Reflection On The Video Keeping Score-Beethoven's Eroia

Zoya Alikhan

Humanities 1101

Professor Clifford

6 November 2017 Reflection on “Keeping Score - Beethoven’s Eroica” Video

In the video, “Keeping Score - Beethoven’s Eroica,” the American conductor and pianist, Michael Tilson Thomas and the San Francisco Symphony, explores the life and music of a German composer Ludwig van Beethoven. Thomas demonstrates and explains the four movements of the Eroica symphony by Beethoven. Thomas also gets into the rival challenges of Beethoven; where a man named Daniel Steibelt, challenged Beethoven to a musical duel in Vienna. Beethoven ended his symphony with the fourth movement and a finale of a frenzy virtuosity type of music. This type of music led the the audience know that the symphony was over.

In this section, I will be comparing and contrasting against Ludwig van Beethoven and Hector Berlioz.

Beethoven and Berlioz were well-known composers from the Romantic era. Beethoven was a talented pianist and violinist. He composed many different things including his thirty-two piano sonatas and nine symphonies. One of the famous piece that Beethoven wrote was called the Eroica (The Symphony no. 3). It was a symphony in four movements and one of Beethoven's incredible works. The Eroica symphony was a oratorio that marked the inception of Beethoven’s creative middle-period. According to the video, Thomas states “This is Beethoven’s third symphony when he called Eroica it took Beethoven three years to write this piece” (3:00). Berlioz was a french composer, and conductor in the Romantic period. His first and most famous symphony that he composed was the Symphonie fantastique. The Symphonie fantastique was according to Fiero who

states “an imaginative composition of the story of Faust and Berlioz’s own life. It tells the dramatic tale of Berlioz’s “interminable and inextinguishable passion”-as he described it-for the captivating Irish actress Harriet Smithson” (Fiero 352). Berlioz took liberties with traditional symphonic form. He wrote the Symphonie fantastique in five movements instead of the four like Beethoven did. Berlioz also combined instruments to create unusual mixed sounds Overall, Beethoven’s Eroica symphony was not a story where as Berlioz’s symphonie fantastique was a story. Both composed a symphony type music and both works were considered a romantic style because they both simply had to write their pieces and not perform to please the audience or the public.
In grade school many of my friends have joined band and I have listened to them in band concerts of them playing different instruments including the clarinet, flute, trumpet, and the piano.

As I watched and listened to them playing their instruments, there were low and high sounds. Half of the people would play at a low sound and the other half would play at a high sound. That was sort of relevant to what I saw in this video. However, in the video it was more of orchestra and symphony meaning there were violins and clarinets; but there were half musicians playing at a low sound and the other half playing at a high sound similar to the band

concert.
When I was confronted with this assigned video, I felt excited to learn about Beethoven and what he composed and it did. However, it did not challenged me very much because the video was mostly about the four movements of the Eroica symphony by Beethoven. The only challenge was trying to follow what Thomas was saying and understanding it very well. The video did not make me feel uncomfortable, but it also made me feel curious to what other interesting things there were besides the four movements of the symphony. I had some positive emotions and that was learning more and having some knowledge about music, symphony and how important it is since I never used to have interest in it until I watched this video. Overall, I thought this video was compelling and less broad than the last video. Beethoven had many amazing compositions and it was nice learning about this composition - the Eroica symphony.