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CREATIVITY IN BEETHOVEN AND COLTRANE

IN STA L L MEN T 2 – W HO N EED S A GOOD MELODY A N YWAYS?

The three-period schema we mentioned earlier partially fails us with Beethoven because his later music
develops in two opposing directions. There is the tendency to retract and economize that we find already
in Opus 95 and also in the very last string quartet, but there is also a move towards even greater breadth,
found in the gargantuanHammerklavier Piano Sonata No. 29 in B-flat Major, Opus 106. In this piece,
Beethoven reaches far back, past the high Classicism of his immediate predecessors Haydn and Mozart,
to Bach. He returns to the fugue, a musical form that had reached an apotheosis in Bach’s music and
would have already seemed arcane in Beethoven’s day. He employs it, though, to create a new kind of
music, expressionistic in its rejection of traditional beauty. In theHammerklavier’s last fugal movement, a
trill takes center stage, forming an integral part of the fugue’s theme:

By placing a mere ornament in the forefront of this brash fugal texture, Beethoven is thumbing his nose at
the banality of commonplace musical gestures and gets away with it because of the imaginative richness
of everything that surrounds the trill as the fugue progresses. He also presents the performer with one of
the most famously difficult essays ever written for piano. Any vestige of Viennese Classicism is smashed
to bits here, and Beethoven won a victory over the past, present and future: Nothing like this had been
written for piano before, and nothing ever will. TheHammerklavier is that rare piece of art that transcends
all previous means of expression and then remains standing alone, towering over all that follows it. The
sonatas of Liszt, Schumann, Chopin and Brahms in subsequent decades and 20th century composers
like Prokofiev and Barber would take many cues from the Hammerklavier, but none would achieve its
dichotomy of archaism and wild, unbridled expression.

The banality of the fugue is humorous, but there is a menacing quality to that humor because of its
extreme difficulty, which often comes from executing that trill amidst all the figuration that surrounds it.
Pianists can hear Beethoven laughing in his grave when they work on this piece, and Beethoven’s
victory over his creative mortality here has a mocking edge that again brings to mind 20th century
examples: There is a distinctively sarcastic quality to this music at times that one encounters, similarly, in
some of Prokofiev’s scores – one thinks of the opening movements of his sixth and seventh sonatas in
particular. The difficulty of Beethoven’s score is Joycean – one thinks of the anecdote that Joyce was
heard at all hours of the night from his room as he wrote Finnegan’s Wake, cackling with wicked glee. I’ll
bet Beethoven had a similar sadistic pleasure as he composed this movement. We know from his
correspondence that Beethoven was consciously setting out to give pianists to chew on for a long time.

This direct confrontation with the banal is not an arbitrary occurrence in Beethoven’s later period. It is
subsequently codified into method in another late piano work, the Diabelli Variations, Opus 120.
Beethoven was given a theme composed by the Viennese music publisher Anton Diabelli and asked to
compose a variation on it. It was to be included in a collection of variations from various composers on the
same theme, among them Schubert and Czerny. Famously, Beethoven first refused to participate, but
then took up the theme with a vengeance, composing a huge set of variations that he eventually
published as the separate work we know today.

Diabelli’s theme, in waltz-time, is at first glance a trifle. Again, as in the Hammerklavier fugue, mere
ornamentation is one of its most distinguishing features; in this case, it is the distinguishing feature. Here
are the first eight bars:

There is no melodic activity in the right hand here apart from the quick curve of the opening right hand
pickup phrase, repeated in the dominant at the pickup to bar 5. Does this even qualify as melody,
though? It looks and acts more like an ornament. The first note of the piece is an appoggiatura, and taken
as a whole, the phrase is similar to the ornament that appears first in the Baroque era, called a “cadence”
because of the way it forms a cadence in its shape. A cadence-type ornament looks like this:

and sounds like this:

