Forest Leaves and Beethoven and Language

Years ago, the now-defunct Houston classical music station KLEF had an announcer who mentioned a listener request for "Forest Leaves" by Beethoven. Eventually the announcer realized the listener was referring to Für Elise, or Bagatelle No. 25 in A minor.

Jalen Jefferson notes

For example, Für Elise written by Ludwig van Beethoven has the emphasis onhas the emphasis on notes and rhythms that actually helps put the piece into perspective when heard. However, on paper it is merely a piece of writing. The quality of those punctuations; crescendos, decrescendos, adagio, adds to the reason that musicians under stead the concept of writing as well as the mission within different pieces. The similarities are so great that hearing the music while writing is merely the end product of the work of art.

I began taking piano lessons when I was ten years old while living in the small town of Grenada Mississippi. Not many people in Grenada Mississippi listened to piano, much less play, much less take lessons.




My piano teacher's name was Sherri O'Bryant and I immediately had a 10-year old boy's crush on her -- she must have been in college at the time, blond hair, slender, patient and encouraging. I have a photograph (old school technology) of her sitting on a tree swing which I took. At our first meeting in her church building, she taught me where Middle C and -- never having music training before that (except for playing the recorder in first grade and that doesn't count because ... why the recorder?) -- I thought it strange that this large piece of furniture would be identified by letters: C-D-E-F-G-A-B-C. At ten I had a full-hand octave reach which was apparently important because she was impressed. 


Over the next year, Sherri made sure that in addition to technique, she instructed me in the biographies of the great (white, European) composers such as Beethoven (from her I learned that he had become deaf; I remember her being amazed at that even with her years of previous learning, and I was incredulous), Brahams, Mozart, et al. Through it all, I had some inkling that I was learning a new language -- the new vocabulary of treble and bass, measures and coda, etc. But more than the vocabulary, I was beginning to understand how musicians see the world differently than literature authors. I had always read -- it's part of my family's genetic literacy that we all read voraciously, even if it becomes an anti-social behavior. I would read children's detective books (Danny Dunn, Hardy Boys, Bobbsey Twins) and some history, small biographies, the Bible (religion had always been an expectation in the family, since at least my great grandfather who had been a preacher in the Primitive Baptist Church), and of course the National Geographic. But these authors saw the world differently, more literally. I hadn't read much poetry, though my father read Frost enthusiastically. By being introduced to the language of (classical and religious) music, I began to see how the world could be understood through tones and syncopation, more than alphabetic clauses and some photographs.

We moved from Grenada and I had to teach myself some piano strategies for several years because for some reason we didn't look for a piano teacher in Searcy, Arkansas (I was so glad to get out of that town a year later -- perhaps the most traumatic year of my life; another story). But I did begin band, playing the alto saxophone where I placed first chair for the whole year minus a brief period as second chair. I won "Best Bandsman Award" that year for some reason (honestly, I think it might have been racial; the two band directors were white and my only competition for the award was a rambunctious black boy who played the tuba; he was good and everyone knew it; when he slipped from first to second chair once, I recall the directors smiling, perhaps even laughing. This was Searcy, Arkansas, after all.  That's all to say about that).

Music is rhetorical -- it not only represents an individual author's talents and intentions, but also his culture and access to technology peculiar to his historical setting. Bill and Ted's Excellent Adventure aside, we can't expect the composer of Für Elise to compose "We are the Champions" because their musical rhetorics were worlds apart (though, dammit, I'd like to hear "Champions" performed in the style of the Ninth Symphony). It's not surprising then, that Jefferson sees relationships in music and "language," where he means spoken discourse. What is fascinating is how the brain processes music as an emotive stimulus just as vocal discourse does. 





In a recent Radio Lab broadcast, Professor Diana Deutsch, who studies the psychology of sound, begins the discussion of how sound affects us emotionally. "Sometimes sound behaves so strangely." Sound is, after all, a stimulus interpreted by the brain. Further, as our exposure to sound is a cultural phenomenon -- I've rarely been exposed to the click click dialect of Khoisan languages, for example -- our limited exposure to some sounds and our sufficient exposure to other sounds will certainly affect how we will respond to those tones and syncopations and rhythms will be a cultural response -- positive, negative, or neutral. Later in the same broadcast, the famous story of the first performance of Stravinsky's Le Sacre du Printemps in 1913 Paris was retold -- when the repetition of the bassoon's chord and the overall avant garde nature of Stravinsky's piece caused a riot among the upper crust. Yet a year later, months before the first shots fired in Belgium, Stravinsky's work was culturally accepted and he was feted on the shoulders of the crowd through the streets. Culture change, so rhetorical expectations changed, and the language of music had changed. Now an audience was prepared for a new message and for the next century neither music nor language would ever be the same. 

When I discussed SMS in my class last week, I was surprised to hear young students insist that SMS is a corruption of language, whereas most students see this as an extension of English. If technology can change the language, then one medium -- music -- can certainly do so. More than vocabulary, more than syncopation, one discourse reflects the intensity and tone of another. We should continue to seek ways of mixing music with alphabetic discourse to uncover even more miracles of rhetorical efficacy with our audiences. We're really only just beginning to appreciate how technology can enable all this mixing and mashing and masking of discourses. The riots of 1913 -- they need to be resurrected, started again. We need the same shaking of up our language as Paris had a century ago. Let it ride.





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