The past few days I’ve been listening to several piano sonatas. It turns out that Beethoven wasn’t really writing these for him (or even other artists) to play in public concerts. Instead, his business model was that he was making money by selling the sheet music for these pieces. People would buy the sheet music to learn the pieces and play them for their family and friends in their own homes.

I found this fascinating because of course then the limiting factor is that the pieces would need to be accessible to amateur musicians. While this is kind of a cool constraint (can you write something groundbreaking that is also going to sell to the regular public and that someone who’d studied piano for just a few years could play?) later in his life Beethoven decided to dispense with that. I guess he was well known enough that he wrote more of what he wanted, and the later piano pieces are more for professional musician/concert hall situations.

In general, I find it intriguing how working artists balance the need to support themselves financially with creating things that they find interesting. Through history, even artists who have been independently wealthy, or had very open-minded patrons, were often still interested in having an audience. So you can’t go completely off the deep end. Or at least not for everything. And people have to be capable of performing what you produce.

I was thinking of this over the weekend when my church choir premiered the last of seven works we commissioned from Kim André Arnesen. While we are a fairly decent church choir, it is still a constraint to write something that a church choir can sing. These pieces have also been performed, as it were, for people who are just there for Sunday services, not people who’ve bought tickets to an avant-garde performance and were prepared for whatever they were getting in to. But within those constraints he did some interesting things with melodies and particularly the chosen lyrics (he worked closely with someone who helped reinterpret familiar stories in modern poetic language). It’s been a fascinating experience.

Anyway, speaking of accessible music, on Friday night a few of us went to Disney on Ice. This particular show was all Frozen and Encanto music. The 5-year-old was slightly disappointed that there was no Moana, but it was still fun! (I like trying to match up some Lin-Manuel Miranda musical moments from Encanto and Hamilton…). Yesterday a few of us also went out to run around in the very gusty wind. For a while the forecast was calling for a huge snowstorm on Thursday but that seems to have disappeared. It will be cold this week and then maybe that will be about the end of winter. We can hope…

Photo: Olaf snow cone, in portrait mode