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Why Is Beethoven Ineffective

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Beethoven: Denying Deafness Defeat due to Determination Music is everywhere in our current lives. We hear it on the radio, playing in stores, and technology has made it even more accessible, whether from cell phones, laptops, tablets, computers, televisions, and video games. Whether the music is rock, country, hip-hop, metal, or any other musical genre, it should go without saying that music is a key part of our culture and has been for centuries. However, while people today have iTunes, Pandora Radio, and Spotify to get music on demand without leaving the house, a few centuries ago, around the late 18th and early 19th centuries in the Classical era of music, it was only performed live, whether at concerts with over eighty people in a stage filled with thousands of people, or on the street as traveling minstrels to entertain passersby. During the late Classical period, one composer made a name for himself. If Bach was the “poster boy” for the Baroque era of music, then a composer easily associated with the Classical era is Ludwig van Beethoven. …show more content…

When he was eleven years old, he performed on various keyboard instruments, including the organ and harpsichord. Six years later, he visited Vienna, Austria, and he performed for another Classical-era compositional celebrity: Mozart. Mozart said great things of Beethoven and showed that he had great potential. (Forney and Machlis, 174-75) Needless to say, truer words could not have been spoken, which is especially surprising given that he suffered an extremely unfortunate affliction which could have easily ruined his profession: deafness. After his retirement as a performing musician a few years after this affliction, he continued his work as a composer, creating some of his most well-known work in that

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