Annotated: Beethoven’s Secret Code

This post is a part of a series that forms an annotated reading list; all posts in the series can be found here.

Today, I read A Secret Code May Have Been Hiding in Classical Music for 200 Years by S. I. Rosenbaum on The Atlantic (Apple News Link). This article caught my eye because as a lover of Beethoven’s work and former violinist, I’m intrigued by new information about very old things. Beethoven’s work in particular is both approachable for those who don’t listen to classical music frequently and complex enough to keep classical music fans interested.

The article delves into an extra level of complexity within Beethoven’s work that I have never read about before. Long story short: Beethoven’s original music manuscripts have notations that are non-standard and until recently have not seen much research, but it appears he has “23 degrees of dynamics (and counting)”, dynamics being how the music is played at any given moment. Given that these notations were non-standard, they never made it into the printed versions, but had to be seen in the original handwritten manuscripts alone.

Kitchen would eventually identify 23 degrees of dynamics (and counting), from fff—thunderous—to [double underlined] ppp—a whisper. He found four kinds of staccato, two kinds of dynamic swells, marks to indicate different ways of grouping notes together, marks to reinforce crescendos and diminuendos. Taken together, Kitchen argued, these marks amount to “living instructions from one virtuoso performer to another,” an elaborate hidden language conveying new levels of expression—and thus emotion—in Beethoven’s music that had been lost for centuries.

I find this fascinating in the context of playing music. In modern music, you get the recording from the artist—who is often the writer and approving the emotional output of a given track—and you have covers—which are (perhaps obviously) different in almost every way; these days, there is little concern given anymore to the idea that the original composer might have meant something emotionally different from the digital capture.

Of course, that is what makes classical music inherently different from modern musical stylings; classical music is more similar to a language in terms of its ethos. Interpretation is the word that comes to mind here. There are both many ways to interpret the music on the page and many ways that the interpretation can get something wrong through a difference in approach and understanding.

From a technology perspective, for modern music this might be akin to the difference between hearing something live versus listening to a highly compressed recording. What is more, technology has attempted to recreate the experience of live music by creating spatial components or lossless recordings, but no one thinks they are at a concert just because they can hear music in surround sound.

As to why the marks never made it into the composer’s printed scores, Yudkin thinks Beethoven may have accepted that his large personal vocabulary of symbols and abbreviations wouldn’t be easily deciphered by others. Perhaps, Yudkin suggested, he included the marks in his manuscripts simply for his own satisfaction. “You put things in a diary,” Yudkin said, because it yields “a mental satisfaction and emotional satisfaction in being able to express what it is that you feel. And no one else has to see it.”

I loved this passage, especially because of the last line. “Why do you write?” For your own satisfaction. The fact that some people can work with and make money from something they do for themselves is a privilege and a form of wonderful luck. But most people do these things as hobbies or out of necessity to hold onto their sanity. Personally, I feel different—satisfied might actually be the best word for the feeling—when I talk through my ideas or write my thoughts down than when I keep them to myself.

And honestly, it almost doesn’t matter whether people are reading; the point of writing something down (especially hand writing something in this day and age) is immortalization.

For Kitchen, that’s precisely the point of studying Beethoven’s markings. If written notation can encode music, he told me, music can encode human feelings. Therefore, written music can actually transplant “a living emotion” from one mind to another. It’s not just telepathy: Music allows a sliver of immortality.

Exactly.