Parting Shots: Not so "so long," after all

Dear Detritusites, I need to ask you a big favor, well, two favors: One, please be patient, this is a long ‘un. But most importantly, two, would you please hold your anger-filled comments and death-threats until the end? This might sting a bit, but, if you can accept for a moment that I may not be entirely crazy, then this will be easier on all of us. Besides, if, by the end, you still feel the need to tear me a new one and shove a fistful of wadded-up Lachenmann scores in the open wound, by all means, go ahead. It’s your right, and I’ll take it with a grin on my face. Now, you could be asking yourselves, what could be so bad that Empiricus felt he needed to issue a disclaimer? Well, people, I’m going to throw-down with Alan Rich.

As you may or may not know, Alan’s post as classical music critic at the L.A.Weekly has been terminated. And this is his last entry at that post (though he’ll remain there, albeit in a limited role).

Parting Shots

I must say, at the onset, that we have not gone after his work, until now, because it is utterly stupendous. Aside from his keen knowledge and ear, his prose is gorgeous. Here, he puts his brilliant knack for imagery and insinuation into motion right away.

Helmut Lachenmann cuts a solitary figure in today’s musical world. At a time when much of the talk centers on accessibility, on a generation of composer-heroes — Adams, Adès, Reich, Saariaho, Salonen, just for starters — who have found ways to reach out to audiences with serious and imaginative creativity, that old notion of the composer on his private Olympus, proudly and defiantly cloaked in his mantle of inscrutability, rests almost solely with this tall, gaunt yet smiling German gent whose music ground its way through Zipper Concert Hall last Monday.

That’s ridiculously clever, maybe even poetic. However, what lies beneath this elegant prose—which, by the way, sets up the rest of the review perfectly—is almost pure anti-modernist venom, couched in populist (?) idealism. To get a better sense of what I mean, let’s take a closer look.

At a time when much of the talk centers on accessibility, on a generation of composer-heroes — Adams, Adès, Reich, Saariaho, Salonen, just for starters — who have found ways to reach out to audiences with serious and imaginative creativity...

He’s just setting up and defining the contrary, yet popular, point of view by naming Lachenmann’s aesthetic adversaries and their accomplishments. In fact, he’s hailing their accomplishments, while making clear that their work represents the present: “at a time when,” “composer-heroes.” This places Lachenmann, where?

...that old notion of the composer on his private Olympus, proudly and defiantly cloaked in his mantle of inscrutability, rests almost solely with this tall, gaunt yet smiling German gent...

Lachenmann is placed on Lonely Mountain, as it were. Or, as we’ve seen so many times before, in his own selfish, ivory tower. But he’s placed there as a relic (“old notion,” “gaunt”), happy to swim upstream. He’s seen as the last of a dying breed (“old notion...rests almost solely”).

Put all of it together we come up with something like this, which sounds a lot like someone else we’ve dealt with before: Lachenmann is an old-school, aloof, who-gives-a-shit-about-comprehensibility kind of composer-God, who doesn’t care about pleasing his audience, unlike “Adams, Adès, Reich, Saariaho, Salonen, just for starters,” who, by the way, are heroes. Salonen, really?

And also, apparently, good riddance, Lachenmann! (I read ahead)

Okay so far?

Well, no. I’m not okay. BEGIN STUPID RANT STOP Accessibility in music means popularity. If that was, indeed, the penultimate goal, then every composer would be imitating this guy. And the only things you get by imitating that guy, besides money and paparazzi, is awards. I mean, where are these composers now? Where is their music being performed? Are these popular Pultizer Prize winners in the canon?: Douglas Stuart Moore, Gail Kubic, John la Montaine, Robert Ward, Leslie Bassett, Richard Wernick, Stephen Albert (Seriously, Google them. YouTube them. Did you find anything? Any music?) What did popularity ever do for them? END STUPID RANT HERE STOP

Okay so far?

Yes, I suppose I’m a little better. Thanks. I needed to get that off my chest. Anyway... you know what? No. Come to think of it, no, I’m not better, because this tripe continues.

“He is the world’s greatest composer,” proclaim a few holdouts in the new-music community who dote on inscrutability.

Unpopular Lachenmann fan = doter on inscrutability. Great. Thanks, Alan. Thanks for nothing. Way to avert the unfamiliar! Way to close your mind! Way to conform. Baaaaah!

At them in response, I fling my favorite James Thurber line: “ ‘He’s God!’ screamed a Plymouth Rock hen.”

