This is so niche, I love it. I remember going over the timpani part for the Fifth Symphony with my teacher and him basically saying "ignore that" on the last measure.
Thanks! Yes I think many players took the same view as your teacher. But I made this because I still see people questioning it... amazing. Perhaps it is weird to make a 13 minute film about 1 bar..! But I am glad people also find this story interesting, particularly as it has become such a famous non-moment in our repertoire!
Wow, thanks so much for this video! I'm a librarian for a youth orchestra and we're programming Beethoven's 5th for the first time. I noticed this anomaly while checking the parts and was immediately thrown off because I had no idea why it was written like that. Being a violist, I asked some percussionist friends and didn't get a conclusive answer, and I didn't have a clue on where to start researching this so I had already decided to move on. I feel so relieved now, thanks to you. Can't wait to tell everyone at work lol
Great video, you managed to completely invest me in this journey, something I didn't quite expect given that I'm not a percussionist, or a huge lover of Beethoven 5. But alas, I am now a passionate defender of one trill in one timpani part in one symphony- love it!
Thanks for this! I am glad you found this interesting. I will be doing more of these, mostly orchestral but maybe piano too. So maybe there might be some other gems that you might like. Good luck with your studies - I'll take a closer look at your channel soon!
Why not! Just make sure it is slow enough so what the timpanist wants to play is possible and audible. The irony is that many of us roll quite slowly, and so a roll is often actually slower than measured 32nds or 16nds.
@@adrianbending1 I'm actually never sure about missing notating unmeasured rolls for percussion. Is it still okay to use tr, or should I go with tremolo lines? Either way no one is playing my pieces, but I still like knowing that they could be played
@@yoavshati Here is a reply I wrote to someone else about this: "Timpanists generally consider that trrrr means "unmeasured" ie not a distinct number of notes. When we see slashes then we try to interpret these as 8s, 16s, 32nds etc. However this is a minefield! The Donizetti, Verdi and Dvorak excerpts in the film show that composers used different conventions, and were also inconsistent themselves (particularly the Dvorak example). The italian composers tended to write slashes rather than trrr and often we play unmeasured rolls because the mathematical number of notes is impossible. What is interesting here is that Beethoven is normally extremely precise about his use of these notations. And they all work without exception except for the printed one at the end of this piece. You are right, often we have to use common sense and not be rigid. The point is that with Beethoven, the rhythmic and unmeasured stuff all works, and sounds musical too. Win Win!"
trrrr is better if you want an unmeasured roll, because nobody could then try to play it rhythmically. If you write slashes but want an unmeasured roll, you run the risk that someone plays it measured.
It turns out that to have more respect to the score (which the adepts of HIP are trying to do) is to notice the mistakes, not to treat the scores 100% literally
Yes you're absolutely right. I think people often believe that the score must be 100% accurate and there are no mistakes. This assumes it was always possible to make all the right checks and then make changes, which obviously often it wasn't!
What a great video!!! Thank you very much for the detailed research. I always believed that this was a clear edition/printing issue, but I did not have the “tools” to prove it. Thank you very much for clarifying it, which will remove (well… 😅😅) all the overthinking and forced ideas pre-conditioned by wanting to be true the ink.
Thanks so much David for your kind words! What is amazing about this is that the new Baerenreiter edition has been out for over 20 years, but orchestras did not buy this new edition and there were no new teaching books. And so although it was well known, the actual players and many conductors had no idea, and continued to argue about it!
@@feyindecay912 that is a good approach to have. It should be much easier now with computers, not pen and ink. But music has got so much more complicated that errors are understandable and still quite common. And so it is good if you can have this attention to detail! 😃
@@dukeofcurls3183 hi there. Yes I've obviously read that and considered what he says carefully. Taking all the available evidence my personal view is as it is here.
It would be easier to believe what was printed in the first edition if it was possible to play it! One of the strongest arguments I feel is that everything Beethoven writes is playable. This is definitely not true for many composers. And so that is huge evidence why the 2 printed minims is an error.
I love this weird but beautiful details - but, in the end in turns out to be writo. (like typo). By the way: the same applies to the last 2 bars of Schubert´s Great Symphony in C maj. D944, where it turned out, that a gigantic accent was mis-read as a diminuendo. Just saying.
Thank you. Your point about Schubert 9 is very interesting! I would love to hear how this happened. Was it a misunderstanding of the composer's autograph score?
