Journal articles on the topic 'Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony'

AbstractDiscussions of the recitative intervention from the solo baritone in the finale of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony usually focus on how his words might offer a commentary on the discourse of the symphony as understood in instrumental terms. This article seeks to interpret the baritone’s words as a call to song – song in its literal as well as idealized sense, as identified through strophic treatment and folk-like character. Beethoven’s borrowing of material from his own setting of Bürger’s Gegenliebe for his ‘Ode to Joy’ tune is taken as a sign of the composer engaging with Bürger’s advocacy of simple diegetic song, an advocacy that sits provocatively alongside the abstract idealism of Schiller’s An die Freude. Concentrating on the song-like aspects within the finale of the Ninth Symphony in this way might seem to magnify the effect of the silences and disjunctures within the movement. However, Johann Gottfried Herder (the poet and theorist of the lyric) embraced silence as one of the conditions of folk-like song, as Beethoven seems to have understood from his own settings of Herder’s poetry. A comparison between the Ninth Symphony finale and some of Beethoven’s actual settings suggests a new understanding of how the composer uses silence within the symphony. It also points up the radical nature of his balance between abstract and literal renditions of song in this work, a balance that even outstrips the Helen-Gretchen contrast in Goethe’s Faust for its subtlety and pervasiveness.

It is well known that Beethoven’s Ninth was followed by a temporary crisis in the genre of the symphony: the next generation found it difficult to get away from the shadow of this monumental piece. The Ninth was first performed in Hungary in 1865, more than 40 years after the world-premiere. We should add, however, that during the first half of the nineteenth century, no professional symphonic orchestra and choir existed in Pest-Buda that would have coped with the task. Although the Hungarian public was able to hear some of Beethoven’s symphonies already by the 1830s – mainly thanks to the Musical Association of Pest-Buda – in many cases only fragments of symphonies were performed. The Orchestra of the Philharmonic Society, founded in 1853, was meant to compensate for the lack of symphonic concerts. This paper is about the performances of Beethoven’s symphonies in Pest-Buda in the nineteenth century, and it especially it focuses on the reception of Symphony No. 9 in the Hungarian press, which cannot be understood without taking into consideration the influence of the Neudeutsche Schule (New German School).

Abstract In recent years, Beethoven’s metronome marks for his Ninth Symphony have experienced a renewed relevance, with several ensembles incorporating the indicated speeds in their performances. Nevertheless, previous research has shown that some of the marks have been incorrectly transmitted, and there is the suspicion that further mistakes are still undiscovered. Focusing particularly on the second and fourth movements, this article discusses the historical sources and scholarly contexts for these markings, within a historical framework that draws on Beethoven’s general tempo principles, as well as observations from contemporaries. The article suggests that the trio of the second movement has three speeds that can be justified historically, although the most popular option, minim = 160, arguably has the least supporting evidence. The discussion also draws attention to another metronome mark for the final section of the symphony that has been often overlooked. Finally, it argues that one of the most often cited examples of an erroneously transmitted metronome mark, the dotted minim = 96 for the Schreckensfanfare found in the later sources, is consistent with Beethoven’s wider practice, and should provide an incentive for performers to experiment with historically informed tempi in this familiar repertory.

This paper, taking its cue from the movement’s heading, reads the “Heiliger Dankgesang” from Beethoven’s String Quartet, op. 132, in terms of spirituality, divinity, and death, following a formal narrative understood in terms of Eastern-influenced conceptions of death and afterlife found in Beethoven’s Tagebuch. It has often been noted that the movements of op. 132 present extremely strong contrasts with one another, and this paper draws connections between the narrative shapes of the various movements and several of the quite varied spiritual perspectives explored by Beethoven. Viewed in this way, op. 132 synthesizes two of the areas in which Maynard Solomon has argued that Beethoven was open to multiple contrasting and even contradictory possibilities—the musical and the spiritual. The contrasts and conflicts among the movements and among the spiritual narratives that they suggest add new dimensions to inter-opus connections as well, giving new depth to the intertextual relationship between the String Quartet, op. 132, and the Ninth Symphony.

The premiere of Beethoven’s Symphony No. 9 in Belgrade, capital of Serbia, was in 1910. The situation in Belgrade, around 1910 in the field of musical culture, and culture in general, was not so good as in other parts of Europe. In a society with not so many professional musicians, where amateurs were the main carriers of musical life, the young composer and conductor Stanislav Binički, who had come back from his studies in Munich decided to organize with a group of enthusiasts the premiere of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony. In this article I will represent the musical situation in the capital around 1910 and show what this premiere brought to audiences and musicians in Belgrade.

