Visual Clues
I heard a Beethoven piano sonata today. It was the early one in E Flat - don't ask me what opus number it is...it's somewhere around the fifth sonata.
Early Beethoven is as deceptive as all other music, but to me it seems a litle bit more noticeable, because you look at the music, and it looks like well-developed Haydn or something like that. It looks fairly ordinary in many ways. The page has not melted like it has in other sonatas, for example A Flat major, Op. 110, or B Flat Major, Op. 106.
But there is a leap between the fairly normal appearance and what the notes are indicating - the sounds the notes mean and the meaning of those sounds.
This early sonata looks pretty ordinary if you just look at a page or two out of it. It's all very classical, with no great shocks. That is, if you play it like it looks - and remember, in printed music every note looks the same. There is one type of "sound" for the whole piece, and this is problematic in pre-romantic music because by and large the notation does not vary. It's not like Alkan or Feldman, say, composers who make notation so clear and use it to define the structure of a piece and show what is happening to the material, because in this earlier music mostly the rhythm doesn't change too dramatically (except sometimes with the better composers). So if you are looking at a piece like this then it all looks much the same, and might easily end up being played as if it is all the same.
The key points in this early Beethoven sonata are the moments when the notation does change - when Beethoven moves the material so far that he changes its visual appearance in a very clear way. Those moments point out to us that the same thing is happening in the other, more rhythmically unchanging parts. It is all very deep, directed change: Beethoven means to communicate profound ideas through his art. But when we don't see a visual clue that reminds us there is something extraordinary happening, we might easily assume it is simply ordinary.
The point is that when all music looks more or less the same, one must think instead of how the sounds were intended to move us and each other. Then it becomes clear that none of the sounds can be the same.
Early Beethoven is as deceptive as all other music, but to me it seems a litle bit more noticeable, because you look at the music, and it looks like well-developed Haydn or something like that. It looks fairly ordinary in many ways. The page has not melted like it has in other sonatas, for example A Flat major, Op. 110, or B Flat Major, Op. 106.
But there is a leap between the fairly normal appearance and what the notes are indicating - the sounds the notes mean and the meaning of those sounds.
This early sonata looks pretty ordinary if you just look at a page or two out of it. It's all very classical, with no great shocks. That is, if you play it like it looks - and remember, in printed music every note looks the same. There is one type of "sound" for the whole piece, and this is problematic in pre-romantic music because by and large the notation does not vary. It's not like Alkan or Feldman, say, composers who make notation so clear and use it to define the structure of a piece and show what is happening to the material, because in this earlier music mostly the rhythm doesn't change too dramatically (except sometimes with the better composers). So if you are looking at a piece like this then it all looks much the same, and might easily end up being played as if it is all the same.
The key points in this early Beethoven sonata are the moments when the notation does change - when Beethoven moves the material so far that he changes its visual appearance in a very clear way. Those moments point out to us that the same thing is happening in the other, more rhythmically unchanging parts. It is all very deep, directed change: Beethoven means to communicate profound ideas through his art. But when we don't see a visual clue that reminds us there is something extraordinary happening, we might easily assume it is simply ordinary.
The point is that when all music looks more or less the same, one must think instead of how the sounds were intended to move us and each other. Then it becomes clear that none of the sounds can be the same.
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