@@adrianbending1 Thank you for your reply . The point is, that historical minded people (like Harnoncourt) see this "thing" Schubert wrote ion the autotgraph as a diminuendo. But Analysis shows, that Schubert used to enlanrge the accent, if it´s meant to be very intensly. So you end up with recordings like this ua-cam.com/video/iYhtSG9fQYk/v-deo.htmlsi=V3h7HMcwOy9ikwLs - with a diminuendo on the last "chord". This information is contained in the preface of Eulenburg edition of the symphony.
Some additional things: I forgot it´s a 2/4 time, so it´s the last four bars. All publications show a dim. on the last chord. According to those it seems, Schubert intended something akin to a modern "fade out". But that´s not right, as expained above. But maybe, there is a lot more to know. (As always)
@@marksteinhaeuser thanks for these messages. I've never investigated this one closely, but I have heard and been asked to play the dim and been surprised by it. The more work I do in this area leads me to think that mistakes are more commonplace than "amazing ideas used once" ! For example, Beethoven 5. The first ever roll at the end of a symphony is really strange, (and amazing say the fans of the weird notation), but it was NEVER ever copied? Isn't that odd if it is so amazing? Same with the Schubert. A dim is a really weird thing to do at the end of a piece like this. So weird that others didn't do it. It's the sort of ending for a reflective short tone poem, not a great symphony! And so I think it is belief in two things that is important: the fact that humans male mistakes, combined with most of the time people write things that are sensible and somewhat predictable..and the genius of both the works we are talking about is displayed very prominently throughout them. (just not in the last few bars!!)
@@adrianbending1 I totally agree. Sometimes the craving to find some act of unthinkable genius is a kind of psyhcological condition that makes people blind to the fact that odd things may only be a misinterpretation or simply a mistake. It´s called over-thinking or over-interpretation. For me personally it is great to know, where those mistakes came from, which is the most interesting aspects of this video. Especially in the case of Beethoven´s 5th, this simple and obvious solution to what´s up with the timpani in the last bar make me even more confortable with the piece as a whole.
An ignorant string player here. but i have to ask what is the difference between a minim with three strokes through it ( the tremolando marking) and a minim with the tr abbreviation - for trill? at that tempo three strokes through the minim cannot be played as a measured repetition, but as an unmeasured tremolando what is the difference when a tympani CANNOT do literal trills. both strike me as markings for a drum roll I know I am a bass player and have played the piece at least a half dozen time in public concert, but still I have to ask are we such fearful rigid literalists that we fear to use some common sense???
Timpanists generally consider that trrrr means "unmeasured" ie not a distinct number of notes. When we see slashes then we try to interpret these as 8s, 16s, 32nds etc. However this is a minefield! The Donizetti, Verdi and Dvorak excerpts in the film show that composers used different conventions, and were also inconsistent themselves (particularly the Dvorak example). The italian composers tended to write slashes rather than trrr and often we play unmeasured rolls because the mathematical number of notes is impossible. What is interesting here is that Beethoven is normally extremely precise about his use of these notations. And they all work without exception except for the printed one at the end of this piece. You are right, often we have to use common sense and not be rigid. The point is that with Beethoven, the rhythmic and unmeasured stuff all works, and sounds musical too. Win Win!
@bigodineo I agree with what you are suggesting. A lot of people have always used common sense and interepreted this simply as a "normal" roll. However there was (and still is!) a sizeable number of players and condcutors who see what is printed and think that they must attempt to play literally what they see. Some of them also think (hope?) that it is a deliberate and flamboyant intentional effect by Beethoven, precisely because the notation is so unusual. But when one looks more widely at Beethoven, everything he writes makes complete sense and is playable, which is why many people thought that this must be mistake, which we now have confirmation of
OK, OK, but I cannot think of a reading of the 5th symphony in which this anomaly was taken literally. Now you have hooked me into a "performance research" mode. I'll never forgive you. Can you, perhaps, direct us to any of the readings that attempt an interpretation of this quirky oversight?
Well... there are. Cleveland Orchestra / Dohnanyi. I wouldn't have bothered to make this video if this wasn't an issue! You probably aren't aware of it because it often isn't very clear to hear even if a player makes a huge effort to do something. Any timpanist will tell you that there is still controversy about this bar. There are still many discussions including vigorous debate on Facebook forums and it is being perpetuated and taught to young players in some colleges because of "tradition" and a scepticism of "academics"..... It seems there are still people who do not want to accept the clear conclusions of the Baerenreiter edition, plus musical logic....
@@adrianbending1 I have this recording and never noticed it. I don't subscribe to Spotify but I assume it is the same recording as the Teldec one with quite brisk tempi and a mixture of historical and modern instruments.