For those of you not familiar with “The Owl Who Was God,” here you go. Note the “moral” of the story, near the bottom. (I love unintentionally ironic references)

Now, in defense of poor Helmut, I’ll lob over a favorite Morton Feldman quote: “The only fanatics I have ever met were conservative musicians.” Take that, conformists!

Yet the concert drew a large crowd, and there were many who stood and cheered at the end.

That’s an ordinary, reasonable response; people go to concerts they might enjoy. This, however, isn’t a reasonable response:

I would love to know what they heard.

And why is that? Take it away, Alan!

Prior to this concert, I knew Lachenmann mostly from the ECM recording of his setting — “opera” in the broadest sense — of the Hans Christian Andersen story “The Little Match Girl,” onto which he has hung the whole paraphernalia of his “fractured aesthetic” (Alex Ross’ term), culminating in a horrendous musical mishmash in which the ghosts of every composer in Lachenmann’s own scrapbook, Mahler, Berg, Stockhausen, Boulez, pass by simultaneously as if in some horrendous wet dream.

A game: Find the Epistrophe!

(Jeopardy theme music)

Find it? The answer is: "horrendous." By repeating horrendous twice with regards to one subject, he’s strongly emphasizing how Lachenmann’s opera is (list of possible synonyms) dreadful, awful, terrible, shocking, appalling, horrifying, horrific, horrid, hideous, grisly, ghastly, gruesome, gory, harrowing, heinous, vile, unspeakable, (takes breath), nightmarish, macabre, spine-chilling, blood-curdling, loathsome, monstrous, abhorrent, hateful, hellish, execrable, abominable, atrocious, sickening, foul, nasty, disagreeable—you get the idea.

But, why wasn’t that a reasonable response? Well, “just for starters,” if a newspaper is going to assign a critic to review a concert, it might be nice if they sent someone who has a general interest in the music to be played. It might also be nice to have a critic open to new possibilities, instead of one who can’t fathom alternate definitions of “opera,” in quotation marks (in quotation marks: in "quotation marks"). Also, also it might be nice if the reviewer was familiar with the music, you know, say the reviewer knew more than one piece by the composer. Just an idea. But who am I to question these things?

Does that lovely, sad Andersen story deserve that?

I didn’t know stories deserve things.

Do we?

To be fair, I don’t know that we deserve “horrendous wet dreams,” either.

Did we on Monday?

Hell no! Everyone is aware that we only deserve “horrendous wet dreams” on Tuesdays, and sometimes Fridays depending on the tide. Mondays are simply out of the question, what with the morning rush-hour commute and all!

But I digress, too. Go on, Alan. Spew more Lachenmann derision.

I had never before endured pain at a Monday Evening Concert; this time I did: pain and anger.

You can’t blame Lachenmann for the burritos you ate at lunch! Lachenmann + burritos = the runs.

The music by [...] Helmut Lachenmann reflected the nastiness dear to so many German and Austrian creative hearts these days.

Whoa! Where’d you come from? Who are you? Get out of here! Go. Get!

[...] Mr. Lachenmann's ''Movement (Before Paralysis)'' seemed almost to jeer at the easygoing spirit and borderline sentimentality of the [preceding] American pieces [...].

Shoo, I said! I mean it!

“Movement (Before Paralysis)” seems proud of its complications. Hard, angular, percussion-ridden, highly uneven in movement, this is the art of unease. Mr. Lachenmann produces wheezes, whines, shudders and whooshes that are sophistication itself.

Go on! Get out of here! And stay out! That's better.

“Played,” by the way, often consisted of blowing through only the mouthpiece of a wind instrument, banging on the case of a piano, delivering frenzied blasts through a brass instrument and otherwise violating the customary sound possibilities of various instruments.

But that’s not new. However, saying that Lachenmann rapes the instruments is new; that’s a new one on me, anyway.

Such procedures are not new,

See.

and they have a certain joke value the first time around.

Odd, but not necessarily new, procedures = a joke, the first time around. Just like sul ponticello, right?

The Lachenmann works were long enough to allow these things to happen several times, and you all know what happens to a joke when you tell it more than once.

It gets old. I got it. You were clear about tha...

Hold it. (sniffs the air for a cheesy taint)

Mr. Rich, sir. Are you saying that...(thinks... “grmphblhpt”)...I don’t know what you’re saying. See, if you’re saying that novel sounds are a joke, but lose their comic luster (?) when repeated, then... I mean, if you’re saying that odd instrumentations, which may not be new, are funny, except when they’re reiterated, which makes them bad things, then...

