From Slate:
Beethoven Has a First Name
It’s time to “fullname” all composers in classical music.
There will be a time when we’ll go to concerts again. We will buy our tickets, shuffle shoulder to shoulder down the aisle, and find our seats. The lights will dim, and the conductor will walk onto the stage to introduce the program. They might talk about Beethoven, Schumann, and Bartók. And they might talk about Alma Mahler, Florence Price, Henry Burleigh, and Caroline Shaw. Many of us, used to the conventions of classical performance, will hardly notice the difference: “traditional” white male composers being introduced with only surnames, full names for everyone else, especially women and composers of color.
The habitual, two-tiered way we talk about classical composers is ubiquitous. For instance, coverage of an early October livestream by the Louisville Orchestra praised the ensemble’s performance of a “Beethoven” symphony, and the debut of a composition memorializing Breonna Taylor by “Davóne Tines” and “Igee Dieudonné.” But ubiquity doesn’t make something right. It’s time we paid attention to the inequity inherent in how we talk about composers, and it’s time for the divided naming convention to change.
When we say, “Tonight, you’ll be hearing symphonies by Brahms and Edmond Dédé,” we’re linguistically treating the former as being on a different plane than the latter, a difference originally created by centuries of systematic prejudice, exclusion, sexism, and racism.
[Grevience bullshit]
Musicians, academics, and teachers have a lot of work ahead to confront the racist and sexist history of classical music. Fullnaming composers, especially those who have been elevated to mononymic status by this complicated history, will challenge us to at the very least afford the same respect to all of the individuals whose music we talk and write about. When we do return to the concert halls, let’s return to concerts that play Ludwig Beethoven alongside Florence Price, and Edmond Dédé alongside Johannes Brahms.
Yes, yes, yes, we know. It is racism, sexism, xenophobia, white supremacism, Eurocentrism, etc. that Beethoven is Beethoven.
Except that it’s not.
The reason Beethoven is Beethoven is this right fucking here:
https://twitter.com/ValaAfshar/status/1309636444814794752
Because Ode to Joy (Symphony No. 9) is perhaps the most beautiful pieces of music ever composed in human history.
It moves the soul. To hear it sends tingles through the body.
There may be contemporary composers worth listening to, but the way people react to hearing the final movement of Beethoven’s 9th is why he is Beethoven and not just some fucker you’ve never heard of that we have to call by his/her full name.
This does nothing to elevate other composers, just knock down great masters like Beethoven. For that, Slate should be drowned in a sewer with the last music that goes through their heads being Cardi B’s WAP.
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