@@petertyrrell3391 ua-cam.com/video/D9hC-_YIALA/v-deo.html Liszt Pupils play Beethoven. I rest my case. Stop listening to Wim and his wholebeat nonsense. The guy is nuts.
@@Quotenwagnerianer @petertyrell3391 please can you not discuss single beat vs whole beat theory on here? There are plenty of other places to do that. This video has nothing to do with that debate. Thank you very much
@@Quotenwagnerianer interesting points from you, @scarf550 and @tamirlyn but I don't want this video to involve discussion about single or whole beat. That is a discussion for somewhere else!
Bro just cassualy spoiled every symphony ending and thought we wouldn't notice
This is so niche, I love it. I remember going over the timpani part for the Fifth Symphony with my teacher and him basically saying "ignore that" on the last measure.
Thanks! Yes I think many players took the same view as your teacher. But I made this because I still see people questioning it... amazing. Perhaps it is weird to make a 13 minute film about 1 bar..! But I am glad people also find this story interesting, particularly as it has become such a famous non-moment in our repertoire!
Playing these endings in a row sounds like late romanticism or modern film music
Yes! could almost make a piece out of just these snippets...
I dunno, it's fairly avant-garde imo
A composition called Trio by Steen-Andersen is partially built by these snippets! Worth checking out.
Wow, thanks so much for this video! I'm a librarian for a youth orchestra and we're programming Beethoven's 5th for the first time. I noticed this anomaly while checking the parts and was immediately thrown off because I had no idea why it was written like that. Being a violist, I asked some percussionist friends and didn't get a conclusive answer, and I didn't have a clue on where to start researching this so I had already decided to move on.
I feel so relieved now, thanks to you. Can't wait to tell everyone at work lol
That's really nice to hear, I am ao glad you found this useful, thank you! Where is your Youth Orchestra?
What an interesting discussion! These are the sorts of stories I live for. Thank you for sharing!
Glad you enjoyed it!
What a cool detective story!!! Thank you so much! Please more of such things!
ua-cam.com/video/UfAN0U0d9Bk/v-deo.html
I love to see people es nerdy as me and I am happy to watch this❤
Great video, you managed to completely invest me in this journey, something I didn't quite expect given that I'm not a percussionist, or a huge lover of Beethoven 5. But alas, I am now a passionate defender of one trill in one timpani part in one symphony- love it!
Thanks for this! I am glad you found this interesting. I will be doing more of these, mostly orchestral but maybe piano too. So maybe there might be some other gems that you might like. Good luck with your studies - I'll take a closer look at your channel soon!
@@adrianbending1 I'd love to hear more, thank you!
Beethoven 1 to 4's endings slowly rising is funy as hell
There's no reason for me to do this, but now I want to write this messed up timpani ending in one of my pieces
Why not! Just make sure it is slow enough so what the timpanist wants to play is possible and audible. The irony is that many of us roll quite slowly, and so a roll is often actually slower than measured 32nds or 16nds.
@@adrianbending1 I'm actually never sure about missing notating unmeasured rolls for percussion. Is it still okay to use tr, or should I go with tremolo lines?
Either way no one is playing my pieces, but I still like knowing that they could be played
@@yoavshati Here is a reply I wrote to someone else about this: "Timpanists generally consider that trrrr means "unmeasured" ie not a distinct number of notes. When we see slashes then we try to interpret these as 8s, 16s, 32nds etc. However this is a minefield! The Donizetti, Verdi and Dvorak excerpts in the film show that composers used different conventions, and were also inconsistent themselves (particularly the Dvorak example). The italian composers tended to write slashes rather than trrr and often we play unmeasured rolls because the mathematical number of notes is impossible. What is interesting here is that Beethoven is normally extremely precise about his use of these notations. And they all work without exception except for the printed one at the end of this piece. You are right, often we have to use common sense and not be rigid. The point is that with Beethoven, the rhythmic and unmeasured stuff all works, and sounds musical too. Win Win!"
trrrr is better if you want an unmeasured roll, because nobody could then try to play it rhythmically. If you write slashes but want an unmeasured roll, you run the risk that someone plays it measured.
@@adrianbending1 Thanks!
I love this video! As a string player I never knew about this unusual notation!
Love this deep dive Adrian, much appreciated! Hope to meet soon!
It turns out that to have more respect to the score (which the adepts of HIP are trying to do) is to notice the mistakes, not to treat the scores 100% literally
Yes you're absolutely right. I think people often believe that the score must be 100% accurate and there are no mistakes. This assumes it was always possible to make all the right checks and then make changes, which obviously often it wasn't!