The difference between Diabelli’s theme and the Baroque cadence is when each lands on the tonic
pitch. Because the tonic takes place directly before the downbeat in the cadential ornament above, it has
the potential function of creating harmonic movement by leading us somewhere else on the following
downbeat. A simple series of cadential ornaments, written out as they sound, illustrates how they can
keep things moving forward:

In the Diabelli theme, though, the opening melodic gesture lands squarely on the C tonic, on the
downbeat – there is nowhere else to go. The effect is bland and stifling in a comic way. The piece has
just begun, and the first thing it is telling us is: “I have nothing more to say!” Since this melody will not
bring us anywhere else, the only way to the dominant is to raise the whole shape by a step, as takes
place at the pickup to bar 5. This is unimaginative and sounds banal because there is no development of
the idea, but maybe that’s just the point.

Commentators have scorned Diabelli’s theme since it first appeared, but others have pointed to its
appealing “generic” quality. It’s very possible that Diabelli intentionally made his theme generic so there
would be room to let the composers use their imagination in their variations to tell stories with true
development. Whatever the case, the theme took hold of Beethoven, and he created a set of piano
variations that is rivaled in magnitude and imagination only by Bach’s Goldberg and
Brahms’ Handel Variations.

A good theme is often referred to as a “gift”, something that is “given” to a composer – from the creator,
from one’s muse, etc. The way that theme is worked out in the course of the piece will involve the will
and intelligence of the composer, but the initial theme often just comes to him or her – in a moment of
inspiration. But what if it doesn’t? Beethoven demonstrates in the Diabelli Variations that he doesn’t need
this gift – he will find inspiration elsewhere, and he will even use the uninspired quality of someone else’s
theme to his expressionistic advantage. This is a victory over banality that is achieved through banality.
And in the story of Beethoven the creative musician, it is a victory over his mortality. He has avoided
repeating himself. He thus retains his relevancy and avoids dying a creative death.

By engaging in the banality of Diabelli’s theme directly and creating so much from it, Beethoven’s music is
deconstructive, calling into question the importance of a good theme. (In part, one could argue that he is
deconstructing his own earlier output as well: There is a tendency towards banality that we find even in
some of Beethoven’s greatest themes – it is part of their character.) If such a paltry theme as Diabelli’s can
inspire such a rich bounty of material from Beethoven, the music itself is “asking” its listener, “What
constitutes good music?” The answer is not something that we point to in the music, i.e., the melody, the
harmony, or the rhythm. It is something that we find in the one who creates the music. It is the imaginative
gift of the composer, more than whatever pre-made material he works with, that keeps us coming back
for more.

Theme and Variations – the Dumbassed-Genius Cousin of Musical Forms

Now replace “composer” in the previous sentence with “improviser”. Imagine that instead of Beethoven
composing variations on Diabelli’s theme, it’s Charlie Parker improvising a solo on George Gershwin’s “I
Got Rhythm.” Parker and other jazz musicians were probably not particularly intrigued by Gershwin’s trite
melody to “I Got Rhythm” – although it has its time and place and it has its charms. They were attracted
by the organizing formal and harmonic characteristics of the song, though – the simple AABA form, the
square 32-bar length (after they jettisoned Gershwin’s short coda), and the yin-yang balance of tonality
that the tune has: We stay right around the home tonic for the first two A sections. At the B section, we
travel to harmony that is remote from the tonal center. Then we return once more to the A section. Here
is how jazz musicians think of “I Got Rhythm”:

Jazz musicians call this type of chord schema “rhythm changes”. (“Changes” means “chords” in jazz
terminology.) It is one of the basic improvisatory structures of jazz – a vessel waiting to be filled, like the
sonnet for the poet, the bank heist for the filmmaker, or the Bildungsroman for the novelist.

Rhythm changes in themselves are banal as well: When a musician plays those chords of Gershwin’s
above, they have a hackneyed feel – it is a distinctly 1930 kind of banality that you might describe as
repetitiously, relentlessly enthusiastic: “Come on everybody, let’s be happy!” You picture a musical revue,
guys with top hats, and lots of forced smiles. A jazz musician playing rhythm changes must find his or her
way to not succumb to their inherent corniness. An innovator like Charlie Parker provides the strongest
model we have: meeting the harmony head-on with a new approach that was revelatory for American
music. We’ll look at how and why later on.

