Beethoven the Improviser – Lecture by Brian Felix

UNC Asheville Chair and Associate Professor of Music Brian Felix will give a free public lecture, Beethoven the Improviser, at 7 p.m. on Tuesday, Jan. 28, in Karpen Hall, Laurel Forum. This talk is part of the university’s Department of Music Lecture Series, which is funded by the Dan Lucas Memorial Fund.

Lecture Description

As with most piano virtuosos who were active during the 18th and early-19th centuries, Ludwig van Beethoven was a masterful improviser. This ability, to which he dedicated countless hours of practice, was central to his success as a working musician. While he was making a name for himself in Vienna during the 1790s, it was his skill as an improviser, not as a composer, for which he first garnered acclaim. Unfortunately for modern listeners, there was no audio recording technology in Beethoven’s time, so we cannot hear what he actually sounded like while improvising.

Scholars agree that there was a close link between Beethoven’s improvisations and compositions, with the latter often representing a crystallized version of the former. In particular, his five piano concertos provide clues as to Beethoven’s improvisational practice, as those pieces were intended to showcase the virtuosity and extemporizations of the soloist, who was, for the first four concertos, Beethoven himself. In this presentation, Felix will explore improvisation as a crucial component of Beethoven’s musical life and, using Beethoven’s piano concertos, will uncover certain aural traits of “Beethoven the Improviser.”

Brian Felix Bio

Brian Felix is an associate professor and chair of the Music Department at UNC Asheville, where he teaches classes on jazz theory and improvisation, jazz history, keyboard skills, music business, the Beatles and the Grateful Dead. Felix holds a B.A. in music from Rutgers College, an M.M. degree in jazz performance from DePaul University and a DMA in Jazz Performance from the University of Illinois at Urbana/Champaign. His research interests include jazz and improvised musics, the Grateful Dead and the Beatles. His work has been published in the journal, Jazz Perspectives, and he is the co-author of Interactive Listening: A New Approach to Music. Felix is also a professional keyboardist—he was co-leader of OM Trio, an acclaimed jazz-rock group that toured internationally between 1999-2004.  He continues to perform regularly in the Asheville, N.C. area with his organ jazz group, Fly Casual, the electric Herbie Hancock tribute group, Flood and other various projects.
https://brianfelix.com
https://www.unca.edu/person/brian-felix

Upcoming Lectures in this Series

Feb. 25 – “It is always three o’clock in the morning”Dowland, Britten, Melancholy, Death – Lecture by Andy Jurik, adjunct lecturer in music, UNC Asheville, and co-director of the Asheville Classical Guitar Society, 7 p.m., Karpen Hall, Laurel Forum.

March 24 – From Songsters to Songbirds: Notes on Singing as Labor in the American 20th Century – Lecture Series Keynote by Gabriel Solis, professor of musicology, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 7 p.m., Karpen Hall, Laurel Forum.

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