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Rob Kapilow is a famous conductor, composer, and popularizer of classical music. His NPR series "what makes it great" explains specific pieces by Mozart, Beehoven, et al, to a broad audience. This email here is a comment about Kapilow's interpretation of Beethoven's Sonata for violin and piano No 9 Op 47, also called the Kreutzer Sonata. http://www.npr.org/2009/10/14/113764595/beethovens-kreutzer-sonata-connections If you follow this link (which is from 2009), you can read: > The violin plays the opening in a major key, and then the > piano reinvents it in a minor key. But what really > interests Beethoven, Kapilow explains, is how the idea > ends "with three repeated notes and a resolution down a > half-step. Just this tiny little fragment. And he starts > working with it, seeing what he can invent out of it, > trying it again in the violin and in the piano, always > three repeated notes, and down." > After a bit, Beethoven whittles the idea down even > further, fiddling just with the half step, taking it both > up and down. In the associated podcast Kapilow speaks this same text in words while playing Beethoven's motifs on the piano. The listener can verify that this is what Beethoven is doing, and better appreciate the beauty of the music because Kapilow has made some of the structure explicit which makes the music beautiful. The half note interval at the very end of the introductory passage is so-to-say the atom, the building block, from which the entire sonata is assembled. Then Kapilow compares the composer's disassembling and re-assembling of a musical theme with the creation of the universe. This is where he goes too far. Instead of interpreting Beethoven, Kapilow uses Beethoven's authority to promote a mistaken world view, namely downward reductionism. It is simply not true that a look at the atoms puts us into the center of the universe, as Kapilow says. Kapilow explains to the listener, correctly, how Beethoven is looking for connections between his atomic musical themes. But Kapilow himself does not give these connections the ontological priority which they deserve. On the contrary, he brings the following example (not on the website itself but this is the podcast at 4:12): > It is kind of like, (inaudible) Palestinians and Israelis, > but Beethoven is always saying, if you look deeper, they > are just both people. If you go down to the subatomic > level, we are all E and F. And once we realize what we are at > base, we can make connections that no one would never had > made before. This passage has it all backwards. Kapilow does not acknowledge how connected everybody living on this planet is and how dependent we are on each other. The connections which he implores the individuals to establish already exist. The connection is primary, not the atomization. Kapilow does not see that the atomized interactions between individuals is an artefact of capitalism. The capitalists are connected alright but they are pitting the working class individuals against each other. Instead of seeing that society consists of connections, and that we have to change the social structure in which we are embedded in order to tear down the walls of the open air prison that is Palestine, Kapilow thinks that society is made up of atomized individuals and that these individuals must remember that the individuals on the other side of the wall are human beings too, in order for this wall to topple. Kapilow is preaching all this to the choir in a very literal sense, namely, to musicians who have devoted their lives to touching strangers on a deep emotional level, and their audiences. Those moved by and interested in Beethoven usually do not have to be told about the humanity that connects us all, they listen to Beethoven because they long to experience this bond. The admonition to recognize our joint humanity can therefore not be directed at the listeners of Kapilow's podcast. There is no need for these listeners to act. This absence is the last thing I would like to mention in this essay. Hans G Ehrbar _________________________________________________________ Full posting guidelines at: http://www.marxmail.org/sub.htm Set your options at: http://lists.csbs.utah.edu/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com
