Tag: Beethoven

Monday Morning Wake-Up Call

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At the Marlboro Music School and Festival this summer, my fellow musicians and I spent an evening listening to historical recordings, an annual tradition. We ended with the slow movement of Beethoven’s String Quartet (Op. 127), performed by the Busch Quartet, refugees from Hitler’s Germany.

This music is as profound as can be. From the first notes, I was in tears. Time was suspended, and nothing else existed. When it ended, I quietly left the room. Making polite conversation would have brought me back to earth; I wasn’t ready.

What I had experienced was complete immersion into music.

Most of life’s great moments are like this. We give our full attention to one thing, and marvel at its beauty and strangeness and specificity. Past disappointments and future worries evanesce, allowing us to take in the present in its totality.

But in today’s frenetic world, such moments are increasingly hard to come by. We should consider how rare and treasurable this kind of immersion is. […]

All sorts of people more qualified than I — sociologists, political scientists and media critics — have addressed the pernicious effects of social media and algorithmic marketing on our society and psyches. But I can testify that music is uniquely well positioned to provide an antidote to this avalanche of stimulus.

You may prefer literature or painting as art forms, but they do not have music’s magnificent, peculiar abstraction. Novels use words; even an abstract expressionist painter relies on colors and shapes that exist in nature and our lives. But instrumental music is not “about” anything. It stirs the emotions despite — or maybe because of — its inability to reference our lived experience in any literal way. A great performance of a great piece of music simultaneously takes us out of our heads and puts us in touch with our deepest, most inaccessible selves. That is the magic of music. […]

As I listened to this astonishing music in the Marlboro dining hall, I never opened my eyes. This was an instinct. I sensed an opportunity to be connected to something profound and beautiful and in no way ordinary, and I did not want to let my other senses intrude on the experience. In our splintered, combustible world, this immersion is the path of most resistance, and a gift beyond words.

— Jonathan Bliss, from “Too Many Dings and Beeps? Try Beethoven” (NY Times, Sept 28, 2025)

Mr. Biss is a concert pianist and co-artistic director of the Marlboro Music School and Festival

Portrait: OC87 Recovery Diaries. Photographer: Benjamin Ealovega

Sunday Morning

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Transcription for a letter by Helen Keller to the New York Symphony Orchestra
THE AURICLE
Published monthly by the Jersey City League for Hard of Hearing, Inc.
Vol. II March 1924 No. 6

In a recent number of the “Symphony Society Bulletin” appeared a remarkable letter written by Miss Keller, who is handicapped by deafness and blindness, and it was so full of inspiration, and suggestion, that our Editor obtained permission of Miss Keller to use the letter in our paper. We feel sure that you will all appreciate it, and join in thanking Miss Keller for this privilege and pleasure, and also for her cordial greetings and good wishes conveyed to us in a letter from her secretary.

New York Symphony Orchestra,
New York City.
Dear Friends:

I have the joy of being able to tell you that, though deaf and blind, I spent a glorious hour last night listening over the radio to Beethoven’s “Ninth Symphony.” I do not mean to say that I “heard” the music in the sense that other people heard it; and I do not know whether I can make you understand how it was possible for me to derive pleasure from the symphony. It was a great surprise to myself. I had been reading in my magazine for the blind of the happiness that the radio was bringing to the sightless everywhere. I was delighted to know that the blind had gained a new source of enjoyment; but I did not dream that I could have any part in their joy. Last night, when the family was listening to your wonderful rendering of the immortal symphony someone suggested that I put my hand on the receiver and see if I could get any of the vibrations. He unscrewed the cap, and I lightly touched the sensitive diaphragm. What was my amazement to discover that I could feel, not only the vibration, but also the impassioned rhythm, the throb and the urge of the music! The intertwined and interwingling vibrations from different instruments enchanted me. I could actually distinguish the cornets, the roil of the drums, deeptoned violas and violins singing in exquisite unison. How the lovely speech of the violins flowed and plowed over the deepest tones of the other instruments! When the human voices leaped up thrilling from the surge of harmony, I recognized them instantly as voices. I felt the chorus grow more exultant, more ecstatic, upcurving swift and flamelike, until my heart almost stood still. The women’s voices seemed an embodiment of all the angelic voices rushing in a harmonious flood of beautiful and inspiring sound. The great chorous [sic.] throbbed against my fingers with poignant pause and flow. Then all the instruments and voices together burst forth-an ocean of heavenly vibration–and died away like winds when the atom is spent, ending in a delicate shower of sweet notes.

