The First Four Notes: Beethoven's Fifth and the Human Imagination (36 page)

The Fifth Symphony also became a calling card for the composer, especially in Japan,
where Beethoven himself (or a reasonable facsimile thereof) was often pressed into
advertising service. In a 2006 commercial for Tokyo Gas, a Japanese Beethoven bursts
out of an armoire, announcing himself by singing the first four notes of the Fifth.
(After cajoling the armoire’s owner into letting him use the shower, and learning
he can simultaneously wash his clothes without losing hot water—thanks to Tokyo Gas
and its new “Eco-Jozu” water heater—Beethoven runs to the
piano, clad in a towel, shampoo in his hair, and pounds out the motive in triumph.)

A commercial for NewTouch Sugomen, a line of frozen noodle bowls manufactured by the
Yamadai corporation, showed Beethoven enjoying the product in question in rhythm—slurp,
slurp, slurp, sluuurrrrp. Beethoven expressing his satisfaction by shouting “
Unmei
” (Fate), the popular Japanese name for the Fifth, but also aurally close to “
umai
”—“excellent.”
⁷⁴

In South America, the advertising agency W/Brasil ingeniously used the motive to hint
at Beethoven’s presence as part of a television commercial for the French-based media/electronics
retailer Fnac: an overhead shot showed a customer flipping through a rack of compact
discs, the plastic cases clacking in the Fifth’s opening rhythm, until the desired
Beethoven album is located and retrieved. (The campaign won a 2003 Gold CLIO award.)

The Fifth could even stand in for the customer rather than Beethoven, at least over
the phone. In 1986, composers and recording engineers Mitch and Ira Yuspeh produced
and marketed “Crazy Calls,” songs in various styles with lyrics designed to work as
outgoing messages on tape-based telephone answering machines. Promoting the collection
through television commercials, the brothers sold over a million cassettes. The message
utilizing the Fifth Symphony’s opening theme was probably the best-known of the set.
“Nobody home,” it sang, “nobody home.”

IN THE EARLY
1980s, chipmaker General Instrument released the AY-3–1350, an integrated circuit
capable of providing synthesized tunes for “toys, musical boxes, and doorchimes” (the
latter especially)—among the twenty-five preprogrammed “popular and classical tunes
chosen for their international acceptance” were Beethoven’s Fifth and Ninth Symphonies.
(Also included were the Marseillaise, the “William Tell” Overture, and the theme from
Star Wars
.)
⁷⁵
Hobbyists soon figured out how to wire an AY-3–1350 to an existing phone, creating
the first Beethoven’s Fifth ringtone.
⁷⁶

Beginning in 1996, when the Japanese telecom company NTT DoCoMo released the Digital
Mova N103 Hyper, the first cell phone preprogrammed with multiple melodic ringtones,
the notion of a phone call announced by Beethoven’s Fifth really began to seep into
cultural consciousness. In reality, both “Für Elise” and the “Ode to Joy” (the latter
was programmed into phones supplied by the organizers of the 1998 Nagano Olympic games)
seemed to be more common. But Beethoven’s Fifth became a common reference for writing
about the possibility of a classical ringtone. (After all, the original already
sounds
like a ringtone.)

As early as 2000, the prevalence of Beethoven’s Fifth as a ringtone, or, more to the
point, the prevalence of the
idea
of Beethoven’s Fifth as a ringtone, was enough for
InfoWorld
editor-at-large Dan Briody to include it in the second of a list of ersatz-Mosaic
cell-phone commandments. “Thou shalt not set thy ringer to play
La Cucaracha
every time thy phone rings,” he preached. “Or Beethoven’s
Fifth
, or the Bee Gees, or any other annoying melody.”
⁷⁷
(Was it the mere translation into ringtone that made the melody annoying? Briody’s
placement corresponded to either the prohibition against worshipping graven images
or the misuse of the Lord’s name, depending on whether one adopts a Talmudic or Augustinian
numeration.)

