I think Beethoven encoded his deafness in his music

TL;DR Beethoven wrote his masterpieces sonata at a time were he could certainly hear them.

I'm not sure how true those stories are, but as someone with only some musical experience, I don't find an experienced composer who continued to compose after going deaf that crazy. I can "hear" songs in my head easy enough, and composers are pretty good at transcribing what they hear onto paper.

You look like an idiot though, get yourself an electric tuner it's like £10.

Thank you

"More pitch distance and difference, and more vibration and resonance, create a recipe for happiness for a hearing-impaired person."

That, in turn, leads to the consideration of whether Beethoven's later music was defined in some way by his deafness.

A typical piano in Mozart's day, just proceeding Beethoven, had a wooden frame, strings made of iron, and a range of perhaps 5 octaves.

The modern concert grand, the design of which was mostly settled on by about 1880, has a cast iron frame, strings of spring steel ("piano wire"), and a rage of just over 7 octaves.

You may be right about some projection going on, but your comment ignores the critical fact that she is one of presumably relatively few humans with experience as a composer with significant hearing loss. So her “projection” isn’t based on some random beliefs, but grounded in a relatively rare shared experience with the subject of her study.

In addition, historians and anthropologists routinely project to varying degrees in trying to interpret the “why” of history in addition to the “what”. And the fact that there’s a lot of speculation going on, is my default expectation as reader. No need to write it into every article on historical interpretation.

So I find her observations an interesting avenue of interpreting some aspects of Beethoven’s musical evolution.

Having studied music from an early age when as he says his hearing was superlative, he would have internalized the timbre of each instrument through its playable range, and could use that knowledge to choose what (absolute) pitch to choose for various passages. He would not have to "hear" the absolute pitch in his head; melody and harmony are invariant to transposition.

That said, he may have had perfect pitch, but that in itself would not enable him to hear a complex orchestral piece in his head.

BTW none of the Beatles had perfect pitch.

In computing we have massive amount of logic gates and wires into and out of the computer - from this we can create all kinds of things.

In music, you have intervals between frequencies and you have time intervals between these, ie rhythm.

Traditionally we divide the space between a sound frequency and the double of it into 12 notes, because it’s a great number to divide by. That means a middle A is 440Hz. 440Hzx2=880Hz. That interval is called “octave”.

Middle C on a piano is thus at 261.6256Hz [0].

Of these 12 “raw” simple fractional divisions, you can select a number of notes that played make a certain mood. If you start at C on a piano and hit the white keys to the next C, you will have hit the 8 notes we group as the “C major” scale.

In this group there are 8 frequencies selected. The 1st is middle C, 2nd is D, 3rd is E, and so forth. For this example I chose C major just because all the notes have easy names - so flats or sharps, but that’s just a side effect of the language we use to talk about tone frequencies.

The interval “5th” sounds great. Hit a C and then G and thank God for creating you in a world of beauty. The frequency of G is 1.5x the frequency of C. The major 5th of A is thus 440Hzx1.5=660Hz.

The major 3rd interval is also a beauty; hit C and then E. It’s all about fractions and multiples, and mathematical beauty.

Each interval in each scale (1st, 2nd, etc) have a certain feel to it. The 7th makes you feel tension - almost home! The 5th inspires heavenly joy.

You can try to find a song you know that contains the intervals. IIRC Norway’s pride Take On Me by A-Ha has a chorus beginning with a 7th and then one step - that would be C4-B5-C5. In Norwegian you’d write C4-H5-C5 though, since B is called H in “the Germanic tribes”, maybe so that you can play “B-A-C-H” on your instrument.

Just like if you nerd out on assembly or binary code for a few years, you can read what a processor would do by just seeing a list of numbers, if you do music for a while you can learn to read music without having to have an instrument embody it for you.

Enjoy music!

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Piano_key_frequencies

Ps I agree with the parent comment - as always when reading something from NYT about a topic I’m not unfamiliar with, I realise it’s a publication somewhat detached from reality.

