One sunny day you are going to visit your friend, Beethoven. It is a long carriage ride to his mansion. During the ride you are jostled and bumped, thrown up against the carriage wall. Your driver, high above you on the riding platform, yells down, ‘So sorry, so sorry, the potholes are horrendous.’ He then lashes the 4 horses to a frenzy and the ride gets even worse. You arrive at Beethoven’s house around noon. Bad timing, you think…he is probably napping. You pay the driver ten cents worth of silver and gold. At the gate, a porter awaits you. ‘Mornin’ Sir, may I take your bag?’ You graciously decline, and make the long walk up the steps to the mansion door. The porter opens the door and shouts, ‘Guest arriving!” Guest arriving!’
Beethoven comes striding down the hallway, mad as a hornet. ‘Blast you, porter, you have woken me from my nap!” Then he sees you, and his anger fades to a warm smile. He invites you in, and leads you back to his study. Inside the study, Beethoven pulls the doors closed behind you. He offers you some Irish whiskey, and you accept. The study, where Beethoven writes all of music, is in a fair state of dis-array. Shelves bursting with books, papers on his desk cluttered together in sections, others crumpled up on the floor, thrown there in anger and frustration. Used feathers litter the marble floor. Splotches of ink, dried to a stain, running down the side of his oak desk. A bust of his own liking wearing a cap made of paper, the word ‘Dunce’ scribbled on it. Numerous self-portraits, some with arrows shot into them. The 2 large windows, high above the floor, smoky and grey, letting only slivers of sunlight cut through the dusty air.
Beethoven says, ‘Can you see, my friend, this business of making music is driving me crazy? It never ends, now the Plague. One day I have three 1st violins, one day two. How do I go on? Rats in the streets! Pied Pipers! I haven’t had a good bath in days, there is a shortage of fresh water. The bread, moldy. The ink is hideous, the parchment horrid. I have a performance in 3 weeks in Paris!’ Beethoven rants quite a bit. ‘What brings you here my friend?,’ as he drains his glass and pours another.
You grab you bag, pull out a laptop and say, ‘DAW.’
Beethoven looks at you bewildered. You open his 5th Symphony in Pro Tools. Now you have his interest. You scroll through the tracks, Percussion section, bass, cellos, violas, violins. Then you cut, copy and paste the intro, arrange it into a new group track, and add some reverb. Flanger. You zoom in the first chord…cut it out, copy it, paste it on another track and duplicate it. 10 times. De-tune 5 of them to different pitches. Add some delay. Speed it up, slow it down. Smash it with compression. Add a Rap kick and snare. Pull up a sample folder, add a choir. Put a riser before it, an impact along side it. Open another folder and get your own sample, an E5 power chord, Les Paul and Marshall, mic’d with a ’57. Transpose it down, step by step…bang, you got it. Pan it wide ride, his section wide left. Add some pre-fader reverb, panned hard the opposite way. You take section 5 and put in where section 2 is. 4 where 7 is. Open a drop-down menu that says ‘Print music notation.’
Beethoven says, ‘Wait.’ You stop. ‘Did you just re-arrange my 5th Symphony?’ he asks. ‘I can put it back,’ you say.
Beethoven says, ‘Give me that thing, right the fuck now.’ You give it to him.
‘The porter will see you out,’ he says, his full attention being diverted to the laptop. You smile.
‘It’s all good,’ you say to yourself as you walk back to your carriage. The printer is in your bag.
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