Beethoven’s Zagreb and Croatian acquaintances included his aristocratic friends, the two countesses, Ana Barbara Keglevich and Anne Marie Erdődy née Niczky, whom he intented to visit in 1817 in her castle near Zagreb. His other friends, Nanette and J. A. Streicher, were ancestors of today’s Zagreb musicians, and general Greth, husband of Jeannette d’Honrath, played on a private concert there in 1819. Beethoven’s music was performed on the first concert of the Musikverein in Zagreb (today Croatian Music Institute, CMI) in 1827. A representative of the Musikverein was present at the Vienna centenary celebrations of his birth in 1870; interesting material about that is kept in the CMI, together with some early and first editions of Beethoven’s works. The local premiere of the Ninth Symphony took place in 1900, with more than 200 performers. Other notable performances of the work include that conducted by Lorin Maazel (1987), and the project entitled Nine for the Ninth Centenary (1994), which united young musicians in the wartime. Tracing Beethoven in Zagreb also concerns his name, which was written on the walls of the CMI building in 1876, and his impressive bust made in 1939 by Vanja Radauš, kept today in a clinic for otorhinolaryngology.

Abstract As Nathan Waddell has recently argued of the literary modernists whose aesthetic incorporation of the Beethovenian legend complicates the dominant view of modernism as an antitraditionalist enterprise, Ludwig van Beethoven’s music has in fact left a more significant and complicated mark on African American literature relating to the sublime properties of his musical aesthetic than has previously been recognized. As a point of departure, I apply Michael J. Shapiro’s definition of the racial sublime as a confrontation with the “still vast oppressive structure that imperils black lives” to the setting of twentieth-century African American literature, where Beethoven’s Romantic sublime often stands in for the racial sublime. This transference, I argue, is not an expression of the artist’s repressed instinctual conflict, the mere sublimation of their devotion to “white” culture and the cult of genius, as Amiri Baraka once suggested. Rather, Beethoven’s music formed a persistent and powerful political allegory of the racial sublime for many prominent twentieth-century authors in their literary works, where the sublime constitutes a sublimation of direct forms of power into a range of aesthetic experiences. This can be observed in the Beethovenian ekphrasis featured in prose works by James Weldon Johnson, Langston Hughes, James Baldwin, and Ralph Ellison—four writers whose works have also been considered indebted to blues and jazz musical influences and who approach the racial sublime not through language but by appealing to music’s nonsignifying suggestiveness, in order to capture the intensities that radiate out of these encounters. As this article reveals, their allegorical uses for Beethoven are not unitary. The forcefield of the racial sublime is registered allegorically through the performative sublime of Sonata “Pathétique” in Johnson’s The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man (1912); the sublime melancholy of the “Moonlight” Sonata in Hughes’s tragic short story “Home” (1934); the spiritual sublime of Beethoven’s piano concerti and the Ninth Symphony in Baldwin’s short story “Previous Condition” (1948); and the heroic sublime of the Fifth Symphony in Ellison’s bildungsroman Invisible Man (1952).

The article examines the genres of the vocal and the choral symphony in connection with the author’s vocal symphony Finland for soprano, tenor and orchestra set to Evgeny Baratynsky’s poem with the same title. It also discusses the issue of expression of the literary text in vocal music, as viewed by a number of influential 19th and 20th century composers, music theorists and artists. Among the greatest examples of the vocal symphony are Gustav Mahler’s Das Lied von der Erde and Alexander von Zemlinsky’s Lyrische Symphonie. These works combine in an organic way the features of the symphony and the song cycle. The genre of the choral symphony started with Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony and includes such works as Mendelssohn’s Second Symphony, Scriabin’s First Symphony and Mahler’s Second, Third and Eighth Symphonies. Both genres exemplify composers’ attempts to combine the most substantial genre of instrumental music embodying the composers’ philosophical worldviews with that of vocal music, which expresses the emotional content of the literary texts set to music. The issue of expressivity in music is further elaborated in examinations of various composers’ approaches to it. Wagner claimed that the purpose of music was to express the composers’ emotional experience and especially the literary texts set to music. Stravinsky expressed the view that music in its very essence is not meant to express emotions. He called for an emotionally detached approach to music and especially to text settings in vocal music. Schoenberg pointed towards a more introversive and abstract approach to musical expression and text setting in vocal music, renouncing outward depiction for the sake of inner expression. Similar attitudes to this position were held by painter Wassily Kandinsky and music theorist Theodor Adorno. The author views Schoenberg’s approach to be the most viable for 20th and early 21st century music.

