The First Four Notes: Beethoven's Fifth and the Human Imagination

by Matthew Guerrieri

  IN THE EARLY 1980s, chipmaker General Instrument released the AY-3–1350, an integrated circuit capable of providing synthesized tunes for “toys, musical boxes, and doorchimes” (the latter especially)—among the twenty-five preprogrammed “popular and classical tunes chosen for their international acceptance” were Beethoven’s Fifth and Ninth Symphonies. (Also included were the Marseillaise, the “William Tell” Overture, and the theme from Star Wars.)75 Hobbyists soon figured out how to wire an AY-3–1350 to an existing phone, creating the first Beethoven’s Fifth ringtone.76

  Beginning in 1996, when the Japanese telecom company NTT DoCoMo released the Digital Mova N103 Hyper, the first cell phone preprogrammed with multiple melodic ringtones, the notion of a phone call announced by Beethoven’s Fifth really began to seep into cultural consciousness. In reality, both “Für Elise” and the “Ode to Joy” (the latter was programmed into phones supplied by the organizers of the 1998 Nagano Olympic games) seemed to be more common. But Beethoven’s Fifth became a common reference for writing about the possibility of a classical ringtone. (After all, the original already sounds like a ringtone.)

  As early as 2000, the prevalence of Beethoven’s Fifth as a ringtone, or, more to the point, the prevalence of the idea of Beethoven’s Fifth as a ringtone, was enough for InfoWorld editor-at-large Dan Briody to include it in the second of a list of ersatz-Mosaic cell-phone commandments. “Thou shalt not set thy ringer to play La Cucaracha every time thy phone rings,” he preached. “Or Beethoven’s Fifth, or the Bee Gees, or any other annoying melody.”77 (Was it the mere translation into ringtone that made the melody annoying? Briody’s placement corresponded to either the prohibition against worshipping graven images or the misuse of the Lord’s name, depending on whether one adopts a Talmudic or Augustinian numeration.)

  But as the technology advanced to the point of sampled, not synthesized, ringtones, popular music began to dominate the market. Where Beethoven’s Fifth did become enormously popular as a ringtone is in the universe of mass-market fiction. Instantly familiar and unsusceptible to cultural obsolescence, the Fifth fairly rings off the hook in such writing. Pick up a thriller, mystery, or romance novel at your local airport, and chances are, if a cell phone rings during the story, it will ring Beethoven’s Fifth.

  To trace the symbolism of these fictional ringtones is to revisit familiar contexts for Beethoven’s Fifth, and Beethoven’s reputation in general. Sometimes it hints at a more privileged path through life; in Christopher Reich’s 2002 thriller The First Billion, Hans-Uli Brunner, the Swiss Minister of Justice, receives an untimely interruption on the links, the melodic content an indication of his class:

  As he stroked the putter toward the ball, an ominous tune chimed from within his golf bag. The first bars of “Beethoven’s Fifth.” The blade met the ball askew and it sailed three feet past the cup.

  “Damn it!”78

  With the advent of technology that allows multiple ringtones, tailored to particular incoming callers, Schindler’s fate-knocking-at-the-door story again surfaces. For example, disillusioned political wife Helene Zaharis in Beth Harbison’s 2007 Shoe Addicts Anonymous programs political calls to ring “with the ominous opening of Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony.”79 Parents are often the symbolized authority, as in Caroline Cooney’s Hit the Road, in which the sixteen-year-old Brit embarks on an illegal road trip: “For her mother’s ring, Brit had chosen the Beethoven’s Fifth theme, that ominous one: dum dum dum daaaaah.”80 (In the 2007 Rear-Window-for-teens movie thriller Disturbia, the girl-next-door Ashley similarly has the Fifth to warn her of a maternal call.) One can even find the American death-knocking variant, as in E. R. Webb’s Christian-inspirational serial-killer novel Gemini’s Cross, as part of the usual cat-and-mouse game:

  Immediately a phone rang somewhere in the shop. The ring tone was Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony. Da-da-da-dum. Death, knocking at the door. Da-da-da-dum. Following the sound, Baxter looked under the table. Nothing. He turned over the chairs, one by one.…

  There it was, a cell phone taped under the chair. He ripped it off and put it to his ear.

  “Okay, Darrell. I’m here.”

  “Good. Remember what I said about law enforcement.”

