The First Four Notes: Beethoven's Fifth and the Human Imagination (35 page)

Accidentally recapitulating a Hegelian model of progressive German music history,
Murphy was inspired to arrange Beethoven by an arrangement of J. S. Bach. In 1972,
a fleeting British studio group called Apollo 100 had scored an American hit with
a pop-flavored version of Bach’s “Jesu, Joy of Man’s Desiring.”
⁵⁴
Murphy worked up a demo of a disco Beethoven’s Fifth
that convinced a short-lived label called Private Stock Records to sign on to the
project. (Private Stock’s biggest successes had been Frankie Valli solo albums, but
the label also cornered the market on unlikely dance records: another 1976 release
was
Bicentennial Gold
, an album of disco versions of American patriotic songs like “The Marines’ Hymn”
and “You’re a Grand Old Flag.”)
⁵⁵

“A Fifth of Beethoven,” credited to “Walter Murphy and the Big Apple Band,” reached
the top of the
Billboard
singles chart in October 1976.
⁵⁶
(The “Band” was a label-imposed fiction that irked Murphy, who noted, “I wrote the
song, arranged it, played most of the parts; it was basically my own doing”
⁵⁷
—apparently taking the Fifth’s motive as, essentially, common property.) The acerbic
rock critic Robert Christgau admitted that the track was “great schlock, transcendent
schlock even,”
⁵⁸
but none of Murphy’s subsequent classical-disco experiments ever approached its success.
(As if to amplify its novelty aspects, it was knocked out of the number one spot by
radio DJ Rick Dees’s “Disco Duck.”) That didn’t stop producer Robert Stigwood from
licensing the track for the soundtrack to his movie project,
Saturday Night Fever
. “A Fifth of Beethoven” was accorded prime placement in the film, accompanying Tony
Manero (John Travolta) and his coterie as we see them enter the 2001 Odyssey club
like a prince and his retinue. Again, the song functions as an entrée into the world
of disco by way of the most common entrée into classical music. For all its opportunistic
sheen, “A Fifth of Beethoven” transcended mere novelty by deftly averaging a host
of cultural vectors: inside and outside, black and white, gay and straight, art and
commerce, eternal and ephemeral.
⁵⁹

Musically, “A Fifth of Beethoven” domesticates the Fifth Symphony while subverting
its accumulated history. Murphy changes the meter from 2/4 to 4/4; the three eighth
notes become three sixteenth notes, the entire anacrusis falling within a single beat,
rather than across the center of the original’s ambiguously fast
two-beat bar. This makes the fourth note of the motive proportionally longer, almost
like a fermata every time, but the continuing steady changes of harmony leave no doubt
as to the underlying grid of time. After a somewhat faithful rendition of the original’s
first paragraph, Beethoven’s contribution is boiled down to merely the four-note riff,
punctuating sections that venture ever further from the symphony’s material.

The only real vestige of Beethoven’s ambiguity is in the opening, a fairly literal
quote of the first five bars, but the context mitigates that original disorientation;
“A Fifth of Beethoven” both plays upon and depends on the Fifth Symphony’s celebrity.
With the same passage with which Beethoven sought to jolt and confuse listeners, Murphy
draws them into comfortable familiarity. Those inclined to dance will wait through
the opening because it’s Beethoven; those inclined toward Beethoven will, maybe, stay
through the dance because it’s Beethoven.

Much of the effectiveness of “A Fifth of Beethoven” vis-à-vis Beethoven’s original
derives from how much the disco sound, with its swooping strings and hypnotically
incessant beat, already matches the Romantic descriptions of the Fifth Symphony that
would become music-appreciation boilerplate: transcendence, otherworldliness. (English
critic Richard Dyer once wrote of how disco creates a Hoffmann-like “ ‘escape’ from
the confines of popular song into ecstasy.”
⁶⁰
) The seeming juxtaposition of high and low is an illusion, even a ruse; disco and
Beethoven are revealed as long-lost cousins. One of the cousins just happens to be
gay.