> Ah, how could I possibly admit an infirmity in the one sense which ought to be more perfect in me than in others, a sense which I once possessed in the highest perfection

> If I belonged to any other profession it would be easier, but in my profession it is a frightful state

I studied music theory and composition in college, so at one time I was at least somewhat practiced in reading and writing scores. My impression is that when you hear something aloud it's nearly always different to some degree from what you imagined in your head — and I don't think even someone like Beethoven escaped this entirely. I feel confident that he would have made minor adjustments to many of the late works he was never able to hear — he was known as a "reviser" in his working methods anyway.

My best evidence for this is the weird harmonic rhythm of the second movement of Sonata #32. ("Harmonic rhythm" is a technical term having to do with where we perceive a move from chord to chord.) The harmonies change at odd points. I don't believe that the effect was entirely deliberate — I think he meant for the harmonic rhythm to be straightforward and merely to anticipate with some melodic gestures. He was probably experimenting, but when you do something unusual, that's when feedback is even more important.

When I read that sonata, though, the harmonic rhythm I hear in my head doesn't seem off. The barlines provide a downbeat, and the apparent harmonies from the melodic gestures don't override it.

"From the time I was a little girl, I have been fascinated with how deafness affected Beethoven. If you look at his piano sonatas, in that first one in F Minor, the hands are very close together and the physical choreographies of the left and right hands are not that dissimilar. As he gets older, the activity of the hands become more dissimilar in his piano work, and farther apart."

and

"I think it’s fascinating, too, that as Beethoven’s hands stretched for lower and higher notes, he demanded pianos with added notes, elongating the pitch range of the keyboard; he asked for physically heavier instruments that resonated with more vibration. More pitch distance and difference, and more vibration and resonance, create a recipe for happiness for a hearing-impaired person, trust me. A more dissonant and thick language, with clashing frequencies, also causes more vibration, so the language does get more physically visceral that way, too."

It's a fascinating article and people should try actually reading it instead of jumping to conclusions about it.

I am not soooo sure about Beethoven, esp. since there are stories of him using a sort of bone-contact thing while playing piano.

There's a mountain of evidence of Beethoven literally sitting at a piano and noodling. He started his career and was widely known as a professional piano noodler!

Furthermore, his early and mid-period music is dominated by the kinds of themes and figuration you'd expect from a professional piano noodler. Try singing op. 2 no. 1 piano sonata vs. fitting your hand to the keys.

It actually took Beethoven a long time and a lot of work to become proficient at writing things like lyrical melodies and non-clunky, non-pianistic counterpoint (and I'd argue he gave up on the latter and just figured out the best contexts for clunky counterpoint to be most effective).

Schumann also had some material in his symphonies that suspiciously fits the hands rather nicely on the piano. So it isn't so cut and dry as you make it out.

Bach was a bit different. At least for quite a stretch he was writing weekly cantatas where he'd do a performance on Sunday, then on Monday start writing the cantata for the next week. When you factor in the logistics of copying all the parts, practicing with the choir, etc., it doesn't leave much time for composing an entire service of music for small orchestra and choir.

And these are typically around 30 minutes of music, pieces full of sophisticated polyphony. Even if you memorized an entire cantata and time-traveled back to take his place I think you'd still be cutting it close just to copy it onto paper in the daylight you had available. And last I studied this, there was no evidence of a notepad or anything that he used to sketch out his ideas.

Anyhow, Bach and Mozart are the only composers I know of for whom the evidence suggests "transcribing from the head."

Edit: actually, even if the choir were one person to a part, Bach's cantatas are so full of fugal textures and virtuosic solos that it would still be challenging just to write everything down, copy the parts, and rehearse the music. I.e., it's not like writing 30 minutes of single-melody songs, scribbling some tab notation above it and letting the accompanists fill everything in accordingly.

In fact, I might be downplaying it. In addition to what most people think of as baroque polyphony, the cantatas also have a more-or-less simple "chorale tune" flowing either on top of that, or possibly in the organ pedals. And Bach wrote out the organ part that I believe he would have been playing himself.

So imagine a modern Church service with hymns and stuff, and paste that on top of what you think of as Bach's music to get a Bach cantata. :)