  “I’m alone.”81

  Jonathan Kellerman, in his 2005 detective novel Rage, uses the Fifth to hint at a character’s Beethovenian outsider gruffness:

  He downed two Bengal premiums, called for the check, and was slapping cash on the table when his cell chirped Beethoven’s Fifth.…

  Rising to his feet, he motioned me toward the exit. Some of the twenty-somethings stopped laughing and looked at him as he loped out of the restaurant. Big, scary-looking man. All that merriment; he didn’t fit in.82

  Then there is the Fifth as an affectation to be mocked. In Linda Ladd’s Die Smiling, detective Clare Morgan considers the Fifth to reflect poorly on her partner, Bud Davis (“he’s pretentious sometimes that way”).83 On the other hand, in Christine McGuire’s serial-killer mystery Until Judgment Day, DA investigator Donna Escalante’s ringtone impresses sheriff’s chief of detectives James Miller, echoing the turn-of-the-century use of the symphony as a signal of feminine refinement—or perhaps passion:

  “Is that your phone chirping or mine?” Miller asked Escalante.…

  “Yours,” she said. “When mine rings, it plays music.”

  “What music?”

  “The first four notes of Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony.”

  “Pretty classy.”84

  And sometimes, fictional phones ring out the Fifth simply as a play on the convenience of recognizability, as with Moxy Maxwell, the stubborn ten-year-old heroine of Peggy Gifford’s series of children’s books.

  Moxy was so quick on the draw when she picked up her cell phone that Ajax often remarked that she would have made a first-rate gunslinger in the Old West. And this time was no exception.

  After the second but before the third note of Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony, Moxy was saying “Yes” into the phone. “Yes” was what Moxy said instead of “Hello,” unless it was someone she didn’t know.85

  If Beethoven’s Fifth stops after the first two notes, is it still Beethoven’s Fifth? Moxy does not have time for your trumped-up pop koans. But the joke only works if the tune is something everybody knows, once again both reinforcing and perpetuating the ubiquity of the Fifth Symphony’s iconic opening. The fictional progress of the Beethoven ringtone, then, encapsulates the progress of the symphony itself in Western culture: from an exotic novelty, to a prepackaged interpretive meme, to a neutered, omnipresent cultural artifact.

  THE OPENING of Beethoven’s Fifth had become a non-Kantian thing-in-itself, a self-sufficient cultural push-button. Its very familiarity could work against it. In Anthony Burgess’s 1962 novel A Clockwork Orange, the Pavlovian aversion treatment by which the delinquent Alex is “cured” of his violent tendencies, the Ludovico Treatment, included the Fifth Symphony at its center, accompanying a film of Nazi brutality. A decade later, for the film adaptation, director Stanley Kubrick cast the Fifth aside in favor of the Ninth; only the Fifth’s opening motive remained, in the form of the doorbell to the home of the writer Mr. Alexander, attacked by Alex and his gang—a grim fate rendered as a grim pun.86

  Kubrick’s version of A Clockwork Orange was stylistically indebted to Toshio Matsumoto’s 1969 film Bara no Soretsu (Funeral Parade of Roses), a hallucinatory, nonlinear modernization of Oedipus Rex set in Tokyo’s gay underground.87 The movie also featured a cameo by the Fifth, a joke at both the Fifth’s and the film’s own avant-garde expense. A conversation turns to a movie that Eddie, the transvestite main character, has been acting in, a movie that may very well be Bara no Soretsu itself. Someone asks if the movie is interesting. “I’m not sure,” Eddie replies. “It’s unique, though”—and Beethoven’s opening phrases sound, as a title card informs the audience: Awaiting your esteemed applause!

  Even that was more pointed than the Fifth’s appearance in the opening
scenes of Clara Law’s 2000 film The Goddess of 1967; we see glimpses of the life of a young Japanese man as he carries on an Internet negotiation for the purchase of a Citroën DS automobile—the “Goddess” (déesse) of the title.88 Each shot produces a jump cut on the soundtrack, each a different genre and mood—the Fifth’s opening turns up in the middle, neither portentous nor ironic, just one of a host of fragments and objects out of which a modern identity is constructed.

