Letter to the Editor

Dear Editor,

I have much enjoyed reading the letter from Professor Stina Lyon. She writes, regarding the criticism she has with my gendered approach to Beethoven:

Herein lies my criticism: looking at music as a universal human creative activity, I see several other equally important dimensions affecting its production and presentation, particularly those relating to social and political collective culture on the one hand and the individual development of physical life itself. … Beethoven truly gives a voice to the universality of the human condition, including that of being a child, and where Grier and McClary refer to women as “the other”, Beethoven hears and expresses the voices of many “others”, including children, who all make their way into his creative sounds.

I couldn't agree more. Beethoven's music is incredibly multi-layered, and in my essay I have only explored one perspective. Not that I have omitted the aspect of children: their particular standpoint is included. But it's quite true that I do not pay any attention to the social and political dimensions. These are vastly important for the total understanding of any music, particularly for a composer like Beethoven for whom they were quite consciously crucial aspects of life, and whose music may articulate social and political expressions both consciously and unconsciously, not only for his time, but also for succeeding generations including our own – one has only to think of the performances of the Ninth Symphony marking major political events. Two examples: Leonard Bernstein conducted a performance in East Berlin to celebrate the fall of the Berlin Wall, in 1989; and since 1985, the main theme of the last movement, the Ode to Joy, has been the anthem of the European Union.