A secret code may have been hiding in Beethoven's manuscripts
theatlantic.com
theatlantic.com
IMSLP is the third wonder of the crowdsourced world, after Wikipedia and OpenStreetMap. I write as an OSM OG, someone who in theory understands crowdsourcing dynamics more than most, and still... IMSLP never ceases to amaze me.
One example. Look at the contributions of Pierre Gouin: https://imslp.org/wiki/Category:Gouin,_Pierre . He's 77 years old and from Montreal. He has edited thousands of scores of keyboard music, with the highest standards of scholarship, and posted them up for people to download. I play the church organ and I lose count of the number of times I have benefited from his endeavours.
Multiply that by the number of IMSLP's dedicated contributors. Multiply that by the number of musicians who have downloaded their scores. It is an absolute wonder and it deserves more recognition.
Also comes to mind: Waze, 123movies, and now that I think about it - why not Google or Hugging Face (Ollama, etc.)?
> But whether Kitchen is correct remains up for debate. Jonathan Del Mar, a Beethoven scholar who has worked extensively with the composer’s manuscripts, told me in an email that any anomalous marks in Beethoven’s manuscripts were merely “cosmetic variants” of standard notations. Beethoven was a stickler for precision, Del Mar explained, especially when it came to his music, and if he’d cared about these marks, he would have made sure they appeared in the published versions. “I am absolutely convinced that, indeed, no difference of meaning was intended,” Del Mar wrote.
> Jeremy Yudkin, Lockwood’s co-director at the Center for Beethoven Studies, also initially viewed Kitchen with skepticism. “When I first talked to him, I thought he was nuts,” Yudkin told me. But Kitchen’s close and careful research won him over. Yudkin now believes that Kitchen has discovered a previously unknown layer of meaning in Beethoven’s manuscripts: “There are gradations of expression, a vast spectrum of expression, that music scholars and performers ought to take into account,” he said.
> At this point, Kitchen believes he knows the code well enough that he can hear it in music. Once, at a concert in Hong Kong, he was listening to a performance of Beethoven’s Piano Sonata No. 23 in F Minor, Op. 57—the “Appassionata.” He noticed an unstable chord that seemed especially ominous and unsettling—the kind of quiet but emotionally powerful moment that Beethoven often noted with one of his bespoke abbreviations.
> “I said, ‘I bet you that’s a two-line pianissimo,’” Kitchen recalled. After the performance, he checked. Sure enough: Scrawled below the disconcerting bass note troubling the otherwise serene chord, Beethoven had written a double-underlined pp. Two hundred years later, maybe Kitchen finally understood exactly what he’d meant.
Edit to add: That string quartet (Quartet No. 15 in A Minor, Op. 132) is amazing though[1], so it's great to be reminded to listen to it again.
[1] Aren't they all? But that one for sure is.
This guy really thinks a lot of himself if he's putting himself into the same category as Beethoven.
Good thing that a classical composer's work specifically depends on avoiding parallel lines.
A friend had a lesson with Mitsuko Uchida and she would correct his tempo from hearing the first note.
I wouldn't believe it if it weren't for the fact that my piano teacher was also such a stickler for the details and he slowly opened my awareness to just how much control of the instrument is possible.
So it doesn't strike me as surprising that Beethoven was fussy and pedantic enough to have a personal graduation of dynamics that far exceeded the standard notation. This is a man who taught himself how to listen through his teeth after all...
Being able to hear the music as Beethoven intended is a small dream to many musicians
I think you meant second note. :)
Note held too long? Tempo too slow.
Note released too early? Tempo too fast, or note erroneously played staccato.
What would be hard though is interrupting the performer during this window and stopping them prior to playing the second note.
Errata: Some first notes are longer than a quarter notes. Some tempos are different than 120 BPM. It's possible to notice something before you can effectively communicate it.
"not quite my tempo"
Also, Fletcher still takes several notes to hear the incorrect tempo.
I'm sure if you're very experienced with playing with orchestra or chamber (as Uchida and my friend are) then there is a non verbal language they dial into, call it telepathy if you will, that lets them sense that count in.
Sounds fictional but dancers and fighters will also attest to being able to read the thoughts of their partners...
So the first note may also include 1-2 bars of silent counting
Teacher: Have you ever learnt Villa-Lobos étude #1? (Reaches for his guitar)
Me: this thing? (I play one note, very possibly a semitone off as it’s a reach past 12th fret on the D string)
Teacher: (with his back to me) No, that’s #4
Me: (wtf!)
Uchida is famously fastidious. She has 5 pianos at home, no one is allowed to touch them and she allegedly knows whether someone does. If you listen to her you can hear just how fussy she is.
I went to listen to her play the Schubert Impromptu cycle at Southbank and she walked off the stage mid-piece because there was some alarm sounding outside haha.