Beethoven Remixed

The BBC is doing a Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony remix contest. You have to be a UK resident to enter, but anyone can download the samples and stems. They are pretty interesting! The producers recorded the orchestra’s instrument groups in isolation to create the stems, and they apparently tempo-mapped the whole thing to 108 BPM so it all falls neatly on the grid. For some reason, however, the web site doesn’t tell you about the tempo thing anywhere; you have to figure that out for yourself.

The web site also doesn’t say anything about the copyright status of the samples. I would assume you aren’t supposed to do anything with them outside of contest submissions, but that’s based on nothing except common sense. Common sense also tells me that once a sample set has been released into the wild, who knows where it might end up?

My immediate reaction to this contest was: cool! I’ve been advocating on this blog and elsewhere for treating the Western canon as a vast sample library. The reaction to the contest from my fellow hip-hop educators was more mixed. This thread on the Facebook Hip-Hop Music Ed group gives a sense of the debate.

I asked Toni Blackman what she thought of the contest. She said, “I think it’s cool. Might be a little corny to some but still dope.” Martin Urbach was more skeptical: “I have no interest in it, like, I don’t want students to use Beethoven to make beats. But maybe i’m gatekeeping… I think it would have been better if they had hip-hop music educators create a toolkit for how to engage with it ethically and ‘from the culture’ like Jay-Z did.” Martin linked that last statement to this article about rappers performing their own work backed by classical ensembles.

Martin speculated that the BBC contest is a way to “bring the orchestra to the hood,” and he does not feel positively about that. He adds that it’s interesting how “broadening young people’s horizons” only goes one way, giving the hypothetical counterexample of the London Philharmonic broadening its audience’s horizons by presenting Tobe Nwigwe in its halls. Rather than having his students remix Beethoven, Martin would prefer to have a set of remix resources based on various genres, in a “playground” format where students can pick and choose, so that they have more agency.

Like Martin, I’m uncomfortable with the idea of “legitimizing” sampling by presenting it under the umbrella of Western art music. I like the liberatory potential in treating the classical canon as a sample library, but I don’t want well-meaning music teachers to think of this kind of remix contest as bait on the hook to get the kids interested in “real” music. My hope is that music educators will come to think of hip-hop and dance producers as being “real” musicians, and that sample-based production is “real” creativity, different from pencil-and-paper composition, but not any less valid.

The Beethoven’s Fifth stems don’t do much for my producerly sensibilities, but they do appeal to me as an educator. I can see playing them in class to demonstrate how orchestration works, and handing them out to music tech students as a mixing exercise. The sample pack has less potential than you might think. It’s mostly variations on the “da da da DAAAH” motif. The samples aren’t trimmed into loops, and they won’t line up with the DAW grid automatically. If you want to use them in a track, you will need to be able to locate the downbeats within them and place or trim them accordingly. This isn’t impossible, but it’s also not beginner-level drag-and-drop material for sure.

Thinking about this contest did make me want to engage Beethoven’s Fifth, so I got Glenn Gould’s recording of Franz Liszt’s piano reduction and warped it out in Ableton. In most of my classical remixes, I have quantized everything to a steady tempo. This time, though, I wanted to hear how it would sound to have the beats and MIDI follow Glenn Gould’s timing.

It’s illuminating to hear how Beethoven scored out his pauses. He did some by inserting extra measures, some with long fermatas, and some with both. You can hear how it all works via the speeding up, slowing down and extreme stretching of the Levee break in response to the tempo map. (BTW, I have done some other Beethoven remixes as well, of Für Elise, the Pathétique Sonata, and Heiliger Dankgesang.)

Whenever you mention the idea of remixing Beethoven’s Fifth, people always reference “A Fifth of Beethoven” by Walter Murphy, so I include it here out of obligation.

This is delightful, but is it a remix? I think of remixes as the act of manipulating or transforming recorded audio, not notes on the page. I would call “A Fifth of Beethoven” an arrangement. But it’s becoming common to describe radical arrangements as “remixes” too, and if that is where language is headed, I’m prepared to go along with it. Maybe we should think of piano reductions of orchestral works (like Glenn Gould’s recording of the Fifth Symphony) as being “remixes” too. Maybe all arrangements are remixes. Maybe composing variations is a kind of remixing too. I don’t know how much Beethoven has to teach us about rap and dance production, but if we’re going to retroactively define all versioning as a kind of remixing, then it shows how useful concepts from rap and dance production can be for understanding classical music.

