Ep. 5: The Masterpiece I Never Heard Of
This was no ordinary professor. She was a brilliant composer with an encyclopedic grasp of All Human Knowledge, or so it constantly seemed, and a mission to ferret out the ignorance of others, often publicly, with unforgettable shock and zeal. For many years afterward, I struggled to shake a really bad habit: the inability to admit that there was something — anything — I didn’t know.
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How Music Does That – The Test Drive
Think you might like the HOW MUSIC DOES THAT podcast but struggle with commitment issues? I feel ya. Here’s a 7-minute sampler of episodes 1-5 to give you a taste.
Keep going. You know you want to.
Listen to “Ep 1: The Evolution of Cool” on Spreaker.
Listen to “Ep 2: The Strange DNA of a Surf Song” on Spreaker.
Listen to “Ep 3: When Truman Touches the Wall” on Spreaker.
Listen to “Ep 4: Let’s Get Sad with Galileo’s Dad” on Spreaker.
Episode 5 publishes on Sept 29.
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Let’s Get Sad With Galileo’s Dad
A gorgeous technique to unify emotion in music has been passed down from the Renaissance to Radiohead. (17 min)
Listen to “Ep 4: Let’s Get Sad with Galileo’s Dad” on Spreaker.
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No, Beethoven Did Not Math His Way to Greatness

Beethoven’s sketchbook, 1815. Scheide Library. Princeton University. Photographed by Natasha D’Schommer from the book Biblio.
8 min
That Beethoven not only continued to Beethoven but composed his greatest works long after going profoundly deaf is entirely astonishing. Like many astonishing things, it spawned a cottage industry of explanations, most of which are moored in a misunderstanding of how composition works.
Ein Beispiel!
It’s seductive, this idea that the people we call geniuses in various fields do things in some fundamentally different way. Maybe it’s a way of forgiving ourselves for being non-geniuses, I don’t know. When it comes to explaining a deaf genius composer, the seduction is even greater. We are drawn toward anything that sounds remotely plausible.
The video above implies that Beethoven somehow used a knowledge of mathematical ratios and the physics of sound to compensate for his deafness and achieve greatness. The relationship between music and math and physics is fascinating, and I’ve written about it myself many times. But the implication that understanding the math of musical sound played any role in Beethoven’s ability to compose after going deaf in his thirties is (be nice!)…not true.
Any composer can write music in pin-drop silence, just as any writer of language can do. If I give you a line of poetry:
There once was a man from Nantucket
and ask you to compose the next line in your head, you can do it and write it down without hearing it spoken. The better poet you are, the better the result. You draw on a lifetime of experience with language and an acquired grasp of syntax and semantics, run through a number of options in your head, “hear” what you want mentally, then write it down. Then the process of improving it begins.
Music works much the same way. You write down the kernel of an idea, then realize it’s awful. So you improve it, little by little. If your ears work, you’ll check it at the piano and make adjustments. If they don’t, you play it in your head. This is not magic — after many years of practice and experience, I can do it myself. Beethoven just did it much, much better than I do. He didn’t use math.
One way we know that is from the thousands of pages of his extant sketchbooks.
Fascinating things, these sketches. He would start with a nugget of an idea — as often as not some inauspicious turd of a melodic fragment — then cross it out angrily and improve it on the next line, cross that out, improve, etc., until at the bottom of the page you have the fully-realized opening bars of the Pathétique Sonata.
You know what’s missing from the sketchbooks? Equations. In a very real way, the difference between Beethoven and the rest of us is how far down the page of the sketchbook you go before quietly saying “Nailed it” and getting lunch.
Beethoven had a lifetime of experience and an acquired grasp of the syntax and semantics of music, and he used that to create new compositions. What’s amazing is not that he composed after losing his hearing, but that he composed so skillfully without the advantage of testing aurally as he went. That really is hard, but not remotely impossible. Even more amazing is something too seldom mentioned — that Beethoven led a revolution in musical style, creating the Romantic period nearly singlehandedly while deaf. There’s no reason to believe that math, for all its inherent beauty, played any conscious part in that process.
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Ep 3: When Truman Touches the Wall
From a Bach fugue to Diana’s funeral to Truman’s wall, this technique is the music of finality.
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A Cricket in the Renaissance (Josquin – El Grillo)
High in the wall of the Sistine Chapel is a choir loft called the cantoria. Built in 1471, it was off limits to anyone but singers in the papal choir for 350 years. In the absence of adult supervision, centuries of singers carved their names in the wall. A member in the 1490s named Josquin des Prez (translation: Josquin of Prez) was one of them. This is interesting because he’s also generally considered the greatest Renaissance composer, and this graffito is the only surviving thing written in his own hand.
The great artists of the Renaissance were most often Italian — Michelangelo, da Vinci, Caravaggio, Raphael, Donatello. But as often as not, the best composers of the Renaissance were Franco-Flemish, meaning they were from northern Europe and had trouble clearing their throats.
Like most northern composers of the period, Josquin — usually referred to by the one name, like Plato or Beyoncé, and pronounced zhoss-KAN — spent most of his career in Italy, where wealthy families were engaged in the most artistically productive pissing contest of all time, to which Josquin contributed many powerful and elegant streams.
He was acknowledged as the greatest composer of his generation within his own lifetime, which is rare but nice. Like Bach two centuries later, Josquin wrote both sacred and secular works and excelled at both. The sacred music is really stunning:
1:12
But he could also let his hair down with secular songs. Here’s a frottola (the precursor to madrigal) about a cricket — short, funny, and kind of amazing:
El grillo, El grillo è buon cantore | The cricket is a good singer
che tiene longo verso | and he sings for a long time
Dalle beve grillo canta. | Give him a drink so he can go on singing
Ma non fa come gli altri uccelli | But he doesn’t do what the other birds do
come li han cantato un poco | Who after singing a little
van’ de fatto in altro loco | Just go elsewhere
sempre el grillo sta pur saldo | The cricket is always steadfast
Quando la maggior è [l’] caldo | When it is hottest
alhor canta sol per amore. | then he sings just for love
1:30
15. JOSQUIN frottola “El Grillo” (The Cricket) (1:30)
1 Chopin | 2 Scarlatti | 3 Hildegard | 4 Bach | 5 Chopin | 6 Reich | 7 Delibes | 8 Ravel | 9 Ravel | 10 Boulanger | 11 Debussy | 12 Ginastera | 13 Mozart | 14 Reich | 15 Josquin | Full list | YouTube playlist
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