In much the same vein as avowals of an African ancestor for Beethoven, there have
been periodic speculations that Beethoven was a deeply closeted homosexual. The most
famous claim was made by psychoanalysts Editha and Richard Sterba in their 1954 analysis
Beethoven and His Nephew
, citing Beethoven’s repeated self-sabotage of his relationships with women, his unhealthily
intense obsession with his nephew, even the cross-dressing at
the center of the plot of
Fidelio
.
⁶¹
The claim is most assuredly questionable. “A Fifth of Beethoven” is much more shrewd
in its appropriation: rather than Beethoven himself, it is Beethoven’s music that
is conscripted into gay culture, polishing another facet of the Fifth’s universality.
In the words of Philip Brett and Elizabeth Wood, it was in “A Fifth of Beethoven”
that “the opening of Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony, that quintessential model of heroic
masculinity, met its gay destiny.”
⁶²

The Fifth also fulfilled its black destiny by gaining a place, via “A Fifth of Beethoven,”
in hip-hop and R&B. The VHB—the Vintertainment House Band, the production team for
Vincent Davis’s Brooklyn-based Vintertainment Records, which featured the influential
DJ Chuck Chillout—produced a 1984 hip-hop adaptation, “Beethoven’s Fifth (Street)
Symphony,” that relied heavily on Murphy’s framework. (And if “A Fifth of Beethoven”
counted on the listener to remember the actual Fifth, “Beethoven’s Fifth (Street)
Symphony” alters the source material in a way that sounds like the musicians themselves
were trying to remember how the piece goes.)

The Fifth has been sampled, looped, and layered into other songs’ backing tracks.
The music could lend weight, either ironic (the British rap group Gunshot used the
opening to kick off their debut single, “Battle Creek Brawl,” in suitably imposing
style) or earnest (producer Antoine Clamaran, under the name Omega, had a French club
hit with “Dreaming of a Better World,” making a transition in the middle of the song
with a swath of the Fifth, much as another DJ might use a sampled drum break). “A
Fifth of Beethoven” specifically could signify both sophistication and retro connoisseurship,
as when the rapper A+ (Andre Levins) used Murphy’s version as the foundation of his
1999 single “Enjoy Yourself,” a night-out boast that updates Tony Manero’s entrance
into the 2001 Odyssey for a hip-hop generation.

But as remixed culture evolved into something more fluid, the disco Fifth found a
niche in which the symphony’s more deep-rooted celebrity could also be acknowledged:
an ironic counterpoint of history and parallel musical tradition. A pair of related
dance tracks from the vibrant mash-up community that sprung up in San Francisco in
the 2000s made especially trenchant commentary: first the DJs Adrian & Mysterious
D mixed the Fifth and Kanye West’s 2005 single “Gold Digger”; in tribute to that track’s
popularity, fellow DJ Party Ben worked the Fifth into a more elaborate collage built
around Kanye’s “Love Lock-down.” Beethoven’s monumentality made fluent combination
with Kanye, a rapper and producer whose musical ambition and self-regard (he once
appeared on the cover of
Rolling Stone
as Jesus in a crown of thorns)
⁶³
might well be called Beethovenian. The grandeur suits him.

Hip-hop artist Bonita “D’Mite” Armah used the Fifth’s theme as a backing for his 2007
single “Read a Book,” which recast basic self-improvement advice—brush your teeth,
take care of your kids, invest in real estate—as a full-on, thumping crunk anthem,
redolent with profanity (“read a muh’fuckin’ book”). Satire with an edge that fine
was bound to offend, especially after Black Entertainment Television turned the song
into an animated short that showcased seemingly every negative hip-hop stereotype
extant; a crowd five hundred strong protested outside the home of BET’s chairperson.
⁶⁴
But Beethoven’s presence was one key to Armah’s intent, to parody a style that had
grown so focused on style that any content would fit. “People tell me all the time,
‘You know, I’m thrown off by how ridiculous the song is,’ ”Armah said. “I was like,
yes, it’s ridiculous, isn’t it? It shows kind of where we’ve gone as a culture, and
as an art.”
⁶⁵

It was the brilliantly edgy Irish band A House that had, perhaps, the best take on
pop Beethoven, with their 1992 single “Endless Art.” The verses—lists of deceased
artists, writers, and
musicians, often cited with their birth and death dates—lead into the chorus, built
on a sample of the first movement of the Fifth: “All dead, yet still alive.”
⁶⁶

“
HOW DIFFERENT
life must have been before the tape-recorder. Fine things evaporated like rain drops.
Nowadays, even rubbish has a chance of immortality. That is progress indeed.”

