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1 ♩ = 66
2 ♩ = 96
3 ♩ = 120

Although the subject of this piece is Beethoven’s progressive deafness and its effect upon him, writing it was also an opportunity for me to confront my own hearing loss. This is something that, until recently, I had been trying to ignore – despite its growing influence on how I live and my ability to socialise. In writing the piece, I expected to come face to face with these unavoidable truths and, if I was lucky and open to it, to reach some catharsis. Ultimately, however, I believe music should somehow transcend the person who wrote it: we shouldn’t be thinking of the composer, or the compositional process, when we are listening. So really No. 52 is not about me, or even Beethoven, but what the listener experiences.

The piece is arranged in three movements, each of which progresses from ‘audible’ to ‘inaudible’ via a method of distortion or obfuscation. In the first, a solo cello melody is gradually clouded by tinnitus-like, foggy strings. In the second, a piano – accompanied by the orchestra – is warped by the sound of a sampler keyboard. The final movement consists of four short pieces, each followed by the same music played through a record player. In those moments where some historical reference is required, I have deliberately written music that ‘looks a bit like Beethoven’. However, I have only quoted him directly once – in one bar of the solo viola part (in reference to a viola joke).

My relationship with Beethoven has changed dramatically as a result of writing this piece. I value him even more as a human being and a musical thinker. He seems to have lived bigger and more unrestrained by trivialities and difficulties than I could ever manage. Now I see what it is to live an intense, full life – even if I fall short myself.

^{Programme note © Richard Ayres}

1          Poco sostenuto – Vivace
2          Allegretto
3          Presto – Assai meno presto – Presto –
______Assai meno presto – Presto
4          Allegro con brio

Wagner was only partly right when he called Beethoven’s Seventh ‘the apotheosis of the dance’. It’s even more fundamental than that. Rhythm really is it: the Seventh thrills with Beethoven’s obsessive focus on what he can make from just a few rhythmic cells, which he turns into structural building blocks with maniacal relentlessness.

Rhythm is inescapably the point of the main part of the first movement, whose dotted-rhythm Morse code is drummed out in nearly every bar, just as it’s drilled into our listening consciousness; rhythm is the catalyst for the ever-intensifying machine for mourning of the second movement; the third-movement scherzo is a vertiginous symphonic catapult, a challenge for us to keep up with the pace; and the finale puts a folk tune on rhythmic steroids, creating a churning centripetal force that sucks in the limits of the musical universe along with all of us listening and everyone playing.

But the Seventh does even more than that. This isn’t a piece about revolutionary ideas or heroes, it’s not a spiritual journey from darkness to light, it’s not about humanity’s relationship with nature, and it’s not about a composer showing how he can break through the conventions of previous generations. He’d done all of that – and more – in his previous six symphonies. He addresses the Seventh, not to our brains, but to our bodies. It is a sensory overload that pummels and pounds its way into all of the frequency-receiving parts of our anatomy: not only our ears, but our stomachs, our loins, our limbs, our feet, all of the parts of us that are made to move with and be moved by music.

The Seventh is the symphony as pure visceral experience, a piece that explodes fiercely and violently out of the bounds of the concert hall and into all the vibrating, resonating places of our bodies. We’ll explore how it gets inside the meta-body of the orchestra in our introduction to the symphony: an upbeat not only to a dance, but to an earthy apotheosis of symphonic grooving!

^{Programme note © Tom Service Tom Service presents ‘The Listening Service’, ‘Music Matters’ and other programmes for ±«Óătv Radio 3, and has also presented on ±«Óătv TV. A regular writer for ‘The Guardian’ since 1999, he is also the author of the books ‘Music as Alchemy’ and ‘Thomas Adès: Full of Noises’.}