[Smt-talk] Beethoven's inner ear

[Eytan Agmon]

Martin Braun asks:

 

“So, when he [Beethoven] wrote down notes after having lost his normal hearing, how many of his decisions were based on auditory imagination and how many were based on the application of rules?”

 

However, since Martin seems to know the “rules” by which (late!) Beethoven composed (“analysis of Beethoven’s scores from different times” he writes “also shows that most rules were the same or similar across the second half of his lifetime”), by his logic the answer to his question is very simple: every decision not based on some “rule” was based on auditory imagination. In late Beethoven, I would imagine, this would constitute a sizable percentage of decisions.

 

Eytan Agmon

Dept. of Music

Bar-Ilan University

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