The research subject is Beethoven’s view of life of the late period - the topical issue for a performing musician: without understanding of the fundamental changes in his style, it is impossible to adequately interpret the late piano sonatas. The last of them - Sonata op.111 - has been an object of discussion not only among musicians, but also among writers for almost two centuries. The author detects the following types of dialogue in Sonate op.111: a) a dialogue with Beethoven’s previous compositions; b) a dialogue - within the latest period - with Ninth Symphony op.25 and Missa Solemnis op.123; c) a dialogue with the music of predecessors; d) an imaginary dialogue of Beethoven and Goethe (of the period of “Faust” completion); e) a dialogue op.111 with the world culture. The author arrives at the following conclusions: whilst the formation of the concept of interpretation is usually related to the performance activities of romanticists - Paganini and List, the prerequisites of the phenomenon of interpretation can be found already in the works and ideas of Beethoven - he is a precursor of romanticists of the 19th century. Each of his works is individualized, and doesn’t contain patterns or cliches. To play his compositions outside of the concept means to be not able to adequately convey the spirit of Beethoven’s music. With all their strict architectonics, Beethoven’s works appeal to spontaneity of self-expression - a pianist, as an actor, should experience this music “in the here and now”.   

This article explores the treatment of space in Gustav Mahler's First Symphony from the perspective of the composer's experience as a conductor of opera. It considers the ‘theatrically’ located offstage utterances in the work's introduction in light of passages from Beethoven's Fidelio (Act 2, scene ii) and Tristan und Isolde (Act 2, scene ii), and against the backdrop of Mahler's controversial attempt to assign the Alla marcia section from the Finale of Beethoven's Ninth Symphony to a small offstage orchestra. By considering in turn the implications of Mahler's treatment of offstage space on the work's overall structure, specifically with respect to the moment of ‘breakthrough’ in the first and last movements, I suggest that Mahler ultimately re-establishes the vitality of the symphony as genre at the intersection between the waning symphonic tradition and the immediacy of operatic convention.

Throughout his life Robert Simpson has been fascinated by two aspects of the music of the great Viennese classical composers: their handling of large-scale tonality, and their handling of rhythm. It has been his abiding ambition to recapture the sense of energy that Mozart, Haydn and Beethoven produced, and which has been largely lost since then. He has wanted, for example, to discover what makes a Beethoven Adagio or Scherzo, or a Haydn Finale, so utterly characteristic rhythmically. As a means of exploring this he has set himself various tasks. He wrote his First Symphony, for example, with a basic pulse throughout, upon which contrasting tempi are achieved by varying the pace of thought. This method is found in subsequent works, for example the Second, Seventh and Eleventh String Quartets, the second movement of the Third Symphony, and most of the Sixth. In these works tonality, as it is generally understood, is a potent force.

Adrienne Rich’s poem “The Ninth Symphony of Beethoven Understood at Last as a Sexual Message” has become a fixture in musicological accounts of Beethoven and the Ninth ever since its introduction to the discipline in an influential essay by Susan McClary. But though Rich’s work has been cited in numerous books and articles in the intervening decades, it has remained yoked to McClary’s text, with critics rarely considering the poem on its own terms. This paper considers what is at stake in our discipline’s reliance on Rich’s “Beethoven” poem. After taking stock of its use at the hands of musicologists since the publication of Feminine Endings, asking to what end authors reference Rich’s work, it returns to the poem in order to stage a more explicit confrontation with its text, reestablish its connections to contemporary discussions of Beethoven and feminism, and consider its significance to musicology.

The reception history of Ludwig van Beethoven's symphonies in America offers striking evidence of multiple, previously unidentified, Continental and English connections to the musical thought of John Sullivan Dwight (1813–93), the first American-born critic of art music, and therefore to early American conceptions of the symphony in the 1840s. These direct links illuminate the history and criticism of the first performance in America of Beethoven's Symphony no. 9 in D minor, op. 125, which took place in New York in 1846. From the many sources associated with Dwight's musical learning and aesthetic education, I have chosen in this article to examine Dwight's literary interest in Johann Christoph Friedrich Schiller's poem ‘An die Freude’ and in Thomas Carlyle's biography of Schiller, to document his knowledge of commentary on the symphony by the German critic Adolf Bernhard Marx, and to describe Dwight's response to the initial American performance of the Ninth Symphony.

