The Beethoven syndrome

The transparency of music - the fact that it rarely has any obvious grounding in the world of the concrete - has caused it often to be appropriated by those who wish to co-opt its power.  In particular, this has led to self-standing music being used as a background track to films and television, reduced to advertising jingles, or simply employed as a kind of emotional or cultural shorthand.

For example, people will talk of Mozart's 'Elvira Madigan' when they mean the slow movement of the Piano Concerto number 21.  For them though, its long, languid lines will always speak of the particular brand of sentimentality found in the eponymous Swedish film.  Similarly, for many the cool and limpid Adagietto from Mahler's Fifth Symphony will be identified with Visconti's film 'Death in Venice', his shameless schmaltz- soaked version of Thomas Mann's hard-edged and tightly-written novella.

At least such thievery can be avoided; other travesties are more insidious. Thus advertising jingles just spring on us.  Before we know it, we hear some poor gobbet from a prized piece of music hacked and shaped to fit the demands of propaganda.  The remedy, though extreme, is not to listen to any commercial programmes which might betray your aural trust by carrying out this kind of hit and run tonal terrorism. 

Unfortunately the final kind of musical appropriation is so endemic, so subtle and so lethal, that it is impossible to protect yourself against it: the use of snippets of music as a kind of tag, a badge of cultural respectability or snobbery or whatever, can occur anywhere and at anytime. 

For example, even before I knew what it was, I had heard the first four or eight notes of Beethoven's Fifth Symphony so often, and in so many disparate but corrupting contexts, that when I finally tried to listen the whole work I found myself unable to hear the opening as anything but another cheap quotation.  As a result, the first movement was meaningless, and has never sounded to me like Beethoven.  Although I can listen to the other movements, they form a gruesome torso, with only dried blood where the head should be.  With my understanding of the Fifth necessarily incomplete, I cannot now fully comprehend the whole series of Beethoven's Symphonies.  And without them, the rest of his music is similarly damaged.

To see as venial this Disneyfication of music, the adding of cartoon colours and cartoon concepts to fine or even great music to produce something as irredeemably banal as Fantasia, is to trivialise the danger.  As everybody recognises - not least the perpetrators of these atrocities - music has an unparalleled and mysterious power to move us.  Tainting that power with butterfly images and ideas which seem to represent it, but which in fact simply feed off it like maggots, is an artistic betrayal.

I speak not theoretically, from some high-minded sense of patrician musical purity, but as one who has been deafened - in a cultural sense - to a masterpiece.  Although I have no right to be as angry as its creator about his real deafness, I can still be angry about mine.  And I can still try to sound a warning note to those that have ears to hear.

(26.12.91)

See also Moody Sonnets - Wrong Time, Wrong Place 

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