Ultima Academy: Beethoven Everywhere

[Bilde]

Ultima Academy is a series of talks, lectures and panel discussions and is free and open to anyone interested in knowing more about the ideas that underlie this year’s festival programme.

Jan Swafford
Philip Clark
Rob Young (moderator)

’Beethoven was in error, and his influence, which has been as extensive as it is lamentable, had been deadening to the art of music.’ – John Cage

The classical canon is unthinkable without the music of Ludwig van Beethoven. Yet Beethoven himself was a mass of conflicts and contradictions: The maestro who believed in his own genius yet found personal relationships difficult. The revolutionary Romantic who served archdukes and noble families. Later, the solo artist who strove to sever all traces of artistic patronage and be true only to himself. The supreme listener who gradually lost his power of hearing. The anguish and triumph of Beethoven is as much a part of the mythology of our musical era as of his own. Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony has been taken up as a call for universal brotherhood but how did that reflect the personalilty of a man who often angrily shunned human contact?

In this mini-symposium we explore Beethoven’s legacy and contemporary resonances. Jan Swafford is an American author and composer whose recent acclaimed biography (Beethoven: Anguish and Triumph, 2013) is the most definitive to date. He will outline the artistic and personal tensions that defined Beethoven and highlight ways in which these set the template for the idea of a composer in society in the intervening years.

British music critic, composer and improvisor Philip Clark (Gramophone, The Wire, etc) gives a personal view of Beethoven’s status and legacy, taking us through the unusual pathways and creative uses and abuses of Beethoven’s work throughout the 20th century, from Pierre Henry’s musique concrète Beethoven’s Tenth Symphony to Ornette Coleman’s free jazz ‘The Fifth Of Beethoven’.

Free entrance!

In collaboration with Norwegian Society of Composers.

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