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Radiolab

Speedy Beet

Radiolab

WNYC Studios

Science, Natural Sciences, History, Society & Culture, Documentary

4.643.5K Ratings

🗓️ 22 May 2020

⏱️ 24 minutes

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

There are few musical moments more well-worn than the first four notes of Beethoven's Fifth Symphony. But in this short, we find out that Beethoven might have made a last-ditch effort to keep his music from ever feeling familiar, to keep pushing his listeners to a kind of psychological limit.

Big thanks to the folks at Brooklyn Philharmonic: Conductor Alan Pierson, Deborah Buck and Suzy Perelman on violin, Arash Amini on cello, and Ah Ling Neu on viola.

And check out The First Four Notes, Matthew Guerrieri's book on Beethoven's Fifth.

Support Radiolab today at Radiolab.org/donate.

Transcript

Click on a timestamp to play from that location

0:00.0

Wait, you're listening to radio lab from W and Y

0:16.7

Hey, I'm Chad. This is radio lab. I want to play a story that's come up a couple of times in conversations with folks here at the show

0:24.4

I guess I'll preface it this way so so one of the things that's been a little spooky weird about this moment is just time

0:39.0

You know at least for those of us who don't have to work on the front lines and are lucky enough to still have jobs

0:45.9

we are

0:47.6

stuck in our homes doing the zooms trying to get things done but the just the the lack of routines

0:56.2

routines that typically give a day purpose without those routines time does weird things

1:04.7

it bleeds it stretches and then collapses I mean we've all had the experience

1:10.6

of talking about something that happened on Tuesday

1:13.8

and then suddenly we're like oh my god that was just Tuesday that feels like a lifetime ago

1:22.2

on the flip side there's April the entire month of April which lasted a second

1:30.0

and I felt myself thinking back to one of the very first I think it actually might be the first

1:35.5

episode that Robert and I sort of hosted the show together it was an entire episode about time and

1:43.9

we talked about relativity and flower clocks and spice clocks and all these things and in that show

1:50.0

we played this piece of music that you're hearing this is Beethoven's ninth symphony

1:55.1

stretched from its typical 70-ish minutes to last 24 hours I put that on the other day and it was

2:08.7

really interesting to listen to again the way the music builds and builds and builds and you don't

2:15.3

know if it's going to keep building to some crescendo which then never arrives and then it pauses

2:22.4

for way too long so no I'm not going to play you 24 hours of Beethoven's ninth symphony I am going

2:30.4

to actually play kind of the flip side because 10 years after we did that first show that that first

2:38.5

show was like 17 years crazy crazy like was that just Tuesday but in 10 years after that we ran

2:46.1

into a different story also about Beethoven and about how he clearly had a very acute sensitivity

...

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