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In March 2020, I was commissioned by The Apollo Chamber Players to write a work for Electric Violin and String Quartet for their Beethoven 250th Celebration Program. I saw this as a challenge that fits right in with my approach to composition. Many different genres of music have influenced my composing style, and many times those genres overlap in a single work. Not purposeful by technical design but by what feels right for me and my emotional state at that specific time.
With this work, I wanted to find, through my compositional voice, a way to speak to the current social and cultural climate we now face. I see a commonality with Beethoven, who, as a composer, was never fully understood during his life. He lived during the Age of Enlightenment (American Revolution, French Revolution), and those tumultuous times shaped his approach to life and conversely, his musical purpose.
Many thought his music to be quite unorthodox. To use the terminology of today, he was a Liberal in a Conservative world (Vienna). The Conservative audiences did not appreciate his underlining premise of composing provocative music. They felt they were being forced to think what the music was about instead of enjoying a pleasant, entertaining tune as with Haydn and Mozart before him. Beethoven took his audiences on artistic journeys with thematic descriptions using innovative tonalities. This approach to composition became the basis of most composers who followed him and continues to this day. The famous conductor Nikolaus Harnancourt has said in part of Beethoven's 5th, "This is not music; it is political agitation." Political Agitation was just one of the motivations that inspired Beethoven to compose. He felt that his musical expression could affect change - Hence my inspiration to write this piece.