Get the latest tech news
A secret code may have been hiding in Beethoven's manuscripts
A violinist believes he has discovered a previously unknown system of dynamics in Beethoven’s original manuscripts.
To this day, the piece is known for the slowly unfolding, baffled joy of its third movement, where the music seems to trace the shuffling steps of an invalid breathing fresh air for the first time in weeks. Taken together, Kitchen argued, these marks amount to “living instructions from one virtuoso performer to another,” an elaborate hidden language conveying new levels of expression—and thus emotion—in Beethoven’s music that had been lost for centuries. As to why the marks never made it into the composer’s printed scores, Yudkin thinks Beethoven may have accepted that his large personal vocabulary of symbols and abbreviations wouldn’t be easily deciphered by others.
Or read this on Hacker News
