Beethoven’s Birdstrokes: Figuration, Subjectivity, and the Force of the Score in the Pastoral Symphony and Copying Beethoven

Abstract

The inscription of a musical score is, at root, a figural gesture. As the score’s figures construct a metaphoric bridge, from the composer’s conception through their spatial representation to the composition’s aural realization, they also play, reflexively, off and into other musical figurations and what those figurations signify. Beethoven’s Pastoral Symphony, Op. 68, provides a rich and distinctive instance of scoring in which the musical figurations seem especially charged to generate meanings beyond the sounds that one ‘hears’ when reading the score mainly as a script for performance. This work, despite Beethoven’s famous assertion that it is ‘more expression of feeling than painting’, mediates aural and visual realms with its deft deployment of musical figurations traditionally heard and seen as pictorial, notably through those figurations associated with water and birdsong in the work’s second movement, ‘Scene by the Brook’. In Beethoven’s scoring his unusual insistence on the physical and pictorial, his development of the spatial dimensions of the music, intensifies the music’s programmatic or mimetic thrust but also marks the music’s metamimetic distance from its pastoral referents. Beethoven’s figuration thus becomes a means of mediating subjective consciousness and the world that consciousness encounters or imagines. The force of musical figuration and its implications for subjectivity, again with key reference to Beethoven, are vividly realized also in the recent cinematic reading of the scoring and performance of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony, Agnieszka Holland’s Copying Beethoven (2007).

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“…But this practice differs from the explicit symbolism of birdcalls in, for example, Beethoven's Sixth Symphony, which William Kumbier highlights as one of a number of 'charged pictorial elements'. 65 Neither does Rautavaara emulate Messiaen's meticulous transcriptions of birdsong, although both composers were drawn to the exclusively musical possibilities of figurations that are suggestive of them. As Maria Anna Harley states, the ornithological accuracy in Messiaen's music is 'less important than the development of a new musical style with the birds' irregular phrase structures, rich timbres, complex melodic contours and intricate rhythmic patterns in incessant variation'.…”