I was happy to read Timo’s response to David Allen’s article; it put his comments from the article in context, and revealed that he and I have much common ground in how we think about these “response pieces” (I’m not a big fan of the word “sequel”, here). 

Because much of the article focused on my Beethoven/5 Project, of which The Blind Banister is the first fruit, and because my own aspi­ra­tions in embark­ing on the project did not really make it into the piece, I’m happy to have this oppor­tu­nity to clarify a few points. Early in the article, Mr. Allen asks: “Why this, and why now? After all, in an ideal world composers would be allowed to write whatever they please.” And soon after, he boils it down to this: “The core assump­tion is that many, if not most, clas­si­cal concert­go­ers have a built-in distaste toward modern music.” While I certainly cannot speak for every performer or concert program­mer, I can say that that is not my “core assump­tion”, nor my moti­va­tion in solic­it­ing new music that is, somehow, inspired by old music. 

I’ve often felt troubled by the way the clas­si­cal world segre­gates new music from old. Ensem­bles and present­ing orga­ni­za­tions devoted exclu­sively to new music provide a vital service—facilitating the creation and giving bril­liant perfor­mances of new work in a volume that would be impos­si­ble without them. But the notion of “new music” as its own genre, and the atten­dant impli­ca­tion that it lacks a deep connec­tion to music that was written 20, 50, and 200 years ago, is distress­ing to me. It is a notion that flatters neither old nor new music. To my ears, anyway, a truly great perfor­mance of Mozart or Beethoven will always be relevant, but it’s deeply danger­ous to think of them as exem­plars of an art form that died in 1917 after a long illness. And while yes, in an ideal world, composers would be able to write whatever they please, I hardly think that that ideal world would be some sort of vacuum. A piece of music’s rela­tion­ship to the past needn’t be explicit, or admiring, but I have a hard time imag­in­ing that any piece worth listen­ing to would be discon­nected from it. 

So, that was the genesis of Beethoven/5: my desire for everyone involved—composer, performer, and listener—to think of old and new music as existing on the same contin­uum. And why Beethoven specif­i­cally? Because composers have been using him as inspi­ra­tion, source material, and light­ning rod since his death nearly 200 years ago. Schubert’s A Major Piano Sonata (Beethoven Op. 31 no. 1), Mendelssohn’s String Quartet Op. 13 (Op. 132), Schumann’s Fantasy (An die ferne Geliebte), and John Adams’s Absolute Jest (several of the late string quartets) are just the first four examples to occur to me. Given that composers have been wrestling with him for close to two centuries, I thought that asking a diverse and fasci­nat­ing group of composers to think about Beethoven was sure to produce diverse and fasci­nat­ing results. 

That those four works I cited have roots in Beethoven’s music is not debat­able. But equally, those roots are not the reason those pieces are being performed again and again—if they weren’t capti­vat­ing on their own merits, their antecedents wouldn’t make them so. And that is the thinking I’ve applied to Beethoven/5: I want the composers to take the Beethoven concerti as a starting point, and in their first airings, at least, I want them to be heard in that context. But beyond that, I’ve spec­i­fied nothing—I haven’t asked for the works to contain a quota­tion, or resemble the Beethoven in length, or form, or any other partic­u­lar. And I greatly look forward to the day on which I sit in the audience and listen to The Blind Banister played by another pianist, in the context of a completely differ­ent program. The specifics of the commis­sion will no longer matter; the work will have joined several hundred years of concerto reper­toire. And if a composer is in that audience as well, perhaps The Blind Banister will itself provide the germ for a new piece of music. To me, that isn’t inertia, but artistic regen­er­a­tion: a key compo­nent of my ideal world. 

–Jonathan Biss