"Polemic in the Concert Hall": the title of Richard Heuberger's article in the Neue freie Presse refers in no uncertain terms to the uproar surrounding Mahler's performances of Beethoven's Ninth Symphony in Vienna. The two performances, on 18 and 22 February 1900, used Mahler's own orchestral re-touchings of Beethoven's work, and Mahler's biographers have often identified these concerts as the first sustained attacks by the press, attacks that would, over time, only continue to increase in severity and frequency. When these concerts are placed into the context of reactions to Mahler's other Philharmonic concerts, however, this narrative of a "fall from grace" proves impossible to sustain. Not only was Mahler denounced for reorchestrating other works from his very first concert with the Vienna Philharmonic, but the language used to do so remained consistent throughout Mahler's tenure. Mahler, as a Jew, was not perceived as having the "right" to "improve" Beethoven--or any other composer for that matter. Although not overtly anti-Semitic, the language of the reviews resembles that found in Wagner's essay "Das Judentum in der Musik," where he outlines the Jewish composer's supposed handicaps: an emphasis on detail to the detriment of the whole, the prevalence of intellect over feeling, and an understanding of culture as merely "learnt" but never "mother tongue." An examination of the critical reactions points out these similarities while also suggesting that, particularly given Wagner's own suggestions (in 1873) for the reorchestration of Beethoven's symphony, the uproar had very little to do with what anyone heard.

Abstract This article argues for a number of hitherto unrecognized continuities——stylistic, aesthetic, and ideological——between Beethoven's marginalized ““political music”” from the period of the Congress of Vienna and his canonical symphonic works. It rereads his œœuvre against the background of the popularity and ubiquity of the ““Handelian sublime”” in early-nineteenth-century Viennese public life——that is, the aesthetics and social practice of grand choral singing, associated primarily with some of Handel's oratorios, but also with the late choral works of Haydn. Presenting new archival research into Vienna's politicized choral culture, the article argues that contemporary theorizing about the power of the musical sublime became the theoretical wing of music's changing social status, as it was mobilized by the state during the Napoleonic Wars more than ever before. These new, Handelian contexts for Beethoven's music lead to three conclusions. First, the choral aesthetic background to Beethoven's symphonies has been largely overlooked. With reference to original performance contexts as well as the topical character of Beethoven's symphonies, the article argues that the symphonies are often best understood as orchestral transmutations of the grand Handelian chorus. Against this background, the appearance of an actual chorus in the Ninth might be reconceived as a moment when the genre's aesthetic debt is most apparent, rather than a shocking generic transgression. Second, the distinction, commonly elaborated by Beethoven scholars, between the mere bombast of Beethoven's political compositions and the ““authentic,”” Kantian sublime of human freedom supposedly articulated in his symphonies cannot easily be sustained. Third, the cultural entanglement of choral and symphonic music in Beethoven's Vienna reveals something not only of the political origins but also of the continuing political potency of Beethoven's symphonies. With reference to Althusserian theories of power and subjectivity, the article speculates that the compelling sense of listener subjectivity created by Beethoven's most vaunted symphonic compositions (noted by Scott Burnham) comes about in part through the music's and the listener's transformation of external, choral reflections of political power into internal, symphonic ones——a transformation that leaves its mark on the topical character of the symphonies, which, especially in their most intense moments of subjective engagement, are replete with official topics and gestures: marches, hymns, and fugues. This might explain why the music has so often been heard as simultaneously browbeating and uplifting, authoritarian and liberating.

What are twelve-note rows really for?‘…I don't need to use serialism to…achieve a unity between the motifs’ says David Matthews in his interview with Mark Doran (Tempo, Vol. 57, No. 223, January 2003, p.11); and most composers would say the same. After all, the motifs and themes of the first movement of Schubert's Third Symphony are so integrated that even the accompanimental cliché of repeated quaver chords turns out to be motivic and the whole of the ‘Unfinished’ is based dialectically on the tonic and dominant versions of a single three-note motif and their sublation. And in his Ninth symphony, Beethoven manages to base not only themes but key-successions, too, on a basic group of four notes and finally even creates that shattering dissonance at the start of the finale out of a simultaneous sounding of its notes. Or is that already proto-serialism?

