Beethoven Dada

Reflecting on our brief thought bubble at the beginning of class today, apparently "sometime around 1920, the German composer Stefan Wolpe, then eighteen years old, organized a Dada provocation in Berlin, in which he set up eight Victrolas on a stage, placed on each of them a recording of Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony, and had a team of confederates play the records at different speeds." 

In a modern take on this, Alex Ross of the New Yorker "used the program Audacity to slow down and speed up the audio files, following advice from several Victrola experts as to what range of speeds was then available... [he then] layered eight distinct Beethoven files in GarageBand. The end result, immortalized in the YouTube video [in the article], is far from being conventionally beautiful, but no one can deny that it provides a fresh perspective on a familiar work."

https://www.newyorker.com/culture/culture-desk/beethoven-dada

-Joud T.