Musicology made the front page of the paper today (Even more amazing, it made Yahoo�s homepage entertainment listings, which usually only discusses Tom Cruise and Britney Spears). A librarian found a score by Beethoven that�s been missing for over 100 years and has never been studied.

As a music scholar, I should be very excited about this. It is a big find that may shed some light on an important piece with a complicated history. But I find these discoveries a bit irritating, because they make the rest of us music scholars look like slackers.

My family has always been very supportive of my work, but they don�t really understand what I do. When I was starting out what I thought was going to be a career as a music theorist, my mom used to explain to her friends, �That�s something all musicians have to study in school.� She didn�t really know what the point was, but she knew it meant gainful employment. Musicology is even more mystifying to her, I think. I can�t really blame her. It�s really history with a peculiar slant. And although history is a real discipline in the public (and my mother�s) mind, musicology is not quite. If you love music passionately, you want to find out everything about it. You want to find out the hows and whys of a piece � how did it come to be? Why was it written at a particular place and time? How does it work? And really, my work fits more under the heading of cultural history. I�ve actually had to justify my focus to some of the old guard of my department who felt that looking at the history of music institutions and cultural policy was a little bit too far away from the music itself.

The discovery of a new score by an old master � particularly the urmaster Beethoven � is very exciting. But my family reads articles like the one about the Beethoven discovery and then they ask me if I�ve ever discovered anything, because finding a piece by Beethoven is something they can understand. The analysis of the origins of musical institutions seem less necessary. Why should we care?

We should care because our cultural institutions are about us and they mirror other aspects of our history that we tend to care very deeply about. Examining the origins of American cultural institutions can tell us a lot about our national priorities at the time � what educational subjects we thought were important, what we thought was the value of art, how economics figured in to art-making, how political structures related to art-making. All of these things also contributed, of course, to the kinds of art that were being made. Which brings me back to our friend Beethoven.

Beethoven is, himself, a cultural institution of sorts. We care about Beethoven pieces because we know he�s an institution, a composer genius; and therefore new pieces by Beethoven are good music that we should know. We are edified by listening to them, or possibly even by merely knowing of their existence. But the question in all of this that interests me more than the greatness of any newly found score is how did Beethoven come to be in this cultural position? Why is it that Beethoven carries such weight? It�s not merely that he�s a �good� composer. He�s the definition of the composer-genius � I believe I used the phrase �composer as rock star� when I was teaching last spring. In order to understand how this happened, why we as a culture value Beethoven so highly, we have to get beyond the music and into his cultural position.

Because I�m lazy and very tired (today was my husband�s birthday and we took AJ into Chicago, but more on that tomorrow), rather than explain what I mean, I�m concluding this entry with an excerpt from some of my notes from my Beethoven lecture last spring. I should stress that other than the numbered points, this doesn�t have a lot to do with what I actually did in the classroom. Rather, these notes were part of the process of figuring out what I wanted to say and how I wanted to say it. Also, I want to point out that there is nothing in here that is particularly original to me. I�m just trying to demonstrate the kinds of questions that interest me, that make me do what I do. End of disclaimer.

* * * * *

The cult of Beethoven. What�s the big deal?

Only composer in your textbook to get his own chapter (and indeed, in most textbooks like this). He also has another chapter named after him � �Music after Beethoven� as if he were a cataclysmic event.

Only composer to get a whole day to himself in this class.

�Immortal Beloved�

Beethoven is the model of musical genius.
Is it the music? The man? There have been lots of great composers. Why does Beethoven get special treatment?

1. Time � his style changes between classical and romantic � he bridges an important shift and becomes the first modern composer, of a sort. Romantic era embraced and codified the genius as cultural icon. Romantic era also embraced art as important, not just entertaining.

2. Biography�we like our geniuses to be brilliant in the face of adversity, to have passionate affairs (their allowable imperfection), to suffer for their art. He was moody and temperamental. He had wild hair. He composed some of his greatest music after he went deaf. He fit the Romantic ideal of a genius to a T. He was revered as a genius in his own time. His music was immediately popular and has remained so. He was kind of a rock star for his era. He made women swoon and send him locks of their hair.

3. Music � not incidental. One can�t be a musical genius and write ordinary music. But what exactly makes Beethoven extraordinary? He was not really a master innovator like Richard Wagner. He was not a brilliant social commentator like Mozart. He wasn�t nearly as prolific as Bach. His works list is broad in scope. He wrote chamber music, orchestral music, sacred music � the Missa Solemnis is one of the most remarkable pieces for chorus and orchestra I have ever performed�and with the possible exception of Fidelio, the opera with which he struggled mightily for a long time (at least four different version of the overture exist, and it had at least two different names along the way), he seems to have had total command of all of these genres.

His struggle with his works, though, is part of the ideal of genius too. It was not easy, it was ripped from the heart.

He seemed to have a vision for musical sound beyond any limitations of performance � players abilities, instrumental availability, etc.

Because of all of these things, Beethoven is often single-handedly attributed with changing the nature of music-making and our ideas about what music is supposed to do. In the Medieval era and into the Renaissance, music was closely tied to function. Through the Baroque and classical eras, the focus was on musical order and, in the case of opera, on expression of text. But with Beethoven, we get a shift in focus. Music is no longer as much about the audience�s perception as about the composer�s communication. It is about personal expression. [This same shift takes place in poetry as well � think of Byron (1788-1824 � whose lifespan fits within Beethoven�s) and the like]

At least some of the nature of this shift has to do with a change in the way music was paid for. With the rise of opera, we saw some of the power of the musical patron (church, nobility) replaced with public support in the opera house. Public concert halls began to open too. But it wasn�t until after the French revolution and into the 19th c. that the patronage system began to break down � Beethoven had royal patrons earlier in his life and relied on them for some funding even later, but after the revolution the nature of the composer/patron relationship changed. Under the patronage system, composers were considered servants of a sort, albeit educated and relatively high-class ones. They were not thought of as artists as much as craftsmen. Their social role changes drastically in the 19th c. when public music making finally became widespread enough to be a composer�s sole support. Idea of artistic autonomy.

0 people said it like they meant it