The words of Stephen, a music critic, “dictating into the latest Japanese device”
in Peter Ustinov’s play
Beethoven’s Tenth
. Later, Beethoven himself shows up at Stephen’s house (knocking on the door in predictable
rhythm) and, after being outfitted with a hearing aid, spends three days listening
to his own works—many for the first time—via Stephen’s record collection. Beethoven
notes the productive virtue of his shelved expanse of vinyl: “From there to there,”
he boasts.
⁶⁷

Beethoven’s Fifth had been a soundtrack for the recording industry’s technological
milestones—the 1910 Fifth by Friedrich Kark and the Odeon-Orchester had been the first
complete symphony put on record, while RCA Victor had introduced the long-playing
record with the Philadelphia Orchestra playing the Fifth, conducted by Leopold Stokowski—but,
with the advent of the LP era, Beethoven’s Fifth itself could make the pitch, and
cheaply. In 1940, for example, the Southern California Gas Company began sponsoring
nightly programs of classical music on radio station KFAC; a report in
Public Utilities Fortnightly
explained the rationale: “The theory: That people who like classical music are mostly
nice people, who like nice things, have nice homes, constitute a sort of upper crust
to the community pie—and therefore should be the folks to talk about the latest appliances.”
⁶⁸

The programs actually exceeded that demographic, drawing a cross-section that would
be any marketer’s dream. “The listening audience is large, includes all population
and economic groups,
commands attention longer than any other form of advertising, and gets close to its
audience, as a very personal thing,” the report noted. “As a friend-maker, it is in
its own class.”
⁶⁹

But, with the advent of rock-and-roll, Beethoven-as-pitchman could go back to courting
that theoretical, upper-crust (or upper-crust-aspiring) audience. Thus, for instance,
Orson Welles—from 1978 until 1981, the television spokesperson for the California
winemaker Paul Masson—was, in one ad, discovered by the camera listening to Beethoven’s
Fifth Symphony on the stereo:

In theory, that was the place of Beethoven’s Fifth in advertising—as a kind of underhanded
appeal to snobbery, a shorthand for good taste. In practice, though, it was the Fifth’s
sheer recognizability that won out.

The strength of wartime V-for-Victory associations initially put a damper on the Fifth’s
mass-media advertising presence. In the early 1950s, the fledgling jingle-writing
team of Bobby Cassotto (who would later adopt the stage name Bobby Darin) and Don
Kirshner (who would later produce the Monkees) had used the opening of the Fifth Symphony
as the basis of a radio ad for a German airline; not surprisingly, the pitch was rejected.
⁷¹
By the 1970s, though, an ad for the pain reliever Vanquish could successfully commercialize
the war, with the Fifth ringing out as a construction worker flashed the V sign to
indicate the defeat of his headache. (Churchill might have demurred, but Sir Thomas
Beecham would have been proud.)

A 1990 television spot for Nike shoes, starring NBA center David Robinson, used a
nifty remix of the Fifth to set up Robinson’s dig at fellow Nike spokesman Bo Jackson:
“Bo may know Diddley, but Mr. Robinson knows
Beethoven
.” It was a widespread intelligence, and one that became the Fifth’s main selling
point—what better way to drill a name or a product or a slogan into the customer’s
head than to leash it to a tune that seemingly everybody already knew?

The association could be positive—as in an Italian television commercial for the cleaner
Vim (“vi-vi-vi-Vim”)—or negative, as in a Swedish radio commercial for Nicorette gum,
starring a choir coughing out the Fifth. Then there was Hyundai’s 2007 “Big Duh” campaign,
in which the glossy poetry-in-motion images of automobiles standard to such commercials
were backed by famous songs, “remixed” into a cappella renditions consisting solely
of the word “duh”—“based on the idea that it’s a no-brainer to pick a Hyundai,” according
to Jeff Goodby, chairman and chief creative officer of Goodby, Silverstein & Partners,
who came up with the ads. Among the songs was, perhaps inevitably, the Fifth Symphony.
“Beethoven would be rolling over in his grave,” reported
Advertising Age
magazine.
⁷²
Nevertheless, the campaign “earned the highest ranking for consumer recall,” according
to the advertising analysts IAG Research.
⁷³
The
quartus paeon
still works.