from Beethoven to Pink Floyd

by richibi


in juxtaposing inadvertently recently
Pink Floyd’s “Dark Side of the Moon”
with Beethoven’s String Quartet no 14
in C# minor, opus 131, I was once again
struck by how one resembled implicitly
the other, both had achieved structurally
an operatic concert, an original musical
form for each their epoch, a piece of
instrumental music – with, even with
Beethoven eventually, voice – see his
9th Symphony for that – in the form of
opera

stay with me

songs started off as ditties, see, for
instance, in our time, “She Loves You“,
the Beatles, in Classical music that’s
the equivalent of a Mozart sonata,
quick, easy to hum along with, and
spirited

then “MacArthur Park“ came along, in
1968, with a song twice the length,
seven minutes and some, of anything
heard before, check out Jimmy Webb,
Richard Harris, and the process

that sounds a lot like Beethoven, I
thought, throw in extrapolations of
symphonic proportions and that
sounds a lot like Beethoven too,
saying, this is not just pretty, people,
it’s potentially momentous, listen

“Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club
Band“ then put several compositions
together, without breaks, to give us
the first concept album, an
uninterrupted flow of various musical
ideas held together by an, however
inexplicit, theme

or “MacArthur Park“, in other words,
amplified

in 1826, it had been Beethoven’s 14th,
where all this started out, no one had
ever done this sort of thing before,
confounded so intimately contrasting
musical forms, but he’d got it from
the Christian Mass

thus Beethoven, a secular prophet

and thus, in his eminent footsteps,
Pink Floyd, solely, among
contemporary artists, addressing
God

it all seems nearly inevitable today,
but it was 1968 then, a time of, if
you’ll recall, revolution

and all of these had been, for better
or worse, once again, our rallying
cries, anthems, towards a better
world

Richard