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Beethoven didn't hide anything. He was obsessed with making sure people played his music as he intended. He would never have intentionally hidden the true instr

by jb1991 3y ago

Beethoven didn't hide anything. He was obsessed with making sure people played his music as he intended. He would never have intentionally hidden the true instructions on how to play it. He didn't even like it when people performed his music from memory for fear they would miss something on the page. He was very explicit.

jackbravo 3y ago
this is addressed in the article: > 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.
- jackbravo 3y ago
  oh! and also at the end, some "proof" ^_^ > 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.
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
  - bombcar 3y ago
    It could be both - notes to himself on what he wants to cause here, even if the performer will see something else (e.g. notes like “arrange the chord order this way when you select it” - editor’s notes to himself).

by jb1991 3y ago

jackbravo 3y ago

this is addressed in the article: > 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.

jackbravo 3y ago
oh! and also at the end, some "proof" ^_^ > 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.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- bombcar 3y ago
  It could be both - notes to himself on what he wants to cause here, even if the performer will see something else (e.g. notes like “arrange the chord order this way when you select it” - editor’s notes to himself).