Jazz musicians use other harmonic progressions that are less repetitive than “I Got Rhythm” for their
improvisatory flights. “Lover Come Back to Me,” “Just You, Just Me,” and other popular songs of the day
were vehicles for Charlie Parker, Thelonious Monk, and others. Sometimes they played the original
melody, or sometimes they wrote a new melody, and then they improvised over the structure of the
song, looping it around. For the layman: This is what’s going on in much of jazz for the last 80 years or so.
On the rhythm changes example above, a jazz musician creates melodies that are related to the chords
or “changes” there, and when the band gets to the last measure, they simply go back to the beginning.
Yes, they are improvising, but they are improvising over that repeated structure. Formally, this is exactly
like the theme-and-variations model that Beethoven used earlier.

If you take the various common forms in classical music – the sonata-allegro form, the minuet and its
younger sibling the scherzo, the rondo, what have you – almost all of them have some inherent drama
built into their structure. The sonata-allegro form is the most interesting as a canvas by itself without paint:
its theme-development-recapitulation shape gives an imaginative composer a strong narrative arc to work
with. The dance-based minuet is much simpler in design, but the mere inclusion in the trio section of new
thematic material, usually in a different key or mode, already gives a composer the potential for contrast.
Contrast, antagonism, and tension, or their opposites, unity, accord and resolution, are all fundamental
aspects of musical storytelling in the same way that they are in any other narrative medium. In the era of
high Classicism, sonata-allegro form in particular inaugurated a new kind of musical storytelling in which
the large scale tonal relationships – particularly the fundamental dichotomy of tonic and dominant – were
exploited as a narrative means to an end.

Putting a theme through its paces, working it out, transforming it, all the while moving away from and then
back towards the tonic home base: This largely German impulse changed musical expression forever. Put
briefly, the impulse was to create something grander, but with formal integrity: a large structure, not just a
large sprawling mass. This meant, for a composer like Beethoven, an inherently organic structure, in
which the tension and resolution on a micro-level, felt in a singular melodic gesture, corresponded to the
larger tonal relationships within a movement – or even within a whole multi-movement work.

In a theme and variations, the tension and resolution that we hear the first time through the initial theme is
all we have. Going back to the Diabelli Variations, let’s look at the full opening theme:

The music begins on the tonic and then moves towards the dominant, where it decisively lands at bar 16.
This material is repeated. After the repeat sign, we are moving back towards the tonic, which decisively
arrives in the last bar. And when we repeat that second part once more, that’s it. This tonal harmonic
scheme will never be developed more; it will simply be repeated. All of the variations will adhere to it, until
Beethoven reaches the exalted ending fugue.
In telling any musical story, the musician – the improviser, the composer, the singer-songwriter, etc. –
works with a dichotomy of identity and difference. Both are necessary. The identity of a work is
established through some sort of repetition: a theme is initially announced, and then a particular aspect of
theme is heard again. What we call development is really a mix of repetition and something different. The
great difference between theme and variations and the sonata-allegro formal approach is that in theme
and variations there is strictly no structural development after the initial statement of the theme. What
follows is a series of repetitions. The variation that ensues is a kind of development, but it is development
from the top-down, so to speak: Melodic variation, rhythmic variation, but all within an established
harmonic and formal structure, which is repeated over and over.

The impulse to constantly repeat the opening thematic material is, in itself, unintelligent and narratively
shortsighted. One relinquishes any real possibility of structural development. Theme and variations take a
proto-copy-paste approach, and in the literature of high Classicism, they have a unique identity – I think
of them as the dumb-assed cousin of the other more exalted forms. Really, though, this cousin is more
complex; he is more of an idiot-savant figure. For while he repeats the structure of his story over and over
again, he uses his rich imaginative gift to fill it with something continuously new. Yes, the structure stays
fixed, but once we are free from the burden of actual structural development, so many unusual and
downright strange things can happen.

