The death of classical music, III: Pythagoras, the ghastly adolescent, and the awful monster
Posted in music on 25 Jun 2005
Guardian Unlimited | Arts features | Beethoven was a narcissistic hooligan
This article from the Guardian manages to combine two of the topics I’ve been writing about here lately — the death of classical music, and the heritage from Pythagoras — so I thought I should cite it.
From the speculations of Pythagoras about the “music of the spheres” in ancient Greece onwards, most western musicians had agreed that musical beauty was based on a mysterious connection between sound and mathematics, and that this provided music with an objective goal, something that transcended the individual composer’s idiosyncrasies and aspired to the universal. Beethoven managed to put an end to this noble tradition by inaugurating a barbaric U-turn away from …