"After" is what we have to live with

Written in 2022 for chamber orchestra (15 minutes) 

Commissioned by and performed by Ensemble Terrible, conducted by Patrik Kako in Prague. Written in response to Beethoven’s 3rd Symphony. The concert dramaturgy consisted of new compositions written inside a performance of Eroica so that Beethoven’s work dovetails in and out of new commissions. My piece begins at approximately bar 440 of the first movement.

In the score that is available on this page, I have not included Beethoven’s work in the orchestration that was used for this concert. A “standalone” version of this piece begins where the recording provided on this page begins and concludes at the end of the first movement of original Symphony. An updated/complete score and set parts which includes this is available for performance on request.

From an interview for the premiere:

1. Is Beethoven - dead - or alive?

Is it possible to say both? Beethoven is literally dead; Beethoven’s work is very much alive in the public mind; a lot of contemporary artists wish Beethoven’s work was dead.

My attitude is more ambivalent. Without him, our musical culture may be very different, and it’s impossible to say what our music in general would be like without him. We simply can’t know what that would mean, and we simply can’t take that level of influence away. There’s too much work out there that is indebted to Beethoven to even count, and I do love the work that has come from his influence; you cannot get rid of that influence, and it’s very difficult to slow down 200 years of cultural inertia. In many ways He is too big to kill.

 That being said, he died almost 200 years ago, and he has become something of a myth or a God among us mortals. I am very uninterested in the idolatry that comes from that, and I don’t like looking at Beethoven as some mighty, other-worldly being. I think it gives the wrong sort of attention to his work and I would rather engage with his work on more equal terms: I wish orchestras programmed him a lot less and gave more room for others.

 Still, I don’t get too angry about it. I choose when to engage and when not to, and that seems to be fine with me. It is a rare day when I’m actively thinking about Beethoven, and that’s just a result of my own personal interests. However, we would not be doing this project without him, so I say “thank you” to Beethoven in that regard.

2. How is the concept of Beethoven using your composition?

For my composition, I used Eroica as a place to begin sonically. By literally using a moment from the piece in the introduction, I allowed my intuition to transform Eroica into my own sound-world and then into my own piece that is otherwise completely unrelated to Eroica. At some point in the transition, the music becomes “Kory Reeder’s Piece,” although I couldn’t tell you where that happens exactly. So, the work comes from Beethoven directly, but I use this as a starting point to develop my own ideas.

3. Does your composition carry any message - or other extra-musical meaning?

We are left with what comes after Beethoven: we can either directly engage with it or try and do our own thing, and this is a choice we need to make. I used this concept as the extra-musical meaning, but also the method for creating the composition: it is an idea in practice.

4. Is composition dead? 

No.