How exactly is structural development a burden? It isn’t simply a burden: It is the burden. It is why Brahms
took so long with a first symphony; it is why Chopin never composed one; it is why Schumann’s sonatas
are not as popular as his other piano music. The Romantics that followed Beethoven expanded on his
expressive innovation but could not match the formal integrity his large-scale structures. Their most
realized contributions were often miniatures, and that made sense: The greatness of composers like
Schumann or Chopin (and already Schubert in some of his later music) came in their ability to express
something fragmentary and fractured, and to let it stay like that. There is a tragedy to this kind of fractured
expression – it is the great, beautiful tragedy of 19th century art music.

To Justify or Not to Justify

The Diabelli are full of strangeness. Early on in the third variation, we encounter this:
The initial three-note pickup at the beginning is a lilting, feminine shape that Beethoven uses throughout
the variation, developing it further after the repeat sign through the use of imitation in different registers. It
acts as a springboard, leading to cascading chordal movement in all directions. But at bar 20, it is as if
there is a skip in the record, and we can’t move forward: We hear only that three note segment in the
bass register, repeated, looped around continuously. The effect is both humorous and mysterious, with
the pianissimo dynamic marking.

Schubert may have had the variation in his head when he went to compose his last, exalted piano sonata
five years later. It begins like this:

The trill there in the left hand at bar eight is the same kind of weird non sequitur as that of Beethoven in
Variation III – it is something unannounced, unprepared-for, but most importantly: unjustified. There is no
good reason why that trill appears, in the same way that there is no reason that Beethoven’s figure in
Variation 3 decides to go all Rain Man on us, autistically repeating itself, grumbling in the lower register.

Schubert wrote music in the realm of the non sequitur in a way that is unsettling and sometimes simply
terrifying in his last years. Take the unexpected harmonic left turn in his song, Der Döppelganger. When
the speaker discovers that the figure he is viewing is none other than himself, Schubert gives us a chord
on the stalt syallable of Gestalt, on the second-to-last bar below, that is twisted and bizarre, and the song
is suddenly in an alienated, unhinged world that sounds more like Vienna of the 20th century:
It’s just plain weird and it’s so great.

One also thinks of the heart-wrenching middle section of the Adagio movement of Schubert’s String
Quintet in C Major, which jabs us in the gut after the impossible tenderness that came before it. We do not
see it coming, and even though it affects us deeply, we don’t really understand why it arrived. The feeling
is: “What happened?” Or, there is the hellish nihilism in the Andantino movement of his second-to-last
piano sonata, No. 20 in A Major (D. 959). Again, it comes fiercely, without warning, from nowhere.
Schubert was a guy who had visions at night when he went to bed – bad dreams, but dreams full of
ecstasy as well – and he managed to get some down on paper before he left the earth. That’s the only
way I can explain his music to myself when I hear it. For me, there is no other music that is so dreamily
beautiful and terrifying at the same time.

Schubert found a way to “take it out,” as jazz musicians would say, and he may have taken a cue from
Beethoven, or he may not have – we know that he admired Beethoven. If he did, it is ironic, because
with Beethoven, even what looks to be a non sequitur is in fact justified, if we dig deeper: He is almost
never just “taking it out” willy-nilly. We’ll look at that phenomenon later in his Ninth Symphony. With
Schubert, though, these outbursts in his music are purely chaotic, even when you unpack them: They
don’t come from anywhere, and they don’t lead anywhere else. They’re like seizures that pass.

Beethoven’s way out in this case is through the theme-and-variations form itself: Once the template is
established in the opening theme, he allows himself all sorts of utterances, like the grumbling left hand of
variation 3 above. The reason why one idea follows another is not so important – there might not be a
discernable reason. The ideas may flow in a more stream-of-conscious manner, like a person talking
continuously, saying what comes to him right at that moment.