Of course this was not “hearing,” but I do know that the tones and harmonies conveyed to me moods of great beauty and majesty. I also sensed, or thought I did, the tender sounds of nature that sing into my hand-swaying reeds and winds and the murmur of streams. I have never been so enraptured before by a multitude of tone-vibrations.

As I listened, with darkness and melody, shadow and sound filling all the room, I could not help remembering that the great composer who poured forth such a flood of sweetness into the world was deaf like myself. I marvelled at the power of his quenchless spirit by which out of his pain he wrought such joy for others—and there I sat, feeling with my hand the magnificent symphony which broke like a sea upon the silent shores of his soul and mine.

— Hellen Keller, The Auricle, Vol. II, No. 6, March 1924. American Foundation for the Blind, Helen Keller Archives.

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Monday Morning Wake-Up Call

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—  Mary Oliver, from “Consequences”, Dream Work

Notes:

  • Quote Source: WeltenWellen.
  • Photo: DK, Daybreak. 6:36 am Jan 29, 2021. 13° F, feels like minus 4° F, wind gusts up to 38 mph. Cove Island Park, Stamford, CT.

the great bull with its fierce eye, its head raised, its four hooves planted on the summit, at the edge of the abyss

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In painting his portrait, I paint that of his stock — our century, our dream, ourselves and our companion with the bleeding feet: Joy. Not the gross joy of the soul that gorges itself in its stable, but the joy of ordeal, of pain, of battle, of suffering overcome, of victory over one’s self, the joy of destiny subdued, espoused, fecundated… And the great bull with its fierce eye, its head raised, its four hooves planted on the summit, at the edge of the abyss, whose roar is heard above the time. […]

If he cannot do this in the world of facts, he wills it in the world of art; everything becomes for him a field on which to deploy the battalions of his thoughts, his desires, his regrets, his furies, his melancholies. […]

The hammer is not all: the anvil also is necessary. Had destiny descended only upon some weakling, or on an imitation great man, and bent his back under this burden, there would have been no tragedy in it, only an everyday affair. But here destiny meets one of its own stature, who “seizes it by the throat,” who is at savage grips with it all the night till the dawn — the last dawn of all — and who, dead at last, lies with his two shoulders touching the earth, but in his death is carried victorious on his shield; one who out of his wretchedness has created a richness, out of his infirmity the magic wand that opens the rock.

~ Romain Rolland, on Beethoven’s struggle with his loss of hearing at 28 in Beethoven the Creator

 

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Saturday Morning: Close your eyes and ears.

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Have a seat. Stretch out your legs. Close your eyes and ears. I shall say nothing for five minutes so you can think about Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony. See, and this will be more perfect still, if you manage not to think in words, but rather create a state of feeling. See if you can halt the whole whirlwind and clear a space for the Fifth Symphony. It is so beautiful. Only thus will you have it, through silence. Understand! If I perform it for you, it will fade away, note by note. As soon as the first one is sounded, it will no longer exist. And after the second, the harmony will no longer echo. And the beginning will be the prelude to the end, as in all things. If I perform it you will hear music and that alone. Whereas there is a way to keep it paused and eternal, each note like a statue inside you.

~ Clarice Lispector, “Letters to Hermengardo” from The Complete Stories.

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