This study presents an attempt to pin down the potential narrative qualities of instrumental, wordless music. Comparing as case-studies two pieces in sonata form–the first movements of Beethoven's ‘Pastoral’ Symphony (as representative of Classical narrative possibilities) and of Mahler's Ninth Symphony (as representative of its composer's idiosyncratic treatment of those in the late nineteenth century) –I propose a ‘narrative’ analysis of their musical features, applying the notions of ‘story’, ‘discourse’ and other concepts from the literary theory of, for example, Genette, Prince and Barthes. An analysis at three semiotic levels (morphological, syntactic and semantic), corresponding to denotative/connotative levels of meaning, shows that Mahler's materials qualify better as narrative ‘events’ on account of their greater number, their individuality and their rich semantic connotations. Through analysis of the ‘discursive techniques’ of the two pieces I show that a weaker degree of narrativity corresponds to music in which the developmental procedures are mostly based on tonal musical syntax (as in the Classical style), whereas a higher degree of narrativity corresponds to music in which, in addition to semantic transformations of the materials, discourse itself relies more on gestural semantic connotations (as in Mahler).

The term unheimlich (uncanny) comes into usage in German music criticism in the nineteenth century and is often used to describe instrumental music, particularly sections of works featuring the ombra topic. While the idea that instrumental music can be uncanny regardless of text or program is not novel, this work differs from most existing scholarship on the musical uncanny in that it presents a possible precursor to the twentieth-century psychoanalytic uncanny. Instead, it examines Schelling's definition of the uncanny in the larger context of his ideas in order to form a basis for theorizing a version of this aesthetic category that is active in the nineteenth-century critical discourse about music. In the early nineteenth century, music becomes uncanny because it discloses what should remain hidden from finite revelation. Critics understand passages of instrumental ombra music as uncanny moments when music calls attention to itself as the sensuous manifestation of the Absolute. They remark on these passages’ effacing of boundaries and sense of becoming, residues of eighteenth-century uses of the topic in operatic supernatural scenes and as part of a chaos-to-order narrative in symphonic music. The article concludes with the reception of the opening of Beethoven's Ninth Symphony and the finale of Schubert's Octet, D. 803, using critics’ comments as a basis for extrapolating, through new analyses, as to the features that might make the particular works remarkable as examples of music's uncanny power made manifest.

Mark Anthony Turnage's Frieze – performed by the National Youth Orchestra of Great Britain, conducted by Vasily Petrenko, on 11 August – and Nashit Kahn's The Gate of the Moon, a concerto for sitar and orchestra – performed by Kahn himself with the BBC National Orchestra of Wales, conducted by David Atherton on 12 August – both raise the question of how, in a new piece, one can meaningfully reference other music. Turnage's work was commissioned by the Royal Philharmonic Society to celebrate the organisation's bicentennial and to share a programme as their most famous and, probably, greatest commission, the Beethoven Ninth Symphony; this shorter work, which is clearly modelled on the Beethoven in its general layout, is a sort of gloss in Turnage's own language on the older one. Kahn's concerto brings together an orchestra of western instruments and a single Indian one and aims at joining their indigenous musical languages in a meaningful way.

Abstract In 1912, Schenker began to reconceptualize four works already published, in press, or in preparation as a series parallel to his Neue musikalische Theorien und Phantasien, under the collective title Erläuterungsausgaben (elucidatory editions): his editions of C. P. E. Bach keyboard works with companion brochure, Ein Beitrag zur Ornamentik (1903; 2nd ed. 1908); J. S. Bach's Chromatic Fantasy and Fugue (1910); Beethoven's last five piano sonatas (1913–20); and his monograph on Beethoven's Ninth Symphony (1912). A close reading of the texts associated with the first two of these brings out the characteristics of Schenker's newly forged mode of musical discourse and helps us understand why Schenker prized it so highly. Inspection of Schenker's correspondence with J. G. Cotta and Universal Edition (also the latter's publication records and catalogues) and his diary makes possible a detailed history of the works concerned and of his unsuccessful attempt to establish the second series; it also reveals the central role he envisioned for himself in the future of Universal Edition and casts light on his complex interactions with Emil Hertzka, on relationships with his private patrons, and on his sense of exclusion from Viennese musical circles.

