Joy

May 10, 2021

Joy

Each time I hear Beethoven’s musical setting of the Friedrich Schiller poem ‘Ode to Joy’, I think the same unlearned thoughts. I have the same unlearned feelings. I opine in the same unlearned way. I see the final movement, the 4th as a summation (I guess that would be correct). The other movements of the 9th symphony DO describe joy, imo. They describe what seems to me to be the ideal of joy, the illusury qualities of joy, the common view of joy. The rest of that symphony wanders about on the hillside or teases delicious harmonies, explores in joyous ways, discovers worlds. The music of the fourth movement is not about joy. It is about desperation. It is shouting into it’s lyric, “Damnit, Joy! Come to me! I feel you not!” That is my sense of it. I think I pretty much stand alone across nations and times but I stand by my opinion. That particular section of the ninth symphony of Ludwig Van Beethoven is not about joy. It does not feel joyful to me. I don’t get it.

The music referred to as Beethoven’s Ode to Joy is strident. It is purposeful. It is determined. It is a near march. It is defiant. It is argumentative. It casts away my accepted concepts of what joy is. It is anything but joyful to me. Since I feel that way, I begin to wonder about the nature of joy. It is possible that Beethoven’s idea of joy was quite different than the ordinary. It is possible that my idea of joy is quite different than the ordinary. It is quite possible that I have missed that boat of common experience. Maybe, it’s me…?

I know that it must have been more than difficult for Mr. Beet-o-wan to find anything in his experience of life that would describe or illustrate joy. I can easily imagine that, a person left with only music (your solitary soulmate/friend) and losing the tactile element of music by becoming deaf? would you – would any human being understand joy? How? How is it possible to step outside that sort of pain? Imagine: you had an abused childhood with little opportunity to explore and become, you are forced into a regimented and punishing schedule on the piano (a difficult instrument, folks), you are beaten, isolated, dehumanized. You are left alone with the tones and the intervals of tone, alone with rhythm, alone with caesura. Those things are at the outskirts of your daily existence, your survival. Perhaps they come to you in dreams or subliminal sensation but they are not a living part of your waking life. They are around the edges of everything but still away. Or, perhaps they remain, those elements, but they become something personal to you and foreign to the rest of the world.

…or maybe not. Maybe I have missed the point. I often do. I am often admonishing myself to sit down and be quiet, allow the adults to talk. “Be still, child.” I might, indeed be listening to music that is ‘above my raisin’. It may, indeed be that I should, “speak the way yo mouth was born”. When I hear ‘Ode to Joy’ and hear it’s defiance, perhaps I misunderstand. It is possible that the very defiance I witness, hear IS the nature of joy. Maybe sweetness and light has nothing to do with it. Maybe joy forces itself out of the limb, into the branch, along the branch, out into magnificent green! Maybe joy casts off the yearly cloak of frozen white with fervor, not sublimity. Maybe the forceful bulb squeezes the tulip out and upward. Ah…maybe joy is not as sublime, as peaceful, as quiet as is described by many. Maybe. Hmmm. Maybe, when Beethoven wrote his additional text to the poem, ‘Oh friends, not these sounds! Let us instead strike up more pleasing and more joyful ones!’ he meant it? Jeez, I feel dumb again. LOL