Deirdre Loughridge

Tag: Beethoven

  • A Dynamic Medium for Creative Thought: Beethoven’s Erard Piano

    For most of his early career, Beethoven played on German and Viennese pianos.  With the light action, clear attack, and rapid decay of these instruments, he composed themes such as this, from the concluding movement of Op. 49, No. 1:

    Op. 49, No. 1 – Rondo: Allegro; Zvi Meniker playing a reproduction of an Anton Walter piano, c. 1790

    Beethoven, Op. 49, No. 1, third movement (first edition)

    In 1803, Beethoven received a new, French piano from the maker Sébastian Érard.  This piano responded differently to his touch, used a foot pedal rather than knee lever to lift the dampers, and produced different sonorities.  It was – as Tilman Skowroneck has discussed – a new tool with which to conceive musical ideas.  With the less clear attack and longer decay of its tones, Beethoven explored new possibilities and abandoned old ones.  One result was themes such as this, from the last movement of Op. 53 (the Waldstein Sonata):

    Sonata No. 21, Op. 53 – Rondo: Allegretto moderato – Prestissimo, Bart van Oort playing a c. 1815 Salvatore Lagrassa piano

    Beethoven, Op. 53, third movement (first edition)

    The long slurs, the slow pace of harmonic change, the rippling accompaniment in the right hand while the left hand alternates between resounding bass notes and treble-register theme, the bell-like quality of this theme  – all are products of Beethoven’s interaction with his new Érard piano, the medium of his creative thought.

    In “Personal Dynamic Media” (1977), Alan Kay and Adele Goldberg heralded a new “dynamic medium for creative thought” in the form of the Dynabook, a predecessor to the notebook computer.

    Kay and Goldberg described the Dynabook as an active medium (or really, “metamedium” that can be all other media), which they saw as basically unprecedented.  “For most of recorded history,” they wrote, “the interactions of humans with their media have been primarily nonconversational and passive in the sense that marks on paper, paint on walls, even ‘motion’ pictures and television, do not change in response to the viewer’s wishes.”

    Yet the piano, and indeed all musical instruments, are responsive media.  Some are more responsive than others – in 1796, Beethoven was dissatisfied with a Streicher-made piano because it “deprived him of the freedom to create my own tone.”   But all musical instruments respond to the “queries and experiments” (to use Kay and Goldberg’s language) of their users.

    Why did Kay and Goldberg exclude musical instruments from the prehistory of the Dynabook?  Not out of neglect.  As Kay and Goldberg state, “one of the metaphors we used when designing such a system was that of a musical instrument, such as a flute, which is owned by its user and responds instantly and consistently to its owner’s wishes.”  Here, the reason for the exclusion becomes clear: Kay and Goldberg conceived musical instruments as interfaces, not as media.

    Recently, Kay has suggested that musical instruments and computers belong to the same category. In a 2003 interview, he remarked, “the computer is simply an instrument whose music is ideas.” This sounds like a statement from a culture in which musical instruments are primarily vehicles for already composed music.  It is as if music exists prior to instruments, simply waiting to be accessed.  That musical instruments and computers are now the same for Kay may reflect the failure of one the dreams behind the Dynabook: the dream that everyone would become computer “literate.”  Discussing the thinking behind the programming language he developed for the Dynabook, Kay explained, “the ability to ‘read’ a medium means you can access materials and tools generated by others. The ability to ‘write’ in a medium means you can generate materials and tools for others. You must have both to be literate.”  The early environments developed using Kay’s language emphasized the “writing” side of literacy: they were for such activities as painting, animation, and composing.  On the Dynabook, kids wouldn’t learn how to play a musical instrument – they would create their own musical instruments, and write music with them.  With the Dynabook, Kay and Goldberg hoped, “acts of composition and self-evaluation could be learned without having to wait for technical skill in playing.”

    Music on the Dynabook prototype.  On the right, “a musical instrument is created.”


    But lets look at how Kay and Goldberg conceptualized media in 1977: “external media serve to materialize thoughts and, through feedback, to augment the actual paths the thinking follows.”  That, to me, sounds like a good description of media.  And it sounds like an excellent description of Beethoven’s Érard piano.  Which should teach us that no technology can be a short-cut to our ideas; but any can be a medium for creative thought.

  • The Auto-tune Debate Before Auto-tune

    Auto-tune: it’s the ubiquitous digital effect that gives pop singers’ voices that robotic quality, that you may know from the Youtube phenom auto-tune the news, and that recently prompted Alex Pappademas to start a three-part New York Times blog series with the question: “really now, what’s so bad about auto-tune pop?”

    Pappademas speaks to the many who find auto-tune repugnant, and especially to those who justify their (dis)taste for the effect as a matter of standards.  As he observes in installment #3:

    the biggest criticism Auto-Tune’s critics level against it is that it’s the sonic equivalent of plastic surgery or ‘roids, a digital fix that lets lousy singers skip over that whole learning-to-carry-a-tune thing (boring!) and cut straight to pop stardom’s V.I.P. room.