But as the technology advanced to the point of sampled, not synthesized, ringtones,
popular music began to dominate the market. Where Beethoven’s Fifth
did
become enormously popular as a ringtone is in the universe of mass-market fiction.
Instantly familiar and unsusceptible to cultural obsolescence, the Fifth fairly rings
off the hook in such writing. Pick up a thriller, mystery, or romance novel at your
local airport, and
chances are, if a cell phone rings during the story, it will ring Beethoven’s Fifth.

To trace the symbolism of these fictional ringtones is to revisit familiar contexts
for Beethoven’s Fifth, and Beethoven’s reputation in general. Sometimes it hints at
a more privileged path through life; in Christopher Reich’s 2002 thriller
The First Billion
, Hans-Uli Brunner, the Swiss Minister of Justice, receives an untimely interruption
on the links, the melodic content an indication of his class:

With the advent of technology that allows multiple ringtones, tailored to particular
incoming callers, Schindler’s fate-knocking-at-the-door story again surfaces. For
example, disillusioned political wife Helene Zaharis in Beth Harbison’s 2007
Shoe Addicts Anonymous
programs political calls to ring “with the ominous opening of Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony.”
⁷⁹
Parents are often the symbolized authority, as in Caroline Cooney’s
Hit the Road
, in which the sixteen-year-old Brit embarks on an illegal road trip: “For her mother’s
ring, Brit had chosen the Beethoven’s Fifth theme, that ominous one: dum dum dum daaaaah.”
⁸⁰
(In the 2007
Rear-Window
-for-teens movie thriller
Disturbia
, the girl-next-door Ashley similarly has the Fifth to warn her of a maternal call.)
One can even find the American death-knocking variant, as in E. R. Webb’s Christian-inspirational
serial-killer novel
Gemini’s Cross
, as part of the usual cat-and-mouse game:

Jonathan Kellerman, in his 2005 detective novel
Rage
, uses the Fifth to hint at a character’s Beethovenian outsider gruffness:

Then there is the Fifth as an affectation to be mocked. In Linda Ladd’s
Die Smiling
, detective Clare Morgan considers the Fifth to reflect poorly on her partner, Bud
Davis (“he’s pretentious sometimes that way”).
⁸³
On the other hand, in Christine McGuire’s serial-killer mystery
Until Judgment Day
, DA investigator Donna Escalante’s ringtone impresses sheriff’s chief of detectives
James Miller, echoing the turn-of-the-century use of the symphony as a signal of feminine
refinement—or perhaps passion:

And sometimes, fictional phones ring out the Fifth simply as a play on the convenience
of recognizability, as with Moxy Maxwell, the stubborn ten-year-old heroine of Peggy
Gifford’s series of children’s books.

If Beethoven’s Fifth stops after the first two notes, is it still Beethoven’s Fifth?
Moxy does not have time for your trumped-up pop koans. But the joke only works if
the tune is something everybody knows, once again both reinforcing and perpetuating
the ubiquity of the Fifth Symphony’s iconic opening. The fictional progress of the
Beethoven ringtone, then, encapsulates the progress of the symphony itself in Western
culture: from an exotic novelty, to a prepackaged interpretive meme, to a neutered,
omnipresent cultural artifact.

THE OPENING
of Beethoven’s Fifth had become a non-Kantian thing-in-itself, a self-sufficient
cultural push-button. Its very familiarity could work against it. In Anthony Burgess’s
1962 novel
A Clockwork Orange
, the Pavlovian aversion treatment by which the delinquent Alex is “cured” of his
violent tendencies, the Ludovico Treatment, included the Fifth Symphony at its center,
accompanying a film of Nazi brutality. A decade later, for the film adaptation, director
Stanley Kubrick cast the Fifth aside in favor of the Ninth; only the Fifth’s opening
motive remained, in the form of the doorbell to the home of the writer Mr. Alexander,
attacked by Alex and his gang—a grim fate rendered as a grim pun.
⁸⁶

