I am a researcher within the Performing Arts Medicine Association. I was interested in looking at Beethoven's use of range over time in his piano sonatas. Although several previous studies have looked at the question of how Beethoven's compositions were affected by his hearing loss, the results were far less than conclusive. A study in the British Medical Journal counted the notes in the first movements of the first violin parts of Beethoven's string quartet's by hand. For a number of reasons, I thought it might be better to look at the piano sonatas, including that Beethoven wrote more piano sonatas than he did string quartets and symphonies, so the statistical power would be greater. Counting all of the notes in Beethoven's piano sonatas by hand would be a Herculean task for sure, but fortunately with scores available from the Center for Computer Assisted Humanities and music21 sufficient coding skills would do the job.
Why music21?
In addition to the number of high notes, I was also interested in Beethoven's overall use of range, the average note, average frequency, number of measures with high notes, and in calculating values based on the number of notes, as well as weighting those measures by the duration of notes. The methods available in music21 allow the collection of this data very quickly. To collect the majority of the data I needed from all 103 movements of Beethoven's piano sonatas, count over a quarter million individual notes, and organize the data into sonatas, and separating the data by movement number, takes about 11 minutes.
Some Interesting Findings
Beethoven's use of high notes was lowest around 1800 (for all the graphs below, the colors within the dots represent the Sonata Numbers, going from red to purple from 1-32):
The average frequency of each sonata follows a similar trend:
In general, as there are more notes per measure, there are more high notes per measure. This trend does not hold many of the sonatas written before 1802.
Also, the relationship between the use of high notes, and the average frequency was different between the earlier and later sonatas:
Conclusions
Technology like music21 is an invaluable tool for the empirical study of musicology. Relatively quickly, data gathered can be used to analyze the possible relationships between Beethoven's use of high notes and his overall range, and compare that with what we understand about his hearing loss. These data suggest that Beethoven was significantly affected by his hearing loss, though it seems that sometime around 1802 he developed strategies to cope with his progressing disability.
