One day in class this fall, I shared with my brilliant theory students an amazing facet of Beethovens composing: how he tends to build an entire movement as a large-scale projection of the few little notes with which the music begins, and how easy it is to recognize and take wild pleasure in this syntactical union between micro- and macrocosm. At which point a student asked, Was Beethoven really thinking about that? I regarded him in silence for a full five seconds, an unprecedented interval for me.... Then I turned to his classmates and said, Did you hear how he began his interrogative sentence? With the third-person singular past tense of the verb to be? How did he know to begin the sentence that way? And how could he be so sure that Beethovens name should come immediately after this opening verb? Did you note how confidently he placed the adverb really just after the proper name, to secure the adverbs strategic position between the subject of the sentence and the following gerund? And how the hell did he know how to construct a gerund?! For heavens sake, tell me, please help me understand, where did the intuition come for him to be able to follow the gerund with a prepositional clause, winding up at last with an abstract demonstrative adjective, somehow substituting for the object of the preposition? Was he really thinking about that? Was he?! Was he THINKING about it?!! I gasped. Then I looked back at the student who had asked the question. He was smiling. OK, he said. It was one of the most obnoxious and sweetest moments of my teaching life.
Posted on: Wed, 10 Dec 2014 14:08:49 +0000