This article reassesses the “mechanical” style of playing featured in Carl Czerny's pedagogical works and keyboard arrangements—specifically, the Complete Theoretical and Practical Piano Forte School, op. 500 (1839), its supplementary text Letters to a Young Lady (ca. 1840), and the four-hand transcription of Beethoven's Symphony no. 9 in D Minor, op. 125 (the “Choral”). The first part of the article situates opus 500 within the larger pedagogical milieu of Biedermeier music culture and Johann Heinrich Pestalozzi's progressivist educational reforms, exploring the way it tasked predominantly women amateurs with assembling basic finger sensations in an exercise-by-exercise—“progressive”—fashion. I propose that this cumulative logic reflects an early-century epistemic norm—what Friedrich Kittler dubs a “mechanical program” of assembly and augmentation. The second part considers Czerny's transcription of the finale of Beethoven's Ninth from the perspective of ludo-musicology and cultural techniques media analysis, outlining the reductive and replicative—“reproductive”—techniques by which Czerny accommodated his former teacher's work to the hands he shaped in the private sphere. I argue that his pedagogies and transcriptions were recursively interrelated. Czerny was simultaneously a mechanic of the hand pedagogically and a mechanical reproducer of symphonies transcriptively, creating a multivalent corpus that forces us to rethink the media-theoretical concept of “mechanical reproduction” vis-à-vis “Discourse Network 1800.”

ABSTRACTThe critical reception of Kubrick's A Clockwork Orange (1971) often circles around two related questions: its relationship to Anthony Burgess's 1962 novel and the implications of its classical ‘compilation’ soundtrack. Revisiting both, this article challenges the pervasive emphasis in existing musicological literature on the film's use of Beethoven's Ninth Symphony by offering a formal analysis of its excerpts by (among others) Rossini, Elgar and Purcell. A fresh look at Purcell's Funeral Music for Queen Mary (1695) serves to open a dramatic lineage leading back to the seventeenth-century ‘Don Juan’ archetype, which brings in tow the vast musicological literature on Don Giovanni along with philosophical accounts from Kierkegaard through Bernard Williams. The film's notorious references to Gene Kelly's dance routine in Singin’ in the Rain (1952) add to its confrontation with individual and collective ideals of ‘liberty’ a cinematic reflexivity that can serve (with some help from Marshall McLuhan's influential 1964 study Understanding Media) to shed new light on Luis Buñuel's assertion that this is ‘the only movie about what the modern world really means’.

Optical storage of digital information has reached the consumer market in the form of the compact audio disk. In this technology, information is stored in the form of shallow pits embossed in a polymer surface. The surface is coated with a reflective thin metallic film, and the digital information, represented by the position and length of the pits, is read out optically with a focused, low-power (5 mW) laser beam. When used for information storage for a computer this device is called a CD-ROM, a Compact Digital-Read Only Memory. The user can only extract information (digital data) from the disk without changing or adding any data. That is, it is possible to “read” but not to “write” or “erase” information.While it is an advantage to have permanently stored information in some cases — for example when listening to Beethoven's Ninth Symphony—in other situations the read-only feature is not appropriate. For most computer applications, it is essential that the user be able to store information on the disk and read it back at will. For example, in a word processing task—such as typing this article — it is often necessary to store the document on a disk. Optical data storage for this purpose is available in the form of a Write Once Read Many times (WORM) optical disk drive. The operating principle in a WORM drive is to use a focused laser beam (20 – 40 mW) to make a permanent mark on a thin film on a disk. The information is then read out as a change in the optical properties of the disk, e.g., reflectivity or absorbance. These changes can take various forms: “hole burning” is the removal of material (typically a thin film of tellurium) by evaporation, melting or spalling — sometime s referred to as laser ablation; bubble or pit formation involves deformation of the surface, usually of a polymer overcoat on a metal reflector.

PurposeOne of the standard practices of Communist Parties around the world is to employ art, including music, as a channel to spread political ideologies. This study aims to scrutinize the reception of Beethoven's music, particularly from a political viewpoint, by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) in the People's Republic of China (PRC) during the early years of its rule, i.e. from 1949–1959. The ambiguity of Beethoven's own political outlook may have provided an opportunity for the CCP to choose the composer and his music in support of its aims.Design/methodology/approachTo understand why and how the CCP could exploit Beethoven and his music to support its political ideologies, a series of Chinese writings on Beethoven between 1949 and 1959 have been studied. Those literatures not only helped the composer gain reputation and popularity in the PRC, but also provided a platform for the CCP to manipulate such candidate and his music. Finally, the reception of the performances of the Ninth Symphony in 1959 in the PRC is singled out for close examination.FindingsDuring the first ten years of the establishment of the PRC, the quantity and quality of the articles on Beethoven expanded considerably. These writings continued to reflect the reception of Beethoven and his music with the addition of political nuances that could be interpreted in the CCP's favour.Originality/valueThis paper seeks to examine the PRC's artistic policies, with a particular emphasis on the reception of Beethoven and western classical music.

