essays | 4

Seeing Beethoven in 2020

Program note to

Con Variazioni, for two pianos

The poet Claudia Rankine has remarked, with bracing clarity and bone-weary frustration:

I don’t understand how all the history and learning and conversations that have carried us through our lives allow us … still to not see the same things, when they seem so obvious.…We’re all looking at the same document and you’re still hearing a justification for the killing of black people.


A document in madness, thoughts and remembrance fitted.

– Laertes (Hamlet, Act IV, Sc. 5)


The platitude about 2020 is that it will all be hindsight. The scriptural symbolism, however, seems to bring more insight: the binary look of two twos and two zeroes in alternation points to the quick flips of watching and hearing everything in double and yet seeing and understanding nothing. Con variazioni is a doublespeak berceuse— a stupefying lullaby. There is some real sentiment, but much of it is dumb. (Duuumb-da-duuumb-da…) The descending chromatic scale can intimate, amazingly, to some, a lament; to others, utter stupidity. Multiple references to Beethoven and Beethovenian objects, touches, and sensations get woven in (all three late sonatas, a couple of concerto, and “Rage Over a Lost Penny,” of course). The distortionist still gets to play his Emperor cadenza. He gets the transcendent trill at the end, while everyone around him, exhausted, tumbles and dissolves back into the earth.

Performance as part of RAGE [Vented] , a commissioning project sponsored by the Cornell Historical Keyboards Center initiated by HereNowHear, in which the composers Christopher Castro, Laura Cetilia, Dante de Silva, Jihyun Kim, Aida Shirazi, LJ White, and yours truly composed works in response to Beethoven’s Rage Over a Lost Penny for his sestercentennial. ⫷ [Nov. 8, 2020, program note revised Jan. 6, 2021]