WAVES OF TIME
Beethoven and Debussy.

Of course this ideas about suspended time demand to make a connection between the spheres of Scelsi and the bubbles of Pierre Boulez (See the text I wrote in 2003 about Memory and Perception in Pierre Boulez)
Beethoven introduces in music the suspended present and years later a tradition in french music will constittude a thread: Debussy-Messian-Boulez.

The problem of music from Bethoven becomes the problem of memory.
Beethoven late period went beyond romanticism. Beethoven has been considered the most crucial figure in the transition from classical to romantic, but in fact his music went far beyond that. There is an indubitable bridge between Beethoven´s late period and anti romantic movements of the end of the XIX century. Beethoven draws the end of modernity
Beethoven´s late period critizies Beethoven second period. Beethoven was aware that classicism became fictitius and artificial, too ornamental. That was the indecorum of Beethoven.

The late period is not about memory but about perception and liberating the imagination, not about depicting a story but producing suggestions, atmospheres rather than linear progressions, music doesn´t move but spins around itself. Time, like ocean waves, doesn´t go anywhere, but it moves, it oscilates rejoicing the tension of the non resolution. What later in the music of Schumann it has been called suspended present, probably the musician that most hated the develops in music.

Beethoven and Debussy, time seems to be suspended, the ambiguity of Debussy and his floating chords, the so called emancipation of sound, Beethoven drew already the possibility of music to become transformation, to emancipate from the sonata form.

Waves of time, the music becomes myterious oscillation, is not static like in the op. 132, music moves, not as an sphere but as waves of sound. Here Beethoven foreshadows Debussy.

Sonata 30. op 109 first movement (John Lill) by john Lill

Sonata 30. op 109 3rd movement by John Lill

Sonata 31. op 110 last movement by john Lill


Beethoven foreshadows Mahler dissolving already the Tonality. Beethoven and Bartók, Beethoven and Shostakovich and, why not, Beethoven and Messiaen (specially from the attack of the piano and how music becomes a machine with gears), Beethoven and Scelsi. Beethoven against the ability to memorize.