It is peculiar that we so urgently seek out the emotion of fear in film. We have a thirst for fear, and we go to elaborate means to experience it. It would be convenient if we could invoke the experience of fear without the apparatus of a cinema, but such intermediaries are necessary. We cannot will ourselves to be afraid. To evoke an emotion, we must organize our environment -- or invoke mental images of such an environment -- which then triggers the emotion. One of the great discoveries of the 20th century was the powerful effect of combining film with musical representations of emotion. It is possible to combine these two media in a way that reflects no naturally occurring visual-auditory correlation, such as the correlation between the sight and sound of a person running. That two such distinct media should combine so readily may seem puzzling. Background music is not part of the diegesis of the film and has the potential to create confusion (Cohen, 2). This potential was illustrated in Mel Brooks' comedy Blazing Saddles (1974). A sheriff rides in the desert set to suitable background music, but then meets the Count Basie Band performing the now foreground music. The music, initially interpreted on a subconscious or emotional level, is unexpectedly thrust into the fictional component of the film and processed on a conscious level. Such exceptions aside, there is usually no such confusion because film and music are integrated on an emotional rather than an analytic level. Fear responses do not require brain structures needed for consciousness and analytic thought but can be processed without conscious awareness by subcortical structures (i.e., the amygdala). A frightening score that is not part of the diegesis of the film combines with visual information at sub-cortical levels to create a unified experience of fear, with no sense that there are two sources of emotional meaning -- fictional and musical. The lack of literal connection between visual and auditory sources is not confusing. We do not question the logic of musicians playing triumphant music at every battle in Star Wars, or sentimental music inside the police station on Hill Street Blues. The combination of film and music is exceptionally potent because both are highly influential media. Economic activity reflects their influence (Huron, 3). In the United States, the largest export sector is entertainment, led by music and film. Film makers are so confident that they invest billions of dollars in them. In 1999 the average budget for a single Hollywood film was 76 million. The prevalence of music in industrialized society is also massive: the music industry is larger than the pharmaceutical industry. As a film composer, I've learned that I can induce fear most readily by turning my attention away from conventional music structures. In an important sense, writing fearful music should not involve composition in the usual sense of the term. Rather, one may rely on the fact that sound is inherently frightening when stripped of the comforting structuring properties of language and music. It is difficult to express fear using conventional forms. Fear is sometimes expressed in Opera but using unconventional forms. Fear is also associated with the bhayanaka rasa in Classical Indian music, but evidence suggests that sensitivity to rasas is related to basic acoustic properties such as pace, loudness, and complexity (Balkwill & Thompson, 1). The major and minor modes in Western music are associated with happiness and sadness, but the evocation of fear seems antithetical to such conventions. When music is recognizable, as in a melody with a traditional harmonic accompaniment, we experience reassurance. Conventional music evokes a comforting feeling that we are "among our own" and there is safety in numbers. The possibility of fear arises when familiar music structures are removed. It is certainly possible to create a creepy atmosphere using traditional forms by repeatedly pairing a musical segment with a frightening image or event. Such learned associations are used in the practice of leitmotiv, in which a musical theme is paired repeatedly with a character until it comes to represent that character. Consider Mike Oldfield's circular melody in The Exorcist or Beethoven's ninth symphony in A Clockwork Orange. Through learned association, both scores created extremely disturbing atmospheres. The most effective way to induce terror, however, is to manipulate basic acoustic properties, also called secondary musical parameters. Primary parameters include melody and harmony: aspects of music that are culturally shaped and recognizable as traditional forms. Secondary parameters include pace, loudness, timbre, and pitch height: elements of sound that are perceived similarly across cultures. The use of musical convention is deeply connected with one's emotional intention. We create fear most powerfully by stripping music of conventional forms. Composers aiming to design a fearful score often import and embed frightening sounds into traditional compositional structures, such as a melody with harmonic accompaniment. They do this as a musical challenge or out of concern that their score might otherwise be perceived as unsophisticated. What evokes fear, however, are not those recognizable conventions of composition but rather, elements of the score that are unrelated to conventional structures. We fear surprising or unfamiliar