 years ago

Such a shame they didn't illustrate the article with specific pictures of some of the actual markings the author is referring to. The small picture at the top isn't really conclusive.

Edit to add: That string quartet (Quartet No. 15 in A Minor, Op. 132) is amazing though[1], so it's great to be reminded to listen to it again.

[1] Aren't they all? But that one for sure is.

dako2117• 2 years ago

A whole lot of words.

tunesmith• 2 years ago

custom markings indicating more granularity in dynamics.

Simon_O_Rourke• 2 years ago

"living instructions from one virtuoso performer to another"

This guy really thinks a lot of himself if he's putting himself into the same category as Beethoven.

AlecSchueler• 2 years ago

One can be a virtuous musician of the level of Beethoven without coming close to his genius as a composer.

Almondsetat• 2 years ago

You're right, at least we know how well the author performs whereas with Beethoven we have no recordings :)

djtango5• 2 years ago

This does not surprise me - the attention to detail that professional musicians play with is astounding.

A friend had a lesson with Mitsuko Uchida and she would correct his tempo from hearing the first note.

I wouldn't believe it if it weren't for the fact that my piano teacher was also such a stickler for the details and he slowly opened my awareness to just how much control of the instrument is possible.

So it doesn't strike me as surprising that Beethoven was fussy and pedantic enough to have a personal graduation of dynamics that far exceeded the standard notation. This is a man who taught himself how to listen through his teeth after all...

Being able to hear the music as Beethoven intended is a small dream to many musicians

jancsika• 2 years ago

A friend had a lesson with Mitsuko Uchida and she would correct his tempo from hearing the first note.

I think you meant second note. :)

colanderman• 2 years ago

First note is perfectly possible.

Note held too long? Tempo too slow.

Note released too early? Tempo too fast, or note erroneously played staccato.

edbaskerville• 2 years ago

First note makes a better story. :) And not totally implausible--she could have inferred the tempo from the preparatory gesture leading into the first note.

djtango5• 2 years ago

No that was exactly the whole point. The first note. My friend was also a professional and was also baffled by this.

Uchida is famously fastidious. She has 5 pianos at home, no one is allowed to touch them and she allegedly knows whether someone does. If you listen to her you can hear just how fussy she is.

I went to listen to her play the Schubert Impromptu cycle at Southbank and she walked off the stage mid-piece because there was some alarm sounding outside haha.

timthecomposer• 2 years ago

That particular quartet (op132) is remarkable. Also not really in A minor, but in the Lydian mode. Very unusual, and deeply moving.

Doctor_Fegg• 2 years ago

Around the same time, scans of Beethoven manuscripts began to appear on a wiki site for musicians called the International Music Score Library Project.

IMSLP is the third wonder of the crowdsourced world, after Wikipedia and OpenStreetMap. I write as an OSM OG, someone who in theory understands crowdsourcing dynamics more than most, and still... IMSLP never ceases to amaze me.

One example. Look at the contributions of Pierre Gouin: https://imslp.org/wiki/Category:Gouin,_Pierre . He's 77 years old and from Montreal. He has edited thousands of scores of keyboard music, with the highest standards of scholarship, and posted them up for people to download. I play the church organ and I lose count of the number of times I have benefited from his endeavours.

Multiply that by the number of IMSLP's dedicated contributors. Multiply that by the number of musicians who have downloaded their scores. It is an absolute wonder and it deserves more recognition.

analog31• 2 years ago

My kids are both classical musicians, and IMSLP has been a game changer for music study, as well as spontaneous jam sessions.

djtango5• 2 years ago

Yes jamming is true. I was once at a party with a bunch of classical musicians and they started sight reading the Mendelssohn trio using an iPhone for the score - thanks be to IMSLP

ajvpot• 2 years ago

IMSLP saved my life as a music student.

_akhe• 2 years ago

How is Wayback Machine not a wonder? Crowdsourced archive that's also behind Open Library and Archive-It.

Also comes to mind: Waze, 123movies, and now that I think about it - why not Google or Hugging Face (Ollama, etc.)?

tomoyoirl• 2 years ago

Not sure if those are spectacularly crowdsourced like the others unless you count “crawlers”. (Is Waze somehow super crowdsourced? Idk much about it. Either way it’s just a top three.)

kazinator• 2 years ago

He couldn't draw a set of parallel lines of his life depended on it.

Good thing that a classical composer's work specifically depends on avoiding parallel lines.

kderbyma• 2 years ago

Tldr; Konami Code is embedded in Beethoven's 5 /s

A secret code may have been hiding in Beethoven's manuscripts

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