This characteristic applies to the improvised jazz solo, and gives much of jazz its particular character. I
would emphasize that the stream-of-consciousness description does not denote formlessness or
arbitrariness in terms of the individual expression of the soloist. There may well be a strong narrative line
in the solo, and the best jazz soloists are storytellers. The difference, though, between this kind of theme
and variations approach and the other more “justified” style of composition that we find in sonata-allegro
works, is the viewpoint of the storyteller: In theme and variations approach, the composer or jazz soloist is
looking ahead constantly; whereas in the sonata-allegro approach, the composer is constantly looking
back, seeing what he or she just did, and then building on that. The present must always be justified by
the past.

We could think of the two approaches in terms of building a house. In theme and variations or jazz
soloing, the frame of the house has already been built, and the composer/soloist can decorate all he
wants, without worry that the structure will collapse. However – a big however: He cannot stray from the
frame of the house; he must work within its borders. In the sonata-allegro approach, the composer must
start from scratch and build the house from the ground up – this is a lot more work, and requires more
diligence. He can’t just build willy-nilly; he has to make a house that will not just look good, but will also
stay standing. If he can pull that off, though, he has the reward of building whatever kind of house he
wants; he may follow his own course at all times. There is no pre-existing template that he is obliged to
follow.

Theme and variations make a concession – they relinquish the autonomous act of building that house
from the ground up, and follow that pre-existing template. They make this sacrifice in the service of a
more immediate kind of expression. The urge to make variations is a pragmatic urge - the urge for a
quicker means to an end; the desire for a template that one can open and start filling with the creative,
chattering stream of material rustling in his or her head; a template that will then quickly organize that
chatter. The necessary dichotomous identity of musical expression is then quickly established - the fixed
identity of the thematic structure announces itself to the listener repeatedly, giving him or her a continual
reference point, and the drama and flux of difference and variety play out within that structure.

Which approach is deeper? Let’s look at Beethovenian justification in his very first piano sonata. Here is
the beginning:

Everything comes from a two-part idea in the opening two measures, bracketed above as Part A and Part
B. They are yin and yang to each other: Part A is more harmonic in nature, tracing the F-minor tonic triad,
while Part B is more melodic, moving stepwise. Part A is ascending; Part B is descending. Part A is
staccato; Part B is slurred. The note values in Part A are uniform and square; those of Part B are varied.
The yin and yang will act as a springboard in two directions throughout the movement, and the distinction
between the two parts will propel the musical narrative forward, as they differentiate themselves from
each other.

Everything comes out of what preceded it, as noted in the brackets above the musical gestures. The first
eight measures are a masterful example of building tension: The initial idea is immediately recast in the
dominant harmony in bars 3 and 4. In bars 5 and 6, the first four bars are shoved into half the space,
which gives us a feeling of insistence and tension. Repetition is tension for Beethoven in this setting, and
difference comes as a release of that tension. At bar 7, we have a climax, and that release takes place in
the descending scalewise motion in the right hand after the rolled chord. Only here, for the first time, do
we hear distinct difference. Those four notes are eighth notes, and that’s a big deal: Until this point,
absolutely no notes with that metric value have shown their face. When Beethoven introduces them
here, they have a dual effect. With the hairpin diminuendo, they feel like a retraction or a retreat. At the
same time, we hear that those notes are a slowed-down variation of Part B’s triplets, expressing
themselves emphatically one more time. This simultaneous pulling-back and insisting makes a wonderful
moment, full of emotional ambiguity. There are at least two ways for a pianist to play bars 7 and 8 – more
insistent, more hesitant, or somewhere in between that reflects both of those sentiments. Beginnings like
these are what make Beethoven the heavyweight champion of justification. Justification in his hands is
never obvious or easy – it is urgent; it is questioning and self-critical; it is filled with import.

There is repetition and difference, repetition and difference. Repetition builds tension here, and
difference releases it, but in theme and variations, the opposite is true: repetition is the norm and
represents stasis, while the constant variation superimposed on that repetition provides the tension that
keeps the listener occupied. These two types of expression are fundamentally different. The one allows
what the other relinquishes. In the sonata-allegro form of the example immediately above, the unfolding
ideas follow no pre-existing grid, but must continually justify themselves by what preceded them. In
theme and variations, those ideas may unfold as they please, but must always adhere to the grid.

