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.
Slate, where intelligence and discernment go to die.
Thank you for posting the video. It did indeed send chills racing, and brought tears to my eye.
Part of what makes the great composers and their works so awe inspiring are the years, decades, and centuries of history behind them.
You have achievements of the entirety of humanity that have been scored to these works. National achievements, personal victories, and moments of history that will forever be remembered with these songs that have truly earned their place and reputation.
Songs, movements, operas, and entirely new concepts of music theory created by individuals where some of todays music is written by only three or four people with teams under them after being being commissioned by a record label and given to an artist they publish. Artists that roll their own stand out.
That is not to say there are not amazing artists of today, Avicii’s Wake Me Up will always make me a little misty eyed, The Nights will always make me think of my father and everything he taught me. Dont Stop Me Now, Almost There, Walk the Moon so many more songs tide in to moments of both pain and joy in my life.
But it takes a great many people all adding those feelings together to find common ground to place something on the level that the truly great already sit upon and to try to cheat your way to it or cut down the mountain to reach the peak will leave us all empty and wanting.
The one thing I’ve seen that struck me with its age was the Serpent Column of Delphi. It was cast by the Athenians from Persian weapons and armor after the Battle of Plataea — the victory that was set up by the 300 at Thermopylae — then given to the Oracle at Delphi. The Romans relocated it to Constantinople, and it survived intact until the end of the 17th century. The heads are broken off, but part of one remains, and I got to see it, too.
I’ve seen older things, but not something that we knew who made it, why, and so closely tied to such momentous events. Made to celebrate the defense of Greece from conquest; at Delphi it was present for 800 years of the great and powerful seeking advice. Its movement marked the shift of the Roman capitol; it was there for the population shifting to Christianity; it witnessed the Crusades (some of the worst of them); it was there for the Turkish conquest.
It’s mind-blowing.
But it’s “just a thing”. A statue that idiots would drag down (and it was, which is why it’s broken now) because it was made and celebrated by imperfect people.
Feelings. Nothing more than feelings…… ????
Someday these useless people will fade into oblivian
I will repeat myself- when all you look for is hate and racism. All you will find is hate and racism. So stupid
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/16/arts/music/blind-auditions-orchestras-race.html
Oh, and the Left wants your music to suck too.
Wow. What’s next, canceling MLK?
Oh yes, they already tried that. Remember when the Smithsonian claimed that the policy of colorblindness is an example of white supremacy?
On composer names, what they claim is simply not true. Some composers are indeed referred to by full name, they need to be since “Schumann” by itself is ambiguous. Others are not; I played the works of Chaminade (an excellent composer of lovely flute music) for quite a while before I learned her first name or her gender.
If they are going to argue politics of names, what would they propose to do with Rembrandt, Michelangelo, or Galileo?
With TV’s, iPhones, iPods, etc blasting us with noise 24/7 (and I’m guilty too as I just MUST have music playing when I work), one wonders if any great composers could come from our generations. The Greats created in a silence we will never know, and could therefore hear the music placed in their hearts by the Great Creator!!!
There are, and they do, but most are writing music for films.
Concert music, like art and architecture, has long been corrupted by Marxist snobs to be deliberately bad.
The left seeks to elevate the ugly and corrupt over the beautiful and pure. They think their paradise depends on it.
What does that tell you about their paradise?
But… but…
«Deine Zauber binden wieder,
was die Mode streng geteilt;
alle Menschen werden Brüder,
wo dein sanfter Flügel weilt.»
Heresy! Enemy of the New Apartheid! And probably a Non-Masker to boot!
(«Was die Mode streng geteilt» has a certain resonance this year, no?)
another one name person to remember:
Vivaldi.
Specifically, “The Four Seasons.”
If we’re going to refer to him by his full name, then we need to include the qualifier: “Ludwig van Beethoven the Younger” to distinguish the composer from his grandfather, “Ludwig van Beethoven the Elder.”
The pair were known by those names during their lifetime, as the grandson’s fame as a composer and pianist were rising but his grandfather was still famed as a singer and musical director. It wasn’t until years after both men were dead that “Beethoven” came to refer only to the composer.
People on the left are always trying to bring down history, but never seem to know anything about what they’re attacking.
Similarly, there is only one “Bach” or “Haydn” or “Mozart” even though in fact there are a number of composers with each of those last names. But, just like Beethoven, only one was so vastly more skilled and so vastly more famous that he gets to be known by just one name.
Come to think of it, it’s a practice still in common use, and indeed it’s used for distinctive talents of any race and gender. Consider Madonna, or Beyoncé.
I wonder what these clowns would do to people from any of a number of countries in the world where it’s common to have just one name. I worked with an engineer from Indonesia who was one of them; he got into all sorts of strange problems with bureaucrats who are incapable of understanding such things (or incapable of being considerate enough to deal with them).