that thug Beethoven

This article, Beethoven Was a Narcissistic Hooligan, pissed me off enough that I had to say something about it. It is intended to be some sort of scathing criticism of Beethoven and his music, but three paragraphs in I found myself thinking that the author, Dylan Evans, must be a fucking idiot. Now, obviously he is not, but I have to wonder what rarefied air he breathes, what pristine fantasyland he lives in to still be able to say things like this:

Beethoven certainly changed the way that people thought about music, but this change was a change for the worse. From the speculations of Pythagoras about the "music of the spheres" in ancient Greece onwards, most western musicians had agreed that musical beauty was based on a mysterious connection between sound and mathematics, and that this provided music with an objective goal, something that transcended the individual composer's idiosyncrasies and aspired to the universal. Beethoven managed to put an end to this noble tradition by inaugurating a barbaric U-turn away from an other-directed music to an inward-directed, narcissistic focus on the composer himself and his own tortured soul.

Perhaps Mr. Evans has yet to hear that a few philosophers have managed to cast a bit of doubt on idealist metaphysics in the last two thousand plus years. Or maybe the problem is me. Perhaps I like Beethoven because he is a hooligan, and being a hooligan myself I respond strongly to "the joy of madness, bloodlust, and megalomania."

Objective, universal, mathematical, musical perfection my ass.

And as long as I'm bitching...Blogger, as you can probably see from the formatting of this post, is an absolute pain in the fucking ass. I refuse to waste any more of my time trying to fix their shitty handiwork. A pox on your house. Yikhrab baytak!

(update: fixed the formatting...Blogger still sucks)