No Jazz Without Beethoven? | Part 6 of the film project A World Without Beethoven?

Cascading piano, and syncopation. What sounds like an American bar jazz piece from the 1920s is actually Beethoven's last piano sonata, Op. 111 – composed almost one hundred years before the birth of jazz in America. To find out what the jazz world makes of Ludwig van Beethoven, Sarah Willis – horn player with the Berlin Philharmonic – met with jazz musician Wynton Marsalis in New York. Marsalis is one of the world’s preeminent trumpet players. He has won nine GRAMMYs, and is artistic director of the House of Jazz in NYC’s Lincoln Center.

As Wynton Marsalis puts it, “The person in the 20th century who most resembles Beethoven is Louis Armstrong, because Louis Armstrong actually gave you a sense of what it meant to be modern; what it meant to be free. Beethoven’s relation to jazz is about his freedom in improvisation – of course we don’t have recordings of him, but every account of his playing is that he would go from really thunderous, bombastic, virtuosic playing to tender, beautiful, melodic…”

Wynton Marsalis, Sarah Willis and pianist Katie Mahan analyze two famous Beethoven pieces: The Piano Sonata No. 32, Op. 111 (1822), – its baselines and syncopation once caused Stravinsky to call it “a pre-echo of boogie-woogie” – and the String Quartet No. 16, Op. 135 (1826), in which Beethoven also experimented with rhythm. In the second movement, for example, he obscures the first beat of the bar – which would typically be the most important beat in European music. In doing so, Marsalis finds similarities between Beethoven’s composition and the ‘jukes’ of football and soccer, in which one player tricks another by suggesting a movement which they then don’t follow through with – “He is doing that with the rhythm.”

No Jazz Without Beethoven? is one of the focuses of the Deutsche Welle documentary film project A World Without Beethoven? In it, the question is posed of how the world might look if Beethoven and his work had never existed – a thought experiment as fascinating as it is provocative. The other focuses of the series are: No Concert Business Without Beethoven?, No Political Music Without Beethoven?, No Rock Riffs Without Beethoven?, No Movie Soundtracks Without Beethoven?, No Precise Tempo Without Beethoven?, and No Concept Albums Without Beethoven?.

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