sounds: sudden changes in loudness, jittery sounds, deep hollow textures, and unpredictable pitch combinations or movement. Sounds are more frightening than visual images, and hence soundtracks are essential to thriller flicks. Visual images are experienced as "out there" and emotionally distant. We've learned to detach ourselves emotionally from visual images by habituating to the continuous stream of horrifying TV and film images. When we actually witness a terrifying event, it seems "like a movie." Sounds are experienced as both outside and inside our heads. We feel sound in our bones, making it difficult to distance ourselves from them. They are less easily localized than visual images, creating nervousness about possible escape routes. Their sources are not always identifiable, creating uncertainty. Prey rely heavily on sounds to alert them of predators, linking sound to fear. The fear centre of the brain -- the amygdala -- lies deep inside the temporal lobe, which processes sound (LeDoux, 4). From an evolutionary standpoint, we can assume that humans, like all animals, evolved a sensitivity to the potential dangers associated with sounds. Brain systems that generate fear are highly conserved throughout evolutionary history, suggesting that fear responses in modern brains are similar to fear responses in early hominids. Large, aggressive, or unfamiliar animals are potentially life-threatening and it is adaptive for us to fear them. Low pitches are associated with large sound-producing cavities and hence, animals with big mouths. Loud low-pitched sounds signal aggression. High-pitched screeches are perceived as alarm calls. During the stabbing scene in the film Psycho, repeated screeching sounds or "alarm-calls" combine with the visual scene to induce excruciating fear. In industrialized society, fear of predation is largely non-existent, replaced with a fear of our own technology: car and airplane accidents, nuclear disasters, weapons. But fear responses today are the result of adaptive pressures that took place thousands of years ago when predation was a constant threat. We are acutely sensitive to alarm calls and predatory sounds. When predators of humans are portrayed in film, as in Jaws or Jurassic Park, the experience of fear is unbearable. Why do we so urgently seek out this unpleasant emotion? One possibility relates to social cohesion. Group solidarity is enhanced when there is a common enemy. The object of fear in film distinguishes "us against them" and secures a bond between those experiencing the terror. The representation of fear identifies an enemy (the object of fear) to enhance solidarity. Teenagers -- who have the greatest need for social bonding and self definition -- are voracious consumers of terror films. Shared experiences of film-induced fear are extremely widespread. In the week ending May 28th, 2000, there were over 3,100 screening of Gladiator in the United States. America dominates the world market in film and music (only India has resisted this domination). For better or worse, Hollywood emotions are globally shared. People from Japan, China, Italy, Spain, and Brazil have a common bond on the basis of having seen The Matrix or The Exorcist. Fear in film also performs another function. Films are externalized representations of cultural memory, and of culturally significant or meaningful experiences. They are a mechanism for accumulating and transmitting knowledge of the environment, preparing ourselves for circumstances in which we might find ourselves. Terror films stimulate the development of cognitive strategies for coping with challenging circumstances. All of us -- teenagers especially -- feel a need to prepare ourselves for hostile environments. Terror films not only nurture social bonding, they motivate the refinement of an essential human trait: courage. By situating ourselves within an environment that presents various hypothetical sources of terror, we test our courage, and we activate the development of important strategies for coping with the very real fears with which we will inevitably be confronted. References Balkwill, L.L. & Thompson, W.F. "A cross-cultural investigation of the perception of emotion in music: Psychophysical and cultural cues." Music Perception, 17, 43-64, 1999. Cohen, A. "Music as a source of emotion in film." In Patrik Juslin & John Sloboda (Ed.) Music and Emotion: Theory and Research. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001. Huron, D. "Is music an evolutionary adaptation?" In Robert Zatorre & Isabelle Peretz (Ed.), The Biological Foundations of Music. New York: Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences, Volume 930. New York, 2001. LeDoux, J. The Emotional Brain: The Mysterious Underpinnings of Emotional Life. New York: Touchstone, 1996. Citation reference for this article MLA Style Thompson, Bill. "Evoking Terror In Film Scores" M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 5.1 (2002). [your date of access] < http://www.media-culture.org.au/0203/evoking.php>. Chicago Style Thompson, Bill, "Evoking Terror In Film Scores" M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 5, no. 1 (2002), < http://www.media-culture.org.au/0203/evoking.php> ([your date of access]). APA Style Thompson, Bill. (2002) Evoking Terror In Film Scores. M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 5(1). < http://www.media-culture.org.au/0203/evoking.php> ([your date of access]).