The breakthroughs attributed to Beethoven made new demands on both audiences and musicians. We will post about these paths next week.

First, underlying these innovations is the composer’s musical experience of time, available to 21st century’s audiences in live performance of Beethoven’s music. Let us take a deeper dive by first separating the musical experience and the experience of time.

We must remember that any musical experience in Beethoven’s time was fully and exclusively human. Until recordings became available 100 years ago, as well as for some 40,000 years before, the only way to experience music was in the presence of musicians. It was necessary a communal experience involving all the senses, the memory and the intellect of all people present. The sense of hearing, as attested by Beethoven’s deafness, was just part of the experience. Also developing an appreciation for music was only possible through musicianship. Singing was the most accessible path to musicianship. The throat and the ears were the central “phonosonic” tools of music appreciation. Music in Beethoven’s time was not a passive experience. Musical experience belonged to whom Stravinsky would later call the “integral” human.

Also, Beethoven’s music, when performed live, invites the audience into an experience of time that is no longer truncated by decades of materialist reductionism. Aristotle defined time as the measure of movement. However, as was already written in 1904:

Since the constitution of the rational sciences of nature, such as mechanics and astronomy, the idea of movement has been associated exclusively with the idea of space. (…) In modern philosophy, to move signifies to ” change place ”; whereas in the philosophy of Aristotle, to move meant merely ” to change “. To move from one place to another was simply one kind of movement but not the only kind (Lionel Dauriac, Essai sur l’esprit musical, p. 59. Paris).

Our understanding of the present is often distorted by a scientific view where “present” is just a dot on a line between the past and the future. But the real present, the one matching our intuitions, is much thicker, and includes our memories (past) and expectations (future). Composers like Haydn and Beethoven were not confused by mainstream notion of a linear time, and their musical experience, anchored in real time, is made present in the communal event that is the live performance of their music.

This difference between the measured time and real time is tangible in music with the concepts of meter and rhythm (also explained by Stravinsky below). A reproach sometimes addressed to classical music is that it “does not have a beat“. That is the very point of Beethoven’s music. Exploring real time, not clinging to measured time.

(note: measuring time, itself the measure of movement, has been debated for centuries as always missing something, as is made obvious by the circularity starting this sentence).

This musical experience of time, which was natural to the contemporaries of Beethoven, is still accessible today. To keep this post short to read, I will advance why I find Beethoven’s music so fascinating:

• Sonata (sounded music) and chamber music evolved from Cantata (sung music). The voice is fully human, but also limited in range, both vertically (pitch) and horizontally (rhythm).
• Mozart and Haydn, in the “Classical period”, pushed these limits with instrumental, wordless music, and established forms (expectations) for their listeners in a language that did not have the limitations of the human voice. Yet, instrumental music from the Classical period retained a sense of detachment from raw human emotions.
• Beethoven, as he was losing his hearing, turned inwards to explore with purely instrumental music how an “integral human” experienced time and consciousness beyond the forms and expectations he had learned from his predecessors.

If this topic of a musical experience of time is of interest to you, consider reading the short excerpt from Igor Stravinsky’s book “Poetics of Music” reproduced below. “Poetics of Music” was written in 1939 as a series of six lectures at Harvard University.

Thanks for reading, Hervé

Excerpt from Igor Stravinsky’s “Poetics of Music in the form of six lessons”. Chapter 2 “The Phenomenon of Music”

For myself, I cannot begin to take an interest in the phenomenon of music except insofar as it emanates from the integral man. I mean from a man armed with the resources of his senses, his psychological faculties, and his intellectual equipment. Only the integral man is capable of the effort of higher speculation that must now occupy our attention.
For the phenomenon of music is nothing other than a phenomenon of speculation.
There is nothing in this expression that should frighten you. It simply presupposes that the basis of musical creation is a preliminary feeling out, a will moving first in an abstract realm with the object of giving shape to something concrete. The elements at which this speculation necessarily aims are those of sound and time. Music is inconceivable apart from those two elements.

To facilitate our exposition, we shall first speak about time.
The plastic arts are presented to us in space: we receive an over-all impression before we discover details little by little and at our leisure.
But music is based on temporal succession and requires alertness of memory. Consequently music is a chronologic art, as painting is a spatial art. Music presupposes before all else a certain organization in time, a chrononomy if you will permit me to use a neologism. The laws that regulate the movement of sounds require the presence of a measurable and constant value: meter, a purely material element, through which rhythm, a purely formal element, is realized. In other words, meter answers the question of how many equal parts the musical unit which we call a measure is to be divided into, and rhythm answers the question of how these equal parts will be grouped within a given measure. A measure in four beats, for example, may be composed of two groups of two beats, or in three groups: one beat, two beats, and one beat, and so on. Thus we see that meter, since it offers in itself only elements of symmetry and is inevitably made up of even quantities, is necessarily utilized by rhythm, whose function it is to establish order in the movement by dividing up the quantities furnished in the measure.

