Beethoven's Science of Logic
Kyiv, December 2020 - June 2021
Project coordinator

The lecture series by composer and musicologist Mykola Kovalinas, marking the 250th Anniversary of the Birth of Ludwig van Beethoven.

This project is an unmistakable tribute to the greatest of the great — the Viennese classic whose work shaped the course of European musical civilization and continues to influence how we perceive music a quarter of a millennium later.

The series proposes a demanding conversation. Yet this approach closely follows Beethoven's own understanding of the "beautiful as complex." These lectures focus on the musical beauty, on the purely musical in Beethoven's music. Paradoxically, all six lectures were planned without the use of actual sound or audio examples. Likewise, the series largely avoids conventional historical or biographical narratives such as “born–studied–worked–fell ill–died.”

Instead, the lectures offer a "purely musical" discussion — professional in nature — that concentrates on sounds and their relationships, or, more precisely, on notes and their relationships. 

It should come as no surprise that all six lectures focus almost exclusively on Beethoven's sonata form. As August Halm aptly noted: "Mozart may have said more refined and beautiful things through sonata form than Beethoven, but for Beethoven, sonata form was never merely a ‘pretext.'”

• Lecture 1: “The ‘Early’ Beethoven”

• Lecture 2: “I Know Nothing Better Than the Appassionata…”

• Lecture 3: “Read Shakespeare's ‘The Tempest'!”

• Lecture 4: On the Hypercycles of a Hyper-Composer

• Lecture 5: The ‘Late’ and the ‘Last’ Beethoven

• Lecture 6: Beethoven — the First! or The Revolution of Sonata Form

More info: https://www.kcmd.eu/beethoven