I’m confused. Let’s go backwards.

These things I can grasp and accept: Lachenmann is not popular. You don’t like his music. Presumably, you do like Adams, Reich, etc. (Salonen, hmmm). They are (more) popular/accessible.

But, therefore...? Lachenmann is a joke? Because he’s not accessible? Because he utilizes odd sounds? Because he’s a modernist? Because his music causes the runs?

There’s a “parting shot,” indeed. (super-slow fade to black)

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If this had been an actual meta-critique, this is how it might have gone. But, fortunately for Alan and a number of you, this is where your patience will be rewarded, because it was not a critique, per se—even though a lot of points stand—because, Alan, like I said at the beginning, is a fine, fine critic, a critic we’ve never before tried to tear apart. Then why go through all this rigmarole, Empiricus? Why parody yourself? So I could make obvious that there is almost no difference between Alan’s opinions and those of other critics, opinions that generally warrant a long, scathing Detritus-like whipping.

What’s the difference, then? Simple. First-person.

Listen, I don’t agree with anything, anything in this review (except maybe the part about Lachenmann being one of the last modernists). Let me just make that clear. Alan and I have polar opposite opinions. I don’t think that if we ran into one another at a concert, that we’d become BFFs.

But, because he uses the pronoun I to express himself, I can’t fault him. Everyone is entitled to their own opinion. And he’s calling it as he sees it. No disembodied, third-person generalizations vomited as objective truth. Just him, and his opinions.

I can’t fault Alan, but I can fault the newspaper higher-ups and whoever gave Alan that particular assignment. I think its pretty clear that Alan can’t stand Lachenmann’s music nor “ivory towerites.” Then why send him to review a Lachenmann/modernist concert? That makes no sense. “Let’s send ol’ Mel Gibson over to cover the bat mitzvah.” That doesn’t make any sense either. So why do it?
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Panhandlers Take a Pummeling

We are where we are, which is why this is so effective.

At two minimarkets in Sacramento, Beethoven has been enlisted to do what no beat cop could do: drive off loiterers, panhandlers and drug dealers. For Good.

I suppose if you place a corpse, or a sack of bones, in front of a store that, yes, people might be a little discouraged from standing there. That and the prices of Chilean limes are so high right now. (How high are they?) They’re so high, I wouldn’t deal drugs next to a body, especially a composer’s rotting body.

In two separate cases, the Sacramento Superior Court has told markets identified as trouble spots by police to play music known to discourage loitering—classical music.

Oh, it’s the music. That’s what Beethoven is doing. Okay, that makes more sense. Still, the price of Chilean limes are so high. (How high are they?) They’re so high I don’t think I could afford both the limes and classical music. And apparently, neither can the panhandlers.

On the other hand, I’m a nearly-homeless musician always looking for a way to make a buck. And I think that, in the near future, I’d enjoy the musical wallpaper as I accost young mothers for change. I just hope they occasionally play some Stravinsky, you now, to mix it up.

Reviews of the violin concertos—to be audible for 25 feet around the store, the orders say—are mixed at the Oak Park and Lawrence Park convenience stores.

I’d have to agree. I thought that the first of the two recordings at the Oak Park store, played by Joshua Bell, was a little stilted and uninspiring, despite a superb effort by the orchestra to balance Beethoven’s unwieldy, Dionysian wind writing with the ferocity of the violin’s deeply engendering melodic lines; this guaranteed disappointment among drug dealers.

The police say the music is effective, along with other security upgrades.

And the Sacramento Police Academy’s music appreciation course was once taught by Karlheinz Stockmunchen. Go figure. I see why our tastes might differ.

While the tactic has been used around the world, some academics see its backing by a court as a cultural assault, similar to thumping panhandlers with a hefty volume of Shakespeare.

That sounds criminal. Instead of Shakespeare, what would these “academics” use? Nancy Drew? Dean Koontz? Barry Manilow?

“I think it’s a coercive act and it makes a mockery of our idea of classical music as a great cultural tradition,” said Robert Fink, a UCLA associate professor of musicology.

That’s why he’s an associate professor.

“It would be like reading ‘to be or not to be’ through a bull horn.”

I think that sounds like an interesting interpretation—better than the creepy Mel Gibson interpretation.

But Onkar Singh appreciates the tactic. He works at one of the affected stores, World Wines & liquors on Fruitridge Road just West of Stockton Boulevard.

You can reach him at (555) 782-2321. He fears heights and loud, crashing sounds.