Who of us, on hearing jazz music, has not felt an amusing sensation approaching giddiness when a dancer or a solo musician, trying persistently to stress irregular accents, cannot succeed in turning our ear away from the regular pulsation of the meter drummed out by the percussion?
How do we react to an impression of this sort? What strikes us most in this conflict of rhythm and meter? It is the obsession with regularity. The isochronous beats are in this case merely a means of throwing the rhythmic invention of the soloist into relief. It is this that brings about surprise and produces the unexpected.
On reflection we realize that without the real or implied presence of the beats we could not make out the meaning of this invention. Here we are enjoying a relationship.

More complex and really fundamental is the specific problem of musical time, of the chronos of music. This problem has recently been made the object of a particularly interesting study by Mr. Pierre Souvtchinsky, a Russian philosopher-friend of mine. His thinking is so closely akin to mine that I can do no better than to summarize his thesis here.
Musical creation appears to him an innate complex of intuitions and possibilities based primarily upon an exclusively musical experiencing of time chronos, of which the musical work merely gives us the functional realization.
Everyone knows that time passes at a rate which varies according to the inner dispositions of the subject and to the events that come to affect his consciousness. Expectation, boredom, anguish, pleasure and pain, contemplation
all of these thus come to appear as different categories in the midst of which
our life unfolds, and each of these determines a special psychological process, a particular tempo. These variations in psychological time are perceptible only as they are related to the primary sensation whether conscious or unconscious -of real time, ontological time.

What gives the concept of musical time its special stamp is that this concept is born and develops as well outside of the categories of psychological time as it does simultaneously with them. All music, whether it submits to the normal flow of time, or whether it disassociates itself therefrom, establishes a particular relationship, a sort of counterpoint between the passing of time, the music’s own duration, and the material and technical means through which the music is made manifest.
Mr. Souvtchinsky thus presents us with two kinds of music: one which evolves parallel to the process of ontological time, embracing and penetrating it, inducing in the mind of the listener a feeling of euphoria and, so to speak, of “dynamic calm.” The other kind runs ahead of, or counter to, this process. It is not self-contained in each momentary tonal unit. It dislocates the centers of attraction and gravity and sets itself up in the unstable; and this fact makes it particularly adaptable to the translation of the composer’s emotive impulses. All music in which the will to expression is dominant belongs to the second type.
This problem of time in the art of music is of capital importance. I have thought it wise to dwell on the problem because the considerations that it involves may help us to understand the different creative types which will concern us in our fourth lesson.
Music that is based on ontological time is generally dominated by the principle of similarity. The music that adheres to psychological time likes to proceed by contrast. To these two principles which dominate the creative process correspond the fundamental concepts of variety and unity.
All the arts have recourse to this principle.
The methods of polychromatics and monochromatics in the plastic arts correspond respectively to variety and unity. For myself, I have always considered that in general it is more satisfactory to proceed by similarity rather than by contrast. Music thus gains strength in the measure that it does not succumb to the
seductions of variety. What it loses in questionable riches it gains in true solidity.
Contrast produces an immediate effect.
Similarity satisfies us only in the long run.
Contrast is an element of variety, but it divides our attention. Similarity is born of a striving for unity. The need to seek variety is perfectly legitimate, but we should not forget that the One precedes the Many. Moreover, the coexistence of both is constantly necessary, and all the problems of art, like all possible problems for that matter, including the problem of knowledge and of Being, revolve ineluctably about this question, with Parmenides on one side denying the possibility of the Many, and Heraclitus on the other denying the existence of the One. Mere common sense, as well as supreme wisdom, invite us to affirm both the one and the other. All the same, the best attitude for a composer in this case will be the attitude of a man who is conscious of the hierarchy of values and who must make a choice. Variety is valid only as a means of attaining similarity.
Variety surrounds me on every hand. So I need not fear that I shall be lacking in it, since I am constantly confronted by it. Contrast is everywhere. One has only to take note of it. Similarity is hidden; it must be sought out, and it is found only after the most exhaustive efforts.
When variety tempts me, I am uneasy about the facile solutions it offers me. Similarity, on the other hand, poses more difficult problems but also offers results that are more solid and hence more valuable to me.