I’ve been listening to classical music for just over six years now, and I still only know a small portion of Beethoven’s stuff well. Every couple months I’ll inch into a new (“new”!) one of his pieces, either deliberately or accidentally. The latest incarnation of this was the 24th piano sonata, in particular the second movement:

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This came through my headphones halfway up the march up the slope to work. It grabbed my attention because the first few bars instantly made me think of “Rule Brittania” in a somewhat cheesy fashion, and then right as I was about to skip the track  it abruptly slipped into that crunchy dissonance. I love that kind of contrast, especially when it was composed such a long time ago. This is the kind of piece that makes me truly appreciate what a pioneer Beethoven was: things like the last movement of the Hammerklavier sonata, and the Grosse Fugue. Not the 9th.

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(That’s Valentina Lisitsa, a “pianist electrifying!” and rising classical superstar, playing the last movement of Beethoven’s “Hammerklavier” piano sonata, Op. 106)

There is so much Beethoven I don’t know, or don’t understand. This was a piece I had heard mentioned dozens of times (it’s one of the most famous sonatas, and I think one of the more famous Beethoven pieces), but I never really liked the first two movements enough to listen all the way through. I must’ve always skipped to a different sonata after a couple minutes (I have the Claudio Arrau boxset, and Beethoven wrote 32 sonatas, so it’s way easy to skip to one I know I like better like No. 32, or the Appassionata).

But now I am totally in love with the Hammerklavier. Especially the last movement, with the crazy fugue, which conveniently lasts exactly as long as it takes me to walk into lab!

Interestingly they seem to divide into three chunks. The big three are 9, 5 and 7, all with comparably high views of 3-4 million. Next come 3 and 7, with large but significantly less views, closer to one million. Rounding it up are the less popular four: 4, 8, 1, 2. All with less than 300,000 views each.

The top five do not surprise me — however the separation between the top three and the next two do. Especially number 6. I would have thought that would be up there with number 7. Maybe that’s because my personal ranking of the top five is: 6, 7, 5, 9, 3.

Also interestingly (but unsurprisingly) there are about four times more views for the first half of No.9 than there are for the second half. Number five is even more pronounced (eight times more!) — perhaps because most viewers just want to hear the famous beginning.

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And dancey No. 7:

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And No. 4:

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And the in-betweeney No. 8:

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There are also some chopped ones:

• No. 9 (part 1, part 2)
• No. 5 (part 1, part 2)
• No. 3 (part 1, part 2)

And the two everyone kinda ignores:

• No. 1
• No. 2

Hoorah! Beethoven symphonies for everyone!

Here’s what we were listening to while cleaning:

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(the rest of the movements are here)

Which I’ve already been listening to a crapload recently (like on the plane trying to drown out the people in front of me…) but it turned out it was the only piece of music on the laptop after the dramatic hard-drive swapping out.

Still, the Grosse Fugue is pretty invigorating to scrub behind the oven to. I’m pretty sure that’s what Beethoven had in mind when he wrote it.

Right?

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The instructions, for the lucky scanjet owners:

1. Turn off scanner
2. Set SCSI ID to 0 (using dial on back of scanner)
3. Hold down green button
4. Turn scanner on

via eeggs

So instead I redownloaded them off of eMusic, which (I bloody hope) you get to do for free. Or at least, I downloaded the one that was really rattling the bars of it’s cage: number 6. Despite the classical music hivemind selecting 5 and 9 as THE SYMPHONIES, I prefer 6 and 7. Especially the first movement of 6. The introductory bars are so… well… what’s it like? It’s like the satisfaction you feel when given a beautifully wrapped parcel, or spectacularly presented desert. It’s the anticipatory x-factor. The mouth whetting.

After satisfying THAT von-Beethoveney urge, I moved over to the Appassionata, which also has a stupendously awesome first movement. That trill, man, it rocks. It sounds so stereotypically classical and prissy, and then those plundering, pounding octaves blast the hell out of it. I love the way Arrau plays it, doing the trill in a really precise, delicate, prompt fashion. It’s almost — not quite — sarcastic.

And musical sarcasm is the quickest way into my heart. And/or pants.

Click here to view the embedded video.

(widescreen here)

The motivation here was to get a program to work out when notes were being hit, just by looking at the volume. The idea is that when the volume suddenly increases, a note is being played. If I can work out exactly when all the notes are being hit in a recording, then I can map the analyzed score (that is, the raw notes from the sheet music) onto the timings, and make a neat animation.

The video shows a moving plot of the volume. Well sort of. It’s the absolute value (i.e., all negative values are made positive) of the amplitude of the waveform. You know how when you look at a speaker cone real close you can see it vibrating? The amplitude tells you how how far it is moving. If the amplitude is large, it is compressing a lot of air, which sounds loud. If the amplitude is very small, the speaker is barely moving, and we can hardly hear anything. This doesn’t exactly correspond to what we hear as volume, because there are lots of psychological effects which affect our perception (for example, hearing low and high pitches differently).

As you can see, it works pretty well when not much is happening, like during the first few minutes. It is interesting to see how the sound slowly drops off after each note is struck. When things get more hectic it gets way harder to separate the notes, since the sound level is continuously fairly high. Quieter notes get lost in the sustains from previous ones.

Imagine hitting a low C on the piano and then immediately hitting a high one, much more quietly. We could probably hear both because they have such different frequencies, despite the volumes. But if instead of hitting the high C you quietly hit the low one again, it would be really hard to hear. That’s pretty much what is happening here. We are not using any of the pitch information.

There is a way to do that, but it is much trickier to program.

So far I have listened to the ones I know the best: 6, 5, 9, 7. Only once each so far, as it all just got downloaded about an hour or two ago. Aside from noticing a bunch of stuff which apparently had been completely obscured by my ears during the myriad previous symphonic listens (key changes and modulations seem way more obvious, for example), it’s striking how similar certain sections sound to the (Beethoven) piano sonatas. I don’t yet know if that’s due to Liszt deliberately orchestrating them like that, or if it’s pure Beethoven shining through… or if it’s me trying to be clever. I’ll try and keep you posted on that one. Hopefully it’s the middle one.

Thank you Microsoft for insisting that Beethoven’s MOTHER ********** NUMBER 9 NEEDS TO BE INSTALLED ON MY MOTHER ********** COMPUTER before Service MOTHER ********** Pack 3 can be successfully installed.

Your programmers are morons. Go to hell, the lot of you.

If Windows prefers Beethoven, I bet baroque old Linux likes the intricacies Bach better. What about Apple? Somebody who has form as an utmost priority I suppose… Webern? Nah, that doesn’t feel right. It has to be universally accessible as well. Any suggestions?