From April 2004 to July 2006, police responded to 359 calls at World Wines & Liquors... The calls range from drug activity to prostitution to panhandling.

Barry Manilow definitely wouldn’t work.

In September, Sacramento Superior Court Judge Jeffery L. Gunther ordered that the [Prit Market] install exterior security cameras, employ private security guards and install high-intensity lighting.

Also ordered was the installation of a sound system to play music outside the building “known to discourage loiterers (e.g. classical music).”

While, yeah, it’s a little disappointing that a judge’s only recourse to stop potential crime and loitering at a convenience store is to order classical music to be piped through a sound system, I don’t really have any objection. As I see it, this is the cultural situation, one that has been brewing for some time now, a symptom of larger causes. It is just an effective means to disperse certain factions of undesirable people and practices, which is not necessarily a bad thing. Nor should it be viewed as an attack, or insult, on culture. This is what it is.

At Prit market, owner Jack Patel plays Handel, Strauss and Mozart on a seven-disc CD changer that pipes the music to the parking lot.

Strauss is offensive. Take that, crack dealer! “Man! My high isn’t so bright, now. Jerk.”

The fast-paced violin music was loud at the side of the store, but not where most cars parked or at the entrance Monday morning.

And, in case you forgot, “a respected litigation analysis firm estimates that 38% of robberies and 17% of sexual assaults on American workers occur while walking to or from their parked cars.”

Patel does not sing the sonatas’ praises.

I know, sonatas are so cliché. (How cliché are they?) They are so cliché that only associate professors write about them.

[Singh is] used to the classical music, he said, and likes the effect it’s had on panhandlers. They’ve left, he said, particularly insulted by the opera CD.

“I can’t take all these recitatives. Where are the big arias and choruses? I’m going somewhere else to find tricks.”

Gustavo Martinez, the supervising city attorney who oversaw the cases, said the order in place the longest—at World Wines & Liquors—seems to be working. He said the store went from an averaging 175 police calls per year to 10 this year [2007].

"That, to us, is very positive,” he said, crediting the Police Department with coming up with the idea to play classical music.

... who forgot to credit Karlheinz Stockburbon.

The idea has been used before, nearly always with positive results reported in the media, said Lily E. Hirsch, a Cleveland State University visiting professor of musicology who wrote an article about “Weaponizing Classical Music” in this month’s Journal of popular Music Studies.

She cited an example from Sydney, Australia, where officials piped Barry Manilow tunes into a park to ward off hot-rodders.

Barry Manilow: good for warding off hot-rodders, but not good for warding off panhandlers, prostitutes and drug dealers.

Officials said it worked. But in published reports, Manilow decried the tactical use of his tunes, suggesting they might drive some people to light candles or dance.

Those people are probably not hot-rodders. Maybe a few crack heads. But definitely not hot-rodders.

“What if this actually attracts more hoodlums?” he wrote in an article that Hirsch cited.

For all the drugged-out hoodlums who read The Detritus, would you be attracted to this? And would you light up candles or dance? Click here.

I thought not.

Hirsch did not entertain Manilow’s question...

Nor would I.

... but she did say that the music-wielding strategy is more about cultural cues than the music itself.

“If you’re feeling tough and want to do a drug deal, you might feel silly doing it to classical music,” she said. “It doesn’t fit your persona.”

Also, if you’re feeling tough and want to do a drug deal, you might feel silly doing it to this: click here.
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Me, Dances With Scherzo

It’s somewhat disturbing how critical reviews lack the relevant research, or references, often required to speak authoritatively about particular works. The results tend to be meaningless, gerund-ridden, adjective-laden fluff. Immediately, this comes to mind.

I was delighted, however, to come across this review by Tom Strini, who actually used a little analysis, albeit someone else’s, to shed some light on the mysteries of Beethoven’s First Symphony. The only problem here is that he attempts to translate the analysis for the average reader, which becomes intolerably insulting.

Musicologist Elaine Sisman [...] argues that Beethoven advanced a particular agenda in this symphony: He [sic] wanted to climb aboard the same pedestal as Haydn and Mozart. Beethoven did not choose the key of C major by accident. C was the key of the fanfare, of the declarative and robust. The “Jupiter” Symphony, Mozart’s 41st, final and most famous, is in C. So is Haydn’s Symphony No. 97, one of his best-known [sic] then and now.