Beethoven is not my favorite canonical composer. It’s hard to tell whether I object to his music or to the fandom and mythology that surrounds him. Some of the music I find beautiful, some of it I find exhausting, mostly it just feels remote from my aesthetic and emotional concerns. But it’s impossible to have any of these feelings separate from my mental image of all the marble busts of Beethoven, literal and figurative. When people start talking about Beethoven’s transcendent genius and supreme mastery, that’s more a statement of colonialist values than a meaningful assessment of his music. I like Philip Ewell’s attitude better: that Beethoven was an above-average composer. Was he the best ever at his particular style of composition? Sure, why not. But is Beethoven’s style of composition the highest achievement of any civilization? That depends on how closely your musical values align with those of Beethoven’s time and place.

Robert Fink (1998) describes the implicit ideology of classical music pedagogy as mirroring that of its bourgeois audience:

[M]usic is valuable insofar as it exhibits the qualities that also define bourgeois subjectivity: autonomy, organic unity, hierarchical depth, and long-range teleological patterns of tension and release. If these formal conditions are met, as in, say, a symphonic movement by Beethoven, music can have transcendental immediacy: it is directly present to us without cultural or bodily mediation, and with the force of a profound and timeless human truth. If the conditions are not met, as in almost all popular music, the music is inferior (p. 162, emphasis in original).

If people love Beethoven, that’s fine, but I don’t like it when his fans confuse their fandom for some kind of universally applicable or objective statement of fact. Roger Scruton (1999) says that “it is surely unproblematically true that taste in music matters, and that the search for objective musical values is one part of our search for the right way to live” (p. 391). He’s a little too confident in this assessment. I don’t believe that objective musical values exist, and I also would like to ask Scruton who he means when he says “we.” Scruton is way too eager to ascribe his personal tastes to all humans everywhere, which leads him to overconfident sweeping assertions like this: “After Beethoven it became impossible to think of the human voice as the source of music, or of song as the goal of melody” (Scruton, 1999, p. 488). Really, Sir Roger? It became impossible? It’s not Beethoven’s fault that his fan base gets carried away so easily, but he does tend to attract a certain kind of grandiose and self-important personality.

Beethoven’s partisans know that the political climate is not friendly toward the Great (White) Man version of musical history. The BBC’s remix contest was probably motivated on some level by a desire to move Beethoven into this more pluralistic world. Other efforts in this direction have been less successful. Mark Whale (2015) gives an argument for why Beethoven should be at the center of the music curriculum even in a multicultural world,

not because, deep down, we can all associate with the Bourgeois-Misogynist-Imperial-German-quasi-Euro-American worldview encoded in its sounds. Rather, because when we step into an encounter with Beethoven’s music, a meeting in which the associations we have with his music become secondary to the simple act and activity of encountering it, we discover in the silence of this encounter the music’s concern for its own musical materials, a concern that encourages us to be concerned for ourselves (p. 29).

That may be true, but couldn’t you could have such encounters with any kind of music? Whale doesn’t say. He brushes aside the fact that Beethoven validates his own cultural identity, and goes on to argue that since Beethoven is outside of most students’ cultures, studying Beethoven actually advances the goals of multiculturalism. That is a… novel approach.

To be clear: I think people should be studying Beethoven! My son is learning to play “Für Elise” in his piano lessons and that seems like a good thing for him to be learning. But the Great Man thing has got to go. Will remixing stems of Beethoven symphonies give us a healthier attitude toward his music, one close to Philip Ewell’s? It’s worth a try.

References

Fink, R. (1998). Elvis everywhere: Musicology and popular music studies at the twilight of the canon. American Music, 16(2), 135–179.

Scruton, R. (1999). Aesthetics of music. Clarendon Press.

Whale, M. (2015). How universal is Beethoven? Music, culture, and democracy. Philosophy of Music Education Review, 23(1), 25–47.