    Auto-tune, in short, is a musical cheat, to which Pappademas replies:

    The truth is that artists and producers have been using technology (reverb, overdubbing, electronic harmonizers) to change the sound of their voices for decades. The link between “organic” live performance and recorded music was broken in the late ‘40s when Les Paul popularized multitrack recording.

    Indeed. But the arguments surrounding auto-tune aren’t unique to vocal effects, and they long predate recorded music. In fact, the same arguments have perennially attended tone-modifying devices of all sorts: many technologies for altering the sound of an instrument were once regarded as crutches but went on to gain acceptance as expressive resources, ultimately becoming part of what it means to know how to play or compose for a given instrument. This is the story of two tone-modifying devices whose detractors have fallen silent: the violin mute, and the sustaining pedal.

    The Violin Mute

    The violin mute was invented in the seventeenth century, and is a device applied to the bridge of the violin to dampen its sound.  The French composer Lully was one of the first to call for muted violins in a written score, pairing them with recorders in a depiction of enchanting, soporific murmurings in the opera Armida (1686):

    By the middle of the eighteenth century, however, French critics regarded the mute as a crutch for violinists incapable of playing softly.  As one writer remarked in an article on performance in the Encyclopédie:

    It is well known that in Lully’s lifetime the violinists needed to resort to mutes in order to play softly enough in certain passages.

    If this view of the mute as a substitute for skill had persisted, the mute no doubt would have become obsolete.  Elsewhere in Europe, however, composers and listeners perceived the mute as giving the violin a special tonal quality that violinists without mutes could not match.  And so composers continued to call for violin mutes for that special tonal quality, often combining it with slow, flowing music to produce the peaceful or dreamy atmosphere pioneered by Lully.  Today, critics reserve their venom for violinists who fail to use mutes when they should.  Speaking of the violin mutes in Haydn’s Il mondo della luna (1777), period performance specialist Nikolaus Harnoncourt recently remarked:

    Players are lazy and think it’s enough just to play very softly. But when composers write ‘con sordino’ — ‘with mute’ — they want a very particular, different sound…The idea was just to hear quivering air.

    Nikolaus Harnoncourt conducts “Vado, vado” from Il mondo della luna – with mutes

    The Sustaining Pedal

    The piano was one of the major technological breakthroughs of the eighteenth century, trumping the harpsichord with its touch-sensitivity and the clavichord with its greater volume.  Early on, piano manufacturers experimented with ways of modifying the piano’s tone, eventually arriving at pedals as a hands-free way to apply tone-modifying devices. Many players, however, considered piano technique a matter of fingers only, and pianists who used pedals were commonly charged with charlatanism – with resorting to technological trickery to mask a lack of keyboard skill. Such was the case with the sustaining (or damper) pedal, which when depressed allowed the strings of the piano to resonate even after the finger had been lifted from the key.  The sustaining pedal was criticized as a cheat for finger legato, and also for producing a muddled blur of sound. As late as 1828, the pianist-composer Hummel maintained:

    a truly great artist has no occasion for the pedals…Neither Mozart, nor Clementi, required these helps to obtain the highly deserved reputation of the greatest, and most expressive performers of their day.

    By this time, however, the tides were turning.  As Beethoven’s student Carl Czerny observed:

    by means of the pedal, a fullness can be attained which the fingers alone are incapable of producing.

    Initially, composers used the sustaining pedal primarily for special effects, reserving them for unusual passages that stood apart from their surrounding context. One of Beethoven’s comparatively rare indications for sustaining pedal, for example, occurs in the opening of the Tempest Sonata, where it sets off slowly accumulating chords from the hurried Allegro theme.

    Beethoven, Piano Sonata Op. 31 No. 2 (Tempest), first movement, first edition (Bonn, 1802)

    The mid-1800s, however, witnessed a period of “pedal mania” during which pedaling became ubiquitous, and composer-pianists developed not only modern pedal technique but also new musical styles premised on use of the sustaining pedal. Chopin and Liszt were two of the chief architects of this development. The nocturne style that became Chopin’s trademark, for example, required the pedal to sustain the down-beat bass notes while the left moved to play mid-register chords, and to continue the cantabile legato across large (highly expressive) leaps in the right hand melody:

    Arthur Rubinstein plays Chopin’s Nocturne Op.9 No.2

    Today, pianists are so used to the sustaining pedal that they often react negatively to the sound of the piano without it – even when playing music composed for finger legato.

    Tone-Modifying Devices & Musical Evolution

    What we’re seeing with Auto-tune, then, isn’t just a discussion of taste masquerading as a discussion of standards. It’s part of the process by which new technologies are incorporated into musical practice, transforming from crutches (which replace something old) into expressive resources that enable new musical styles and require new musical skills.