It’s apples and oranges, but we could make one last observation about the difference before leaving the
topic. In the bulk of canonical three or four- movement classical works from the later part of the 18th
century through the 19th, and still in the 20th – such as sonatas for an individual instrument or an
instrument with accompaniment, chamber music, and symphonies – the sonata-allegro movement will be
first, and the theme and variations movement will come after it, often as a finale, but also often in a middle
slow movement. This could have become the norm for many reasons, but particularly after Beethoven,
there is a sense that a composer must prove himself compositionally worthy in that first movement, and
the way to do that was through the sonata-allegro form.

It’s simply easier in many ways to compose theme-and-variations. I don’t have the data to back it up, but
I’m sure that the actual amount of time spent composing a theme and variations movement for all those
composers was less than the time it took to write a sonata-allegro movement of equal length. That ease is
why the approach benefits jazz musicians, because – here I might ruffle some feathers – jazz is not
fundamentally a composer’s music. It’s a form of music with some great composers, and a lot of great
improvisers. Don’t get me wrong: I don’t mean to suggest that jazz musicians didn’t write sonata-allegro
pieces because they couldn’t, so they copped out and blew over repeated thematic material. I mean that
they had other designs.

The chief reason why theme and variations interest me here is because they are the most significant
formal device that jazz music took from western classical music. This is not a coincidence. It speaks to the
pragmatic urge in jazz – the urge to accommodate the improviser. The improviser is the protagonist, and
most often he is decorating the existing house, versus building a new one from scratch. We watch him or
her with wonder, or we watch him or her with boredom. If you think about a lot of modern jazz, you
realize that, collectively, jazz musicians threw all their eggs in one basket formally speaking, by submitting
to the theme and variations approach.

I am bracketing out all of the great compositional contributions from people like Duke Ellington, not
because it is of lesser worth or importance in my view, but because when we talk about the be-bop
revolution in small group jazz, led by Charlie Parker, and then everything that followed it – Miles Davis’
groups in the 50’s John Coltrane’s group in the 60’s, and many other great ensembles and soloists, right
up to the present day, when you walk into a jazz jam session just about anywhere on the planet – we’re
talking about a theme and variations approach, or, as a jazz musician would have it, “head-solo-head out”
(the “head” for jazz musicians is the theme). Jazz musicians everywhere are all still trying to be little
Beethovens: They’re trying to make their improvised variations imaginative and interesting.

If you think about that, it’s really a ludicrous project: How is someone going to arrange his or her notes in
a more compelling way than all the ways we’ve already heard – especially on older-than-dirt structures
like rhythm changes and blues? The reason why a lot of people complain that jazz is boring is because,
truthfully, a lot of it is. And most of the time, the reason that it’s boring is because that soloist and the band
he or she interacts with are not arranging their notes in a fresh way. This may be an obvious point, but I
raise it to emphasize the nature of the creativity in jazz: It is not necessarily expressed in the composition
at all. Often the composition is just a means to an improvisatory end. So much lays on the improvisation,
on the personalized variations of the material that the group comes up with in the heat of the moment. If
those variations aren’t inspired, then the banality of the composition – rhythm changes, for example – will
be all that’s left. Then you want to race for the door.

This is not meant as a mystification of what jazz musicians do, nor is it meant as a diminishment of what
they have achieved. To me, it speaks more to the character of their collective achievement, and now I go
back to this idea of avoiding a creative death: When a jazz musician blows an uninspired solo, he or she
dies right in front of us – and we die with them, of boredom. When a jazz musician blows a great solo
though, he or she avoids dying a creative death in real time, right in front of us, for all to see. It is a victory
and it’s a thrill – it’s the jazz Sublime. Later, we’ll consider its nature more closely.

© Brad Mehldau, All Rights Reserved

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