A conversation with Dean Ball about classical music
With a little AI talk at the end
Dean Ball is one of the sharpest writers and thinkers around about AI. I first encountered him at his Substack, Hyperdimensional. He just completed a brief stint in the White House’s Office of Science and Technology Policy, where he was the primary staff drafter of America’s AI Action Plan. Now he’s returned to blogging and is a Senior Fellow at the Foundation for American Innovation.
Part of what I appreciate about Dean is that he has a worldview deeply influenced by the humanities. In my experience, the most technical thinkers about AI lack the interest and knowledge to think about the cultural impacts of new technology. And many that I follow in the arts world are threatened by AI and spurn it to a fault.
Dean bridges those two worlds in ways that are often illuminating. The first piece I encountered by him, “Measure Up," looks at the history of the piano and its predecessor instruments to highlight the ways that new technology completely change what is possible creatively.
I don’t know what the broader cultural impacts of AI will be. Perhaps, as Dean suggests, we will enter a “Romantic Era” of software, where we begin to ascribe more of an emotional valence to it and see the value of disorder alongside its traditional order.
Honestly, nobody knows what these kind of impacts will look like. What I do know is that I’d like to see more thinkers who take both the technical and the cultural as seriously as he does.
As readers of this blog know, I have been diving deeper into classical music in the last few years. I wrote some general reflections here, and a smaller post about Mozart here.
I wanted to pick Dean’s brain about classical music, as it’s hard to find people who write accessibly about the subject. Thanks to Dean for taking the time to talk to me! We mostly stayed in-the-weeds on music (though I don’t read music, so it doesn’t get too technical), though I had to throw in a question at the end about AI’s impact on the future of music.
Here’s a transcript of our conversation, with much of the music we discussed sprinkled throughout.
Live vs. recorded music
Ben: I've been thinking a lot about the difference between live and recorded music. What's one composer whose music needs to be seen live?
Dean: That's a great question. It all benefits from being seen live in some ways. The obvious answer to this would be Wagner or Mahler. I always hate it when people say that music is cinematic. I don't mean it in the stylistic sense, but in terms of what their enterprise was, especially Wagner, he’s more like a Scorsese than he is like a Bach, right? So those are the obvious ones.
Certainly any opera, particularly if you don't speak the language. It’s very tedious to follow a libretto on recording. So I just give up and I listen to the opera as pure music, which is pleasant enough, don't get me wrong, but it's good to have the translation. And, of course, it involves acting and it’s important to actually see the people.
I would also say religious works like masses, especially if you see it in an actual church. It does depend, the masses post-Beethoven were often too large orchestrally to fit in most churches. But if you see a Bach mass in a church or cathedral, it's really amazing.
And the last one I’d like to say, maybe it’s just me in particular, but piano. Solo piano, really anything with a soloist. There's a certain kind of emotion that you get from the soloist performance. And you can get a better sense of how they're interpreting the music by seeing it.
Ben: Speaking of which, Vikingur Olaffson is coming to my town later this year. Are you a fan of his?
Dean: He's wonderful. He has some really cool recordings of Philip Glass that I actually like.
Ben: I love those.
Dean: That's why those come to mind, Glass is not someone who comes to my mind very often as a favorite composer. But those are really, really cool. If you have the chance to see a great soloist in person, it's very much worth doing.
Ben: Are there any composers or formats (e.g., solo performance) that don't work as well live for you, or maybe disappointed you relative to your expectations?
Dean: [Laughs]. Well, it depends. One thing that I always have, especially if you go to a big concert hall, is that I very frequently want to turn up the volume. I like to listen to music loud. In particular the big romantic symphonies are just so much fun to play really loud.
So that can sometimes be an issue. And of course, you know, there are things that annoy me. I may know right off the bat that I’m not going to like the way a particular conductor deals with a particular moment or transition. Or “I think he's gonna take it too fast or he's gonna have the dynamic somewhat wrong” compared to my Platonic ideal.
Ben: Well, that’s performance-by-performance, right? Not necessarily the live format.
Dean: To go back to your question, there's a lot of moments that don't work unless you see them live. There’s a lot of moments that were intended for a live audience and it's just very, very hard to capture the subtlety.
I think of Haydn, who’s got these sort of jokey intros where he would play the loud noises to get people to shut up. Like that sounds more stilted or weird when you hear it recorded and you don't have context.
I would say, you know, Beethoven introduced these smooth transitions between movements. Like between movements three and four of his Fifth Symphony [sings the transitional notes], but often on a recording it’ll stop and start, which can be obnoxious.
And then, of course, there’s lots in opera. You might not know that there’s a joke happening.
Music is funnier in person, even purely orchestral music.
Ben: That tracks with my experience, too. Although it's funny, part of what I like about seeing live music, including some of those big romantic pieces, is how quiet they get. So it's funny that you want to turn it up because I always find myself turning it up too much when I'm listening on recording, and then turning it down once it gets loud. So being sort of hostage to how quiet it's actually supposed to be sometimes works for me.
Dean: Oh yeah, for sure. One of the best examples of this is if you listen to a version of the Beethoven Violin Concerto with Beethoven's cadenza, which not all of them actually have. But if you listen to it with the Beethoven cadenza, at the very end of the solo, the orchestra comes back in pizzicato, and the soloist is just kind of winding down, and then the strings come in pizzicato, and it's just so cool when you see it. Or like Sibelius 5 is extremely cool in person. And there are subtle moments that are quiet, that you wouldn't quite pick up on.
Even a string quartet. I've gotten jokes in String Quartets that I didn't get from recordings, just because you see some sort of obvious parody. Beethoven does this sometimes too, in one of the big movements in either the 11th or 12th. It has this moment that's almost like it turns into like a march with toy soldiers, and it's just the strangest thing in the world. And get the parody much more in person.
Beethoven
Ben: Speaking of Beethoven, I've read your personal history essay where you talