Lately I have been seeing lots of suggestions on Social Media about how to celebrate Beethoven’s 250th birthday this year. Many of these offer the idea that, because LVB’s music is already so ubiquitous, all celebrations should involve vows to not program any of his music at all this year. Some of these are said in jest, and ALL of them come from a very real place of anger at the lack of imaginative programming on the part of orchestras and other music organizations.
I have a different idea. First, it isn’t Beethoven’s fault his music is overplayed. During his lifetime, music of the past was rarely performed. Each concert was a celebration of the next new piece by living composers, Beethoven in particular. He was not composing for posterity; he was composing for next week’s concert. He was just doing his job. On many levels, I am grateful that we know his music and can learn from it (more on that in a bit), but the disdain many people, especially today’s living composers, have for his music is a perfect example of Familiarity Breeding Contempt. Every time his 5th Symphony is programmed, a little more of its breathtaking weirdness gets rubbed off. It makes perfect sense that one could feel weary of hearing his music and come to dread the prospect of a whole year of MORE BEETHOVEN. Also, to be perfectly honest, not every thing he wrote was genius. If I never hear the Choral Fantasy again, I will be able soldier on.
Here’s what we forget about Beethoven when he gets overplayed. He was a radical modernist. His sense of architecture and structure and proportion in music has not been seen/heard in any previous composer (with the exception of Bach, but he is another story). His awareness of the large, overarching scale in music is something that all composers can- and should- learn from. His harmonic explorations set the stage for the end of tonality. And, his interest in texture and the sounds themselves (Waldstein sonata opening) were so strange and fresh that his peers thought he had lost the ability to compose when he lost his hearing. In fact, I believe the opposite is true; when he lost his hearing, and had to rely solely on his inner ear, he became much more experimental and wonderfully strange.
The prospect of a year of Beethoven when many music organizations show little interest in composers of the 20th and 21st centuries feels unconscionable. This results in less of an interest in or awareness of non-white and/or non-male composers. Beethoven’s music is criticized for being such an integral part of the Canon of Classical Music-but the canon is not made of stone. It has infinite room. Adding people will not bump Beethoven, or Brahms, or anyone else. There is room for everyone.
So- here’s my proposal. To celebrate Beethoven’s 250th birthday, program his music. Program the best of it. Celebrate him. BUT- make a pledge that, starting this year and continuing in to perpetuity, EVERY TIME a Beethoven piece is programmed on a concert, it will always be paired with a piece by a living composer, whether a pre-existing piece or a new commission. And, I have the perfect place to start. Jonathan Bailey Holland, a fine ALIVE composer, has composed a companion piece to LVB 9- a brilliant piece for chorus and orchestra called Ode. That would be a perfect place to start.