  The tendency of such digital interconnectedness, while at the same time making the entire corpus of culture more and more immediately accessible, was to encourage consumption of information in more and more concentrated packets. Matt Wand, a cofounder of the British avant-garde sound collage group Stock, Hausen & Walkman, summarized the aesthetic: “MP3 is a codec designed to remove ‘redundant’ audio information, to make a sound file 5 to 10 times smaller, in effect to create ‘MUSIC-lite’—a kind of diet music in which all the sound information our ears supposedly don’t need to hear is removed.… [H]ow much better would it be if the software truly stripped out all the redundant material, Beethoven’s 5th reduced down to its first 4 notes, a repetitive dance hit cut right down to the one repeating loop that is its main constituent?”89

  In a 2005 episode of The Simpsons, Marge Simpson spearheads the construction of a new Frank Gehry–designed concert hall in Springfield—but at the opening concert, the entire audience gets up to leave after the first five bars of the Fifth. “We’ve already heard the duh-duh-duh-dum,” Chief Wiggum explains. “The rest is just filler.”90

  THEODOR W. ADORNO saw it all coming. In 1945, he wrote: “There exists today a tendency to listen to Beethoven’s Fifth as if it were a set of quotations from Beethoven’s Fifth.”91

  At the time, Adorno was living in exile in Los Angeles, California. A native of Frankfurt, he had fled the Nazis in 1934, first to England, then to America, having been invited by his colleague Max Horkheimer to rejoin the Institute for Social Research, the think tank that had employed both of them back in Germany; the Institute had followed Horkheimer to New York.

  Adorno’s insight into the Fifth’s fragmentation was a by-product of another American invitation. Shortly after his arrival, Adorno was recruited into a Rockefeller-sponsored study of mass media, centered at Princeton, and known as the Radio Project. He was already interested in radio and recordings, in the way it affected how people listened to and understood music, the way it promoted what he called “regressive listening”: “Not only do the listening subjects lose, along with freedom of choice and responsibility, the capacity for conscious perception of music, which was from time immemorial confined to a narrow group, but they stubbornly reject the possibility of such perception.” And, foreshadowing his diagnosis about the Fifth: “They fluctuate between comprehensive forgetting and sudden dives into recognition.”92 Music over the radio, to Adorno, was all sensuality and no structure. (He once wondered whether “Beethoven actually wanted to go deaf—because he had already had a taste of the sensuous side of music as it is blared from loudspeakers today.”93)

  Adorno left the project in 1941, critical of the project’s methodology. Paul Lazarsfeld, the sociologist who headed the project, and Frank Stanton, later to become president of CBS, had come up with a gadget they nicknamed “Little Annie,” which could instantaneously and continuously record audience likes and dislikes.94 (It was an early version of that staple of instant polls and focus groups, the dials that a viewer can turn from positive to negative to mirror their reaction.)

  The flow of data that “Little Annie” and other such methodologies provided was, to Adorno, misleadingly, dangerously context-free. One of the main underpinnings of the critical theory that he and Horkheimer and the Institute for Social Research had developed was that reactions always have a social context—in fact, it is the very context of society itself that most reveals its own critique. To regard any data, any reaction, any cultural artifact as somehow separable from the society that produced it was liable to blind one to the ways in which society shapes artifacts and reactions in order to reinforce its own status quo.

  No status quo was excepted. The Institute and its researchers were Marxists, but Marxists who were dismayed at the way Marxism had been hijacked and bureaucratized in order to lend unqualified support to this or that Communist movement. Adorno’s resistance toward such sloganeering would resurface in the late 1960s, after he had returned to Germany, after he had resumed his teaching career, his classrooms full of young radicals. But when those radicals became soixante-huit would-be revolutionaries, Adorno drew back, censuring their reliance on revolutionary formula rather than critical engagement. His lectures were disrupted by demonstrations; he died during a Swiss retreat, taken after canceling the year’s remaining classes. His last letter was to his Institute colleague, Herbert Marcuse, who had supported the student uprisings. “I am the last person to underestimate the merits of the student movement,” Adorno wrote. “But it contains a grain of insanity in which a future totalitarianism is implicit.”95

