The Badass of Bonn

In the annals of Classical Music, there are many iconic renegades, but none more badass than Beethoven. He was the original musical gansta’; a loose cannon; a trouble-making fish-out-of-water; a status-quo-destroying, kung fu, up-in-your-grill, mofo.

Anecdotal evidence to this effect abounds:

Beethoven ignored, or downright abolished many of the conventions and strictures that bound music fast to the Classicism he was schooled in; Beethoven expanded the harmonic and rhythmic vocabulary of his time, and gave musical expression to a set of emotional dynamics and affects hitherto unvoiced, or voiced only partially- Anger, boredom, petulance, obstinacy, monomania, ADHD-style compulsiveness, as well as numerous other facets of the human experience that lie just on the other side of normalcy; Beethoven alienated everyone, even (and especially) those closest to him; Beethoven cared not one whit for his unkempt appearance; Beethoven transcribed his musical ideas with such wild abandon that his scrawls and erasures regularly shred his manuscript paper; Beethoven was a musical metaphysician unwilling to make concessions to practicalities; Beethoven trashed hotel rooms (I just made that up, though it’s easy enough to imagine); Beethoven scowled, spat, grimaced and growled his way out of the Enlightenment and into a Romantic Era of his own devising; Beethoven had the crazy hair, which, let’s face it, he probably teased in private.)

Beethoven’s behavior with regard to existing social norms ranged from cavalier to downright uncouth. As Bettina Brentano tells it (and it is oft-told)- Beethoven and Goethe once were walking together in Teplitz when they came upon a crowd of local aristocrats. Goethe veered off the path to make way for his social betters, evidently bowing and salaaming his pantaloons off, whilst Beethoven simultaneously plowed his way through the group, hands clasped firmly behind his back, without so much as a nod. He later, supposedly, upbraided Goethe for his servility, claiming it was they, the noblemen, who should’ve made way for the artists. Apocryphal or not, this story tells us everything- Beethoven didn’t take güff from nobody.

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Most interestingly, Beethoven, whilst busy being his ultimate-badass self, also wrote music that was sentimental to the hilt. He wrote music that was maudlin. He wrote music that was decorous. He wrote some of the most saccharine music, the sappiest music, and the most rhetorically simple-minded music, whilst being a badass the entire time. He was a badass when he wrote Für Elise; he was a badass when he wrote the first movement of the Moonlight Sonata and the last movement of the Emperor Concerto; he was a Badass when he wrote The Pastoral Symphony; The Rule Britannia Variations, Wellington’s Victory and any number of major and minor Mannheim skyrockets. Insipid bagatelle: badass. Heart-on-sleeve aria: badass. Giggle-inducing minuet: badass.

Beethoven was a badass for reasons that did not preclude him writing pretty music, simple music, schmaltzy music, or even (do we still use this word?) beautiful music.

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There’s a significant lesson suggested by this dichotomy for our own current compositional culture.

The sad byproduct of the twentieth century’s pioneering musical spirit, as fascinating and fecund as it turned out to be, was an end to exactly those sentimental strains, those simple beauties and robust tropes that Beethoven deployed in his own uncouth and rebellious fashion. Complexity, for its own sake, and in all its various manifestations, has become our status quo, even in our professed neo-romantic and minimal musics. One finds it nearly impossible to attend a new music concert where sentiment, if present at all, isn’t cloaked in needless densities of dissonance, or convolutions of rhythm and repetition.

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The vacuum created by this, classical music’s repudiation of simplicity, has been filled, to a large extent, by popular music, and, obviously, at no sacrifice to badass bravado. To whit (as if examples enough don’t abound): Metallica are badass and used harmonies that Haydn would find archaic and naive. Motorhead played chords you could easily produce on a harmonica. Ditto Sepultura, Celtic Frost, Slayer, and so on. If you took any Megadeth tune and played it on a squeezebox it would sound to all the world like a sea shanty.

And these are just the metal bands- hell, if you don’t think someone can be badass and musically simple, straightforward and/or sentimental at the same time, I give you BOTH Francis Albert Sinatra AND Elvis Aron Presley. They were all about badass, and they sang songs a grandmother could love and any motivated child could play.

Furthermore, any rock, pop or alternative act that is considered the current incarnation of hard or hip, is unpacking at most five chord-types (and most likely a whole lot fewer) all of which are the same as those used by a beginner piano pupil. So why is it then, that our conservatory composition students as well as our leading composers fear being called out as derivative, or worse- maudlin? Nobody’s calling out Paul Anka, Jack White or Johnny Cash for their simple sentimentality- that is, not if they know what’s good for them.

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Beethoven is partly to blame for Classical Music’s current muddle- more precisely: the Beethoven that we have come to know, distorted through the lens of twentieth century Modernist dogma. This Beethoven is the harmonic innovator, the exemplar of a much discussed, much mythologized, otherworldly, “late” style. These days, everyone seems to willfully forget that Beethoven (rebellious though he may have been, prophetic though he may have been) always loved a good ditty.

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All of this is to say: is no one badass enough to write simple music again? Is it really so much to ask of our musical elite, many of who ARE bona fide genius’s themselves, to write something anyone could find compelling and understandable? Though I myself would not want to live in a world without the prodigious masterworks of twentieth and twenty-first century modernism and post-modernism, it’s time to move on. Enough already. It’s over. Complexity and inscrutability are all played out.

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I, for one, believe that this notion, that our contemporary classical music can be both badass and listenable, can, and will, eventually gain traction. I am hopeful that in my lifetime someone might just barrel up onto the stage at Carnegie Hall, pushing their way past whatever fatuous musical aristocracy may stand in his or her path, and proudly, menacingly perhaps, play us their own, seriously badass, A minor Bagatelle.