UC Press Blog

By Lawrence Kramer, author of Experiencing Sound: The Sensation of Being

On the two-hundredth anniversary of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony, which premiered on May 7th, 1824, The New York Times ran an opinion piece on the work by the distinguished pianist and conductor Daniel Barenboim. The next day Beethoven again turned up in the Times, this time on the front page. A lock of his hair had yielded new clues to the cause of his deafness. The medical journalist Gina Kolata reported on the research but did not stop with the diagnosis (lead poisoning). She went on to talk about the Ninth.

The two articles could not be more different. The contrast between them brings out an important dimension of what may be at stake in experiencing sound—the subject of my new book, Experiencing Sound: The Sensation of Being. Sound may be an object of pleasure, indifference, or distress. But apart from its quality in any given moment, sound is the source of a primary sensation in which present time and present reality feel present and real. Beethoven may have housed that sensation in some of his music. Helen Keller, the other leading figure in Kolata’s article, certainly found it there—in the Ninth Symphony.

Barenboim, regrettably, hears nothing of this. He recycles the familiar idea that music is ineffable (“on its own it stands for nothing but itself”) because it delivers “metaphysical” meanings through the material medium of sound. The trouble is, spoken language does exactly the same thing. It even does so “musically,” with intonation, accent, rhythm, and dynamics as well as the sound of words. The fact that language, spoken or written, can never fully “grasp music itself” is, contra Barenboim, unremarkable, because language cannot fully grasp anything at all, including the experience of language. Saying credible things about music is hard, but that does not mean it is impossible. (Joshua Barone does exactly that in a subsequent Times article.) 

Barenboim’s position boxes him in a dilemma. His aim is to explain the extraordinary value of the Ninth, but he says only that the symphony’s “greatness . . . lies in the richness of its contrasts,” something ordinary to the point of vacuousness. To get around the problem, he ends by ignoring his own logic. He turns to the Italian political philosopher Antonio Gramsci (1891-1937) for a quotation about resisting Mussolini, omitting to mention that Gramsci was a Marxist, and concludes: “One could paraphrase much of the work of Beethoven in the spirit of Gramsci by saying that suffering is inevitable, but the courage to overcome it renders life worth living.”  So, then, music does stand for something besides itself. Whether Barenboim’s paraphrase is adequate to its subject is another question. 

The finale of the Ninth, the “Ode to Joy,” does better. The movement famously begins with a violent fanfare, followed by a review of snippets from the preceding three movements. A stern recitative on cellos and basses rejects each one. Only later, after another false start and a return of the fanfare, does the solo baritone voice enter to call for something more “agreeable” and “joyful.”  (The voice may stand for Beethoven’s own. He wrote the text to this passage.) This introduction makes sense only if the rejections do. A listener must hear the dissonant outbursts as rejections of something about the music in question. Exactly what is heard may vary, though I would expect that a rough consensus would not be hard to reach. The entire finale is premised on the understanding that its music stands for a great deal besides “itself,” if one can even coherently conceive of the “itself” apart from the “standing for.”

Kolata thinks that one thing it stands for is Beethoven’s deafness. She takes her cue from Keller, who in 1924, when the symphony was a mere hundred years old, reported feeling just the same way. Keller “listened” to a radio broadcast of the symphony by placing her hand on the “sensitive” and large diaphragm of the receiver. A friend had removed its cover so that she could touch the membrane directly:

What was my amazement to discover that I could feel, not only the vibration, but also the impassioned rhythm, the throb and the urge of the music!  . . . As I listened, with darkness and melody, shadow and sound filling all the room, I could not help remembering that the great composer who poured forth such a flood of sweetness into the world was deaf like myself. I marveled at the power of his quenchless spirit by which out of his pain he wrought such joy for others—and there I sat, feeling with my hand the magnificent symphony which broke like a sea upon the silent shores of his soul and mine.

Keller turns to metaphor to describe her experience but the experience itself is not metaphorical. She processes the sound waves via vibrations that resonate throughout the entire body rather than flowing into a single sense organ. Although she concedes that she was not “hearing” in the usual sense, she affirms that what she was doing was listening. She claims that she could perceive the “intertwined and intermingling vibrations from different instruments” and voices. She clearly feels that what she heard through her hands moved her no less than it would have moved someone who heard it by ear. 

Is Kolata right? Was Keller?  Deafness is certainly not the whole story of the Ninth—a story fashioned by a host of listeners, including modern musicologists who have a lot to say about this music—but in ordinary human terms it is certainly a plausible part of the story. Why, after all, should the music not carry traces of Beethoven's quarter century of struggle against a relentless progressive deafness? Beethoven himself endorsed the idea, writing on a sketch page for one of his string quartets in 1806, "Let your deafness no longer be a secret—even in art." The music thus becomes able to incorporate the expression of a vital need, precisely the one that Beethoven could not satisfy, though Helen Keller could, with Beethoven’s help: the need for sound.

A subsequent letter to the Times bears eloquent witness to the credibility of hearing the music in these terms. The writer, Greg Joseph, introduces himself as "a bilateral cochlear implant recipient who lost and regained his hearing not once, but twice." Like Beethoven, Joseph sought the best technology available to him to regain his hearing. His, unlike Beethoven's, worked. Joseph continues:

The story of Ludwig van Beethoven’s confronting his growing deafness as he continued to compose and conduct has always provided special inspiration for me that transcends his music. Whenever I listen to his compositions, I hear more than notes exquisitely written and performed. I hear the voice of a fellow human being who is overcoming trauma, adversity and fear through his art, whispering to me not to despair, but like him, to make the most of what I have while I can in my own way.

One might speculate that the turn to voice in the finale of the Ninth includes the wish or even the hope that singing might at some point break through the wall of silence and thus afford Beethoven his portion of the universal joy that the music exists to celebrate. We do not actually know how much or how little Beethoven could hear in later life, though his use of conversation books suggest that he was seriously and perhaps profoundly deaf to the speaking voice. Could  singing voice do better?  Perhaps it was at least worth a try. The finale even suggests as much (contra Barenboim) by the way it transforms the strongly visual image of Joy—“Freude, schöner Götterfunken,” Joy, beautiful spark of God—into something purely auditory. The imagery of the text is easily grasped when the singing starts. But as the movement progresses, the text is progressively vaporized into masses of unfettered sound.

What Keller and Beethoven share, despite being deprived of sound in the ordinary sense, is the need for sound, a primary need for sound as the sensory gateway through which the feeling of being alive becomes immediately perceptible to the living being. Experiencing Sound is in part about the consequences of that need: many, various, and too little explored.