  HE WAS BORN Theodor Wiesengrund, but, around the time of his emigration to America, settled instead on Adorno, his mother’s maiden name. (For a time, he also wrote reviews under the name “Hektor Rottweiler.”)96 His father was a well-to-do assimilated Jew, carrying on the family wine trade; his mother was an opera singer of Corsican ancestry and Catholic faith. Theodor enjoyed a fairy-tale childhood, if the fairy tale had been written by a German intellectual. The philosopher Siegfried Kracauer was a family friend; every week they would read Kant, Theodor becoming attuned to “the play of forces at work under the surface of every closed doctrine.”97 He learned the canon of classical music by playing piano duets with his aunt. He was precocious, sheltered, and spoiled. A friend remembered Adorno enjoying “an existence you just had to love—if you were not dying with jealousy of this beautiful, protected life.”98

  Adorno was probably the most accomplished musician to ever become a professional philosopher. He was welcomed into the circle of the Second Viennese School, studying piano with Eduard Steuermann, and composition with Alban Berg; the latter relationship was particularly close, with Berg extolling Adorno’s music to Schoenberg while Adorno helped facilitate Berg’s love affair with Hanna Fuchs-Robettin.99 Adorno’s music, in the predodecaphonic, freely atonal expressionist style, shows a talent and technique far beyond mere dilettantism. In the early 1930s, he began his most ambitious work, an opera based on Mark Twain’s Tom Sawyer called Das Schatz der Indianer-Joe (The Treasure of Indian Joe). The subject might seem a strange fit, but Adorno’s libretto brought out themes of fear and conformity lurking within Twain’s tale:

  [Huck and Tom] A man has died

  Two saw it happen

  All are guilty.

  With emphasis As long as they don’t talk.100

  But the increasing uncertainty of his status in Germany, not to mention the unenthusiastic response of his friend and fellow cultural critic Walter Benjamin, led Adorno to abandon the project after only two numbers.

  Adorno focused on his other vocation, philosophy. As might be expected from his childhood weekends, Adorno’s philosophy was strongly shaped by the German Idealists, by Kant and, especially, Hegel. But Adorno was wary of the implications of Hegel’s dialectic, the way it seemed to be led by the nose toward the Absolute by subjective thought—for Adorno, a subjective point of view didn’t exist outside of the objective society that shaped it. This was not simply metaphysical hair-splitting; it was, for Adorno, at the core of why the Enlightenment-born Western world had not only not prevented suffering, but had produced suffering on an unprecedented level. The Idealistic focus on subjectivity had missed the objective suffering happening all around it.

  Adorno instead would call for a “negative dialectic,” one that would put asunder the illusory unities that subjective thought imposes on the objective world—“to break the compulsion to achieve identity, and to break it by means of the energy stored up in that compulsion and congealed in its
objectifications.”101 In the words of one of Adorno’s best interpreters, Robert Hullot-Kentor: “What Adorno wanted to comprehend was the capacity of thought—of identity itself—to cause reality to break in on the mind that masters it.”102 Adorno’s thought used contradiction—often self-contradiction—to jostle reason out of its subjective biases. The result is his difficult, reflexive, fragmentary writing style—there is, as Hullot-Kentor puts it, “the sense, on entering any one of Adorno’s essays, that even in their very first words one has already arrived too late to find out for sure what any of the concepts mean.”103 But better that than the false assimilation of the concepts into a point of view unaware of its own distortions.

  ODDLY ENOUGH, a good place to start to understand Adorno’s perception of Beethoven is in his analysis of another type of music, an analysis that Adorno, in many ways, got remarkably wrong. Adorno’s writings on jazz are infamous. In his 1936 essay “Über Jazz” (originally published under the “Hektor Rottweiler” byline), he rehearsed a critique that he never abandoned: jazz was mechanical, rigid music, repackaging an illusion of freedom in such a way that only inculcated the conformity necessary for a capitalist, industrial society to maintain the status quo. Any sensation of freedom in jazz is just a veneer, detached from the underlying structure, a structure that encourages obedience, not rebellion.

  Beethoven’s syncopation had been “the expression of an accumulated subjective force which directed itself against authority until it had produced a new law out of itself.”104 But in jazz, “the objective sound” (the harmonic and rhythmic repetition) “is embellished by a subjective expression” (the misdirections of solos, syncopation, &c.) “which is unable to dominate it and therefore exerts a fundamentally ridiculous and heart-rending effect.” The improvisatory elements of jazz are, thus, just sentimental window dressing, a halfhearted revolt “against a collective power which it itself is; for this reason its revolt seems ridiculous and is beaten down by the drum just as syncopation is by the beat.”105