Sisman believes Beethoven modeled his symphony on those two works. She cites the similar Mozart/Beethoven harmonic plans in their first-movement development sections, and she notes that both placed peculiar digressions into miasmic, tonally unstable minor mode [sic] between the second theme and the closing theme.

I have a couple of problems with Sisman’s assertions, but nothing major. Now, for us music illiterates, take it away Strini!

That sounds a little technical, but if you hear the piece this weekend, the creepiness of these passages will explain just what Sisman means.

One, the Milwaukee Symphony only played the Beethoven, not the Mozart. So I think it would have been extremely difficult to listen to both of the passages at the concert. Two, Sisman’s analysis wasn’t all that technical, if you ask me; all you needed to get was that there are structural similarities, particularly harmonic similarities, between the two opening movements’ middle sections. Three, how on this good, green Earth, if you actually had been able to compare the development sections, could a sense of “creepiness” confirm Sisman’s thesis? I mean, there’s Tom Cruise creepy; and then there’s Mel Gibson creepy.

She believes that both Mozart and Beethoven alluded to genre music from “ombra,” opera scenes among ghosts or in the underworld.

That could be creepy, I’ll admit. But I don’t understand how similar harmonic plans translate to creepiness. Could you please elaborate for me?

The ombra effect in the First Symphony is arresting, and foretells even spookier things to come in later symphonies.

It’s... eye-catching? That’s why it’s creepy? That’s how they’re similar? Beethoven gets creepier?

So much for that. Maybe Papa Haydn can teach us something.

One of Beethoven’s most striking effects in the First Symphony comes at the very beginning. He starts with a C7 chord; the B-flat within it is alien to C major and points to the key of F.

I’ll buy that. But, does this have something to do with how Beethoven tried to attain Mozartean or Haydnian status?

Beethoven feints tentatively toward this key and that, through 12 long, slow bars of introduction. He gives us a C chord in measure 8, but it doesn’t really feel like home.

So no. Thanks for the info. (sigh) Go on, then.

Finally, at the end of measure 12,

I’m starting to dislike how Strini never spells-out a number. My problem, I guess. Go on.

... the strings tumble into a root-position C, firmly establish the home key, tear off at a break-neck tempo and change the mood decisively.

I once wet my pants during first-grade square dancing. Naturally, I wanted to hide it; so, I remained seated on the floor. But that wicked, wicked teacher made me get up and dance. Boy was that embarrassing. My jeans were several shades darker than they once were. The girl with whom I was partnered squealed with disgust. Oh boy, here it comes; I thought to myself, “Jesus shit-Christ.” Of course, she pointed and laughed. By the time the whole class was rolling on the floor laughing at me, the teacher had grabbed me by the arm and whisked me away to the bathroom to clean up. I, too, can change the mood decisively.

Go on.

The moment is astonishing,

(unenthusiastically) Why?

... all the more so, because that C in measure 13 both supplies the relief of long-delayed resolution and launches an entirely new impulse.

I’m beginning to think that the whole I-researched-some-stuff-and-want-share-it-with-you thing is the wrong approach. Besides, whatever happened to his girlfriend, Sisman? What happened to Beethoven striving for things? Or copying people?

... Strini? Hello?

The harmony is Beethoven’s technical means for creating the kind of Eureka moment that anyone, musically literate or not, can understand.

Just a retranslation here: anyone can understand Beethoven’s “I Found It!” moments, because of the harmony. Okay. So what about the harmony? Is it the same harmony that he stole from Mozart’s developments? Or was it referring to the harmony in just the first thirteen measures?
I’m confused. I don’t understand why Strini said that. By correlate, would Mozart’s harmonies also create “Eureka?” moments anyone could... I don’t know.

I better let Strini explain this one.

In subsequent works...

We’re not talking about subsequent works! Are we? I thought this was about the First Symphony, or Tom Cruise vs. Mel Gibson creepiness.

... Beethoven often elaborated on the notion of feeling toward a tonality, as if for a handhold on a fog-shrouded cliff.

Whoa! Hold up a minute. The notion of feeling-toward-a-tonality? Or the notion of feeling, toward a tonality? ...!?!?!?... Beethoven is on a cliff? He’s scaling a cliff? How can he elaborate on scaling a cliff? Is it a tall cliff?

It’s almost characteristic of his style,

So it only seems like he’s scaling a cliff.

culminating in the opening of the Ninth Symphony.

But he is scaling a cliff, with his feelings, toward a notion of tonality, which is almost what he does, and then did. (cries alone in a corner, which is like a cliff, of feeling, shrouded in fog)

But Beethoven did not invent it.

