Beethoven = No Sleep?

Oct 15, 2006 at 5:04 PM
6 comments

Last night, at somewhere around 3am, in spite of the fact that I knew I was getting up at 8am... I could not fall asleep. And it's Beethoven's fault.

I spent all evening yesterday listening to symphonies. I didn't even finish them all (I only listened to 2-7), and it still took me hours. (I mean, y'know. There was a healthy dose of procrastination in there, too. But still.) So when I eventually went to bed, I turned the light off, closed my eyes... And my brain could do was think of the freaking Fifth Symphony. Over. And over again. Different parts of it, sometimes separately, sometimes on top of each other, making my head this disgusting mess of sound.

And of course my brain picks a stressful sounding movement from a symphony, so sound in my head + feelings of tension = COULD NOT SLEEP.

This research paper is going to destroy me in new and different ways which other, less resourceful research papers have been unable to do...

Beethoven: The 9 Symphonies / Gardiner

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I don't know Joie -- Beethoven rambling around might be better than a whole lot of Death Cab... you might not want to get out of bed ever again... Actually, I've been listening to both of the those this year -- LVB b/c I'm trying to learn the piano, and DCFC b/c I like music that makes me think some other sucker has it a LOT worse... ;)

Ha, good point! At least I've moved on from relatively depressing pop music to relatively depressing symphonic music. How's the piano learning going?

I'm really enjoying it -- considering that I had never picked up and instrument of any kind or learned how to read music before this Spring. :) I actually wrote about it last month here. Right now, I'm practicing all my major and minor patterns and chords, and transposing basic things up and down the scale. We've also got our mid-term performance coming up -- it will be in front of the whole class (mid-term is one piece, final is two-pieces -- and we have evaluations where you have to demonstrate the technical stuff). <nervously looks around>

Wow, very cool!! Teaching yourself to read music is impressive... Reading music always frustrated me, so I didn't really become decent at it till college (oops). I'm sure you'll do great on your mid-terms!! You've got some cool pieces picked out. The second movement of Beethoven's Seventh is one of my absolute favorites.

Beethoven's 9th is...amazing. I can't even pick a decent word to describe it. It's one of the few songs that can literally make me cry just by listening to it.

Yeah -- I got to see that (7th Symphony) performed live by the Chicago Symphony Orchestra. It was amazing. Also, I'm always a little chargrinned at how much the scene in "Mr Holland's Opus" gets me when he plays the 2nd movement and talks about LVB's deafness vis-a-vis his own child's.

Also, I think #8 is really under-rated.

Beethoven = No Sleep?

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