Kubrick’s version of
A Clockwork Orange
was stylistically indebted to Toshio Matsumoto’s 1969 film
Bara no Soretsu
(
Funeral Parade of Roses
), a hallucinatory, nonlinear modernization of
Oedipus Rex
set in Tokyo’s gay underground.
⁸⁷
The movie also featured a cameo by the Fifth, a joke at both the Fifth’s and the
film’s own avant-garde expense. A conversation turns to a movie that Eddie, the transvestite
main character, has been acting in, a movie that may very well be
Bara no Soretsu
itself. Someone asks if the movie is interesting. “I’m not sure,” Eddie replies.
“It’s unique, though”—and Beethoven’s opening phrases sound, as a title card informs
the audience:
Awaiting your esteemed applause!

Even that was more pointed than the Fifth’s appearance in the opening scenes of Clara
Law’s 2000 film
The Goddess of 1967
; we see glimpses of the life of a young Japanese man as he carries on an Internet
negotiation for the purchase of a Citroën DS automobile—the “Goddess” (
déesse
) of the title.
⁸⁸
Each shot produces a jump cut on the soundtrack, each a different genre and mood—the
Fifth’s opening turns up in the middle, neither portentous nor ironic, just one of
a host of fragments and objects out of which a modern identity is constructed.

The tendency of such digital interconnectedness, while at the same time making the
entire corpus of culture more and more immediately accessible, was to encourage consumption
of information in more and more concentrated packets. Matt Wand, a cofounder of the
British avant-garde sound collage group Stock, Hausen & Walkman, summarized the aesthetic:
“MP3 is a codec designed to remove ‘redundant’ audio information,
to make a sound file 5 to 10 times smaller, in effect to create ‘MUSIC-lite’—a kind
of diet music in which all the sound information our ears supposedly don’t need to
hear is removed.… [H]ow much better would it be if the software truly stripped out
all the redundant material, Beethoven’s 5th reduced down to its first 4 notes, a repetitive
dance hit cut right down to the one repeating loop that is its main constituent?”
⁸⁹

In a 2005 episode of
The Simpsons
, Marge Simpson spearheads the construction of a new Frank Gehry–designed concert
hall in Springfield—but at the opening concert, the entire audience gets up to leave
after the first five bars of the Fifth. “We’ve already heard the duh-duh-duh-dum,”
Chief Wiggum explains. “The rest is just filler.”
⁹⁰

T
HEODOR
W. A
DORNO
saw it all coming. In 1945, he wrote: “There exists today a tendency to listen to
Beethoven’s Fifth as if it were a set of quotations from Beethoven’s Fifth.”
⁹¹

At the time, Adorno was living in exile in Los Angeles, California. A native of Frankfurt,
he had fled the Nazis in 1934, first to England, then to America, having been invited
by his colleague Max Horkheimer to rejoin the Institute for Social Research, the think
tank that had employed both of them back in Germany; the Institute had followed Horkheimer
to New York.

Adorno’s insight into the Fifth’s fragmentation was a by-product of another American
invitation. Shortly after his arrival, Adorno was recruited into a Rockefeller-sponsored
study of mass media, centered at Princeton, and known as the Radio Project. He was
already interested in radio and recordings, in the way it affected how people listened
to and understood music, the way it promoted what he called “regressive listening”:
“Not only do the listening subjects lose, along with freedom of choice and responsibility,
the capacity for conscious perception of music, which was from time immemorial confined
to a
narrow group, but they stubbornly reject the possibility of such perception.” And,
foreshadowing his diagnosis about the Fifth: “They fluctuate between comprehensive
forgetting and sudden dives into recognition.”
⁹²
Music over the radio, to Adorno, was all sensuality and no structure. (He once wondered
whether “Beethoven actually
wanted
to go deaf—because he had already had a taste of the sensuous side of music as it
is blared from loudspeakers today.”
⁹³
)