(wipes tears from face, goes back to Journal Sentinel Arts page)

The scaling a cliff part, (sniffle) or the “I found it!” part?

Sisman points out that Haydn opened his Symphony No. 97...

Also known as the “Fat Friend Who Makes You Look Better” Symphony.

...with a slow, off-tonic, introduction.

So Beethoven lifted more material. First he stole Mozart’s development, and creepiness; now, he’s stealing introductions from Papa Haydn. What a hack!

Haydn reused the chord progression of the introduction later in the first movement, and Beethoven followed suit.

What an unoriginal, glass-eyed hack! I hope he didn’t also steal sonata form, or minuet form, or scherzo form, or rondo... What’s that? He did? Jerk.

Did Beethoven consciously model his First Symphony on Mozart and Haydn?

Ah, finally, the point emerges.

Sisman thinks he took his cues from the “Jupiter” and the 97th to honor Mozart and Haydn, to announce his place in their tradition...

Beethoven on a rooftop, naked: “You hear that, world! I am asserting myself in a tradition! Take that!”

... and to exercise some one-upmanship.

That must’ve been why he “borrowed” heavily from those cherry-picked symphonies. How does he exercise it? The one-upmanship?

The one-upmanship lies in part...

Listen carefully, composers. You may, one day, want to assert yourself in a tradition and get your one-upmanship. This is exactly how to do it.

... in Beethoven’s tremendous forward drive,

You hear that? Forward drive.

... with a daring, banging tympani part, springy dotted rhythms and on-the-fly antiphonal exchanges between winds and strings.

Got all that? Good. What else?

Beethoven labels his third movement with the traditional “Minuet,” but it is nonetheless a wild, rollicking scherzo.

You were right, he did steal the scherzo. That bum.

He really challenges the wind players; the First Symphony is almost as much band music as orchestra music.

Beethoven really showed Mozart and Haydn good.

Some early critics complained about its explosiveness.

Or did he?

Still, he was extending a tradition, not blowing it up.

So, extending a tradition equals one-upmanship. Air-tight logic, there. I won’t touch it.

Beethoven demonstrates an absolute grasp of the techniques and strategies of his forbears [sic], in his key plans, in his classical structural proportions, in melodic materials that are contrasting but compatible, and in his uncanny economy of means.

You, Forbears. Me, Dances with Scherzo. [Sorry. I have no real complaint. I just don't like that word.]

I know it’s been a while, but I don’t remember discussing classical structural proportions. Nor do I remember talking about contrasting melodic materials and their compatibility. Oh, yeah. I also don’t remember anything about Beethoven’s uncanny economy of means.

This is getting silly. Seriously, this is what the article sounds like:

Beethoven is interesting. He wanted to be really good. Sisman says that he may have borrowed things from Mozart and Haydn to do that. She also says that he borrowed a creepy thing from opera. The first few measures are pretty cool. Later, he scaled cliffs in the fog. Hadyn did cool things, first. But Beethoven really, really wanted to be good. So he made his pieces with forward drive. He also used other techniques that he learned from his Four Bears, but I don’t want to talk about them.

Am I really all that far-off?

Beethoven was willful, and this music sounds willful.

...?...

But very little in the First Symphony is arbitrary, even when Beethoven recomposes a recapitulation or sees to a bit of developmental unfinished business by enlarging a coda.

On the other hand, I dislike ice cream on cold days. I remember once I had some ice cream on a cold day and the record store was closed. And Mom wouldn’t allow us to come inside until Dad mowed the lawn. But the Civil War escalated beyond the point of zero French involvement.

We didn’t talk about any of this. Ever. Ever. ...!??!?!...

(goes back to corner, curls up, eyes redden)

The First Symphony, historically, has been discounted as Haydnesque...

I prefer Haydnian.

... and, therefore, backward-looking.

(cries)

True, Beethoven went further in later works; the First does not point toward Romanticism to the degree of the Sixth or the Ninth.

(yells from across room, tears flowing)

But we were talking about the First Symphony! Jerk!

But the First is no mere promising work by a young fellow finding his voice. Beethoven knew exactly what he was about, down to the smallest detail.

( yells from across room)

Yeah! He was about stealing things from Mozart and Haydn just so he could throw it back in their faces! I hate reading these things!

He was after brilliance in the First Symphony, and he got it.

(screams from across room)

But this wasn’t about brilliance!

(gets up, finds Dad’s gun, inserts muzzle of gun into mouth, ...)
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