What a great video!!! Thank you very much for the detailed research. I always believed that this was a clear edition/printing issue, but I did not have the “tools” to prove it. Thank you very much for clarifying it, which will remove (well… 😅😅) all the overthinking and forced ideas pre-conditioned by wanting to be true the ink.
Thanks so much David for your kind words! What is amazing about this is that the new Baerenreiter edition has been out for over 20 years, but orchestras did not buy this new edition and there were no new teaching books. And so although it was well known, the actual players and many conductors had no idea, and continued to argue about it!
Love your video. Interesting history with lots of humor!
Well, I'm glad we settled that !
Timpani goes BRRRRRR
Amazing video! Love investigative music history!
What an interesting story!
@@feyindecay912 thank you very much. Glad you think so!
@adrianbending1 I'm a composition student myself, and this searching for detail definetly inspires to be conscious about my own notation
@@feyindecay912 that is a good approach to have. It should be much easier now with computers, not pen and ink. But music has got so much more complicated that errors are understandable and still quite common. And so it is good if you can have this attention to detail! 😃
Bach wrote with ink and a quill, one cantata a week (plus copying, training, and performance of the work), and managed to produce clean scores.
@@riverstun yes. Sure! I think we could all agree he was exceptional in many ways. I think there are many more composers like Beethoven than JS Bach.
Great video!
Kenneth Woods wrote about how he thinks Del Mar's explanation is a stretch, and that he prefers the split roll
@@dukeofcurls3183 hi there. Yes I've obviously read that and considered what he says carefully. Taking all the available evidence my personal view is as it is here.
It would be easier to believe what was printed in the first edition if it was possible to play it! One of the strongest arguments I feel is that everything Beethoven writes is playable. This is definitely not true for many composers. And so that is huge evidence why the 2 printed minims is an error.
This is just one long Bärenriter Verlag ad
The journey is always more profitable than the conclusion. Even if it’s all a variation of V I the tension gives the ending a different flavor.
I love this weird but beautiful details - but, in the end in turns out to be writo. (like typo). By the way: the same applies to the last 2 bars of Schubert´s Great Symphony in C maj. D944, where it turned out, that a gigantic accent was mis-read as a diminuendo. Just saying.
Thank you. Your point about Schubert 9 is very interesting! I would love to hear how this happened. Was it a misunderstanding of the composer's autograph score?
@@adrianbending1 Thank you for your reply . The point is, that historical minded people (like Harnoncourt) see this "thing" Schubert wrote ion the autotgraph as a diminuendo. But Analysis shows, that Schubert used to enlanrge the accent, if it´s meant to be very intensly. So you end up with recordings like this ua-cam.com/video/iYhtSG9fQYk/v-deo.htmlsi=V3h7HMcwOy9ikwLs - with a diminuendo on the last "chord".
This information is contained in the preface of Eulenburg edition of the symphony.
Some additional things: I forgot it´s a 2/4 time, so it´s the last four bars. All publications show a dim. on the last chord. According to those it seems, Schubert intended something akin to a modern "fade out". But that´s not right, as expained above. But maybe, there is a lot more to know. (As always)
@@marksteinhaeuser thanks for these messages. I've never investigated this one closely, but I have heard and been asked to play the dim and been surprised by it. The more work I do in this area leads me to think that mistakes are more commonplace than "amazing ideas used once" ! For example, Beethoven 5. The first ever roll at the end of a symphony is really strange, (and amazing say the fans of the weird notation), but it was NEVER ever copied? Isn't that odd if it is so amazing? Same with the Schubert. A dim is a really weird thing to do at the end of a piece like this. So weird that others didn't do it. It's the sort of ending for a reflective short tone poem, not a great symphony! And so I think it is belief in two things that is important: the fact that humans male mistakes, combined with most of the time people write things that are sensible and somewhat predictable..and the genius of both the works we are talking about is displayed very prominently throughout them. (just not in the last few bars!!)
@@adrianbending1 I totally agree. Sometimes the craving to find some act of unthinkable genius is a kind of psyhcological condition that makes people blind to the fact that odd things may only be a misinterpretation or simply a mistake. It´s called over-thinking or over-interpretation. For me personally it is great to know, where those mistakes came from, which is the most interesting aspects of this video. Especially in the case of Beethoven´s 5th, this simple and obvious solution to what´s up with the timpani in the last bar make me even more confortable with the piece as a whole.
