The first 2 chords of Beethoven's Eroica, as played over the years...

... on recordings beginning in 1924:



I'm amazed at the variation. It makes me hyper-aware of how little discernment I have generally, listening to complex music.

(Via Metafilter.)

"Women/Mens."

A door. Photographed in 2004. I was fooling with these old pics today, getting the coding right for this post and this one, after realizing — reading an article about the Goodman Community Center here in Madison — that it's the old Kupfer Ironworks building where they played "9 Beet Stretch" back in April 2004.

Beyond Obama's blue pill: folksingers!

What medical treatments will the government approve, in the future, for the aging population of America? Two years ago, President Obama let it slip that cheap painkillers would supervene more expensive cures. And here's a new, low-price palliative for the oldies:

Every week, three music therapists from MJHS Hospice and Palliative Care crisscross the city and suburbs to sing songs to the dying. With guitars strapped to their backs, a flute or tambourine and a songbook jammed in their backpacks, they play music for more than 100 patients, in housing projects, in nursing homes and even in a lavish waterfront home. The time for chemotherapy and radiation is over.

The music begins: a song to hold death at bay, a song to embrace death, or to praise God. A Vietnam veteran asks for a song in Vietnamese. One man asked only for songs with death in the lyrics, to force his family to talk to him about the future. He was ready to talk about it. They weren’t. So the therapist sang Queen’s version of “Another One Bites the Dust.” “Amazing Grace” and other spiritual songs are most often requested just before death.

It's a jobs program for sensitive young women who might feel uncomfortable busking on the city streets, waiting for cold-hearted businessmen to drop a dollar in their guitar cases. The government will drop the dollar in, and the elderly patients will be too polite (and also physically unable) to walk away.

Welcome to the hospice, where the strumming of Joan Baez wannabes will prepare you for death. They will ease your "final transition." You'll be ready to die before they're ready to leave.  If you hang out too long at the hospice, be forewarned: When you've heard "Amazing Grace" 10,000 times, you've only just begun.

Can't we please pick our own music? Recorded music played by virtuouso musicians? Maybe Beethoven's 6th Symphony.... or "The Man in the Box"....



IN THE COMMENTS: Jim said:

I was on the faculty in a music department with a music therapy program for ~25 years, and taught a couple of courses to students majoring in MT during that time.

The MT professors/practitioners have been relentlessly pursuing their dream of obtaining funding from medical insurance and the public schools. They point to a growing body of MT research - all of it advocacy, most of it incompetent, much of it just silly - to support their lobbying for the loot.

ALSO: When you get to that hospice and the folksinger arrives, remember John Belushi. (Suggestion via RLC in the email and Sixty Grit in the comments.)

"I think of the whole history of classical music as a mountain."

"You start at the bottom of one side, which is medieval chant. You climb up the mountain, go down the other side, and when you reach the ground again, you're at late 20th century minimalism.... At the top of the mountain — fusing the best aspects of Baroque, Classical, and Romantic (with a dash of prophetic modernism) in magnificent, awe-inspiring structures — is Beethoven."

Jaltcoh completes his countdown of the top 10 greatest classical composers.

From the comments to yesterday's post (##4 and 3): "Wow. I thought that I love Brahms about as much as anyone, and even I can only put him 4th. I respect your courage."

AND: Here's the corresponding NYT analysis by Anthony Tommasini, putting Bach 1st — and Brahms  7th.

Coffee conversation.

ME [Reading this]: "Shakespeare didn't have coffee!"

JOHN: "But Beethoven did. He cared so much about his coffee that he counted out the beans. He had to have 60 beans per cup.

That last link also has Bach's Coffee Cantata:

Mmm! How sweet the coffee tastes, more delicious than a thousand kisses, mellower than muscatel wine. Coffee, coffee I must have, and if someone wishes to give me a treat, ah, then pour me out some coffee!

You'll know you're a real coffee person if reading that makes you go get some coffee.

Where did coffee originate? Ethiopia! "Abyssinian goat herder Kaldi observed his herd's interest in eating berries of a certain tree whereupon they would become excited and spirited for periods of time, and often wanted to neither rest nor sleep at night" So thanks to Kaldi's perceptive goats for the centuries of enhanced perception their discovery bestowed upon us.