Nice
Good production! I did not know Beethoven signed himself as Luigi is that his original signature?
Everything you see on the part is the hand writing of the copyist Joseph Klumpar. The score is in Beethoven's hand writing
An ignorant string player here. but i have to ask what is the difference between a minim with three strokes through it ( the tremolando marking) and a minim with the tr abbreviation - for trill? at that tempo three strokes through the minim cannot be played as a measured repetition, but as an unmeasured tremolando
what is the difference when a tympani CANNOT do literal trills. both strike me as markings for a drum roll
I know I am a bass player and have played the piece at least a half dozen time in public concert, but still I have to ask
are we such fearful rigid literalists that we fear to use some common sense???
Timpanists generally consider that trrrr means "unmeasured" ie not a distinct number of notes. When we see slashes then we try to interpret these as 8s, 16s, 32nds etc. However this is a minefield! The Donizetti, Verdi and Dvorak excerpts in the film show that composers used different conventions, and were also inconsistent themselves (particularly the Dvorak example). The italian composers tended to write slashes rather than trrr and often we play unmeasured rolls because the mathematical number of notes is impossible. What is interesting here is that Beethoven is normally extremely precise about his use of these notations. And they all work without exception except for the printed one at the end of this piece. You are right, often we have to use common sense and not be rigid. The point is that with Beethoven, the rhythmic and unmeasured stuff all works, and sounds musical too. Win Win!
@bigodineo I agree with what you are suggesting. A lot of people have always used common sense and interepreted this simply as a "normal" roll. However there was (and still is!) a sizeable number of players and condcutors who see what is printed and think that they must attempt to play literally what they see. Some of them also think (hope?) that it is a deliberate and flamboyant intentional effect by Beethoven, precisely because the notation is so unusual. But when one looks more widely at Beethoven, everything he writes makes complete sense and is playable, which is why many people thought that this must be mistake, which we now have confirmation of
OK, OK, but I cannot think of a reading of the 5th symphony in which this anomaly was taken literally. Now you have hooked me into a "performance research" mode. I'll never forgive you.
Can you, perhaps, direct us to any of the readings that attempt an interpretation of this quirky oversight?
Well... there are. Cleveland Orchestra / Dohnanyi. I wouldn't have bothered to make this video if this wasn't an issue! You probably aren't aware of it because it often isn't very clear to hear even if a player makes a huge effort to do something. Any timpanist will tell you that there is still controversy about this bar. There are still many discussions including vigorous debate on Facebook forums and it is being perpetuated and taught to young players in some colleges because of "tradition" and a scepticism of "academics"..... It seems there are still people who do not want to accept the clear conclusions of the Baerenreiter edition, plus musical logic....
ua-cam.com/video/IaUhHH__pB8/v-deo.html
There it is. And it isn't very audible, except the bang on the end....
And this one. Chamber Orchestra of Europe with Harnoncourt. open.spotify.com/album/7rlxqGPPD528fqY8YC9ivh
@@adrianbending1 I have this recording and never noticed it.
I don't subscribe to Spotify but I assume it is the same recording as the Teldec one with quite brisk tempi and a mixture of historical and modern instruments.
what is the source for the Daniel Speer example at 6:27?
There's an article "Timpani parts from German Baroque Music" from 1999. It was published in 'Early Music' by OUP
Indeed, a video about nothing.
You should also consider the strong possibility of performances speeds slower than what we hear today.
And you should consider that the earth is not flat.
Because this is just hogwash of the same kind.
@@Quotenwagnerianer can you back up your view with some evidence?
@@petertyrrell3391 ua-cam.com/video/D9hC-_YIALA/v-deo.html
Liszt Pupils play Beethoven.
I rest my case.
Stop listening to Wim and his wholebeat nonsense. The guy is nuts.
@@Quotenwagnerianer @petertyrell3391 please can you not discuss single beat vs whole beat theory on here? There are plenty of other places to do that. This video has nothing to do with that debate. Thank you very much
The back ground music is too loud.
ua-cam.com/video/RTM6o1afUxM/v-deo.htmlsi=DKDzDES0NoZ4ySOL
Wim solved this. Read at half tempo and that is performable just fine.
It was never half tempo. We literally have written evidence that they used metronomes the same way we do.
Wim solved nothing. Wim is the musical equivalent of a flat-earther.
@@Quotenwagnerianer interesting points from you, @scarf550 and @tamirlyn but I don't want this video to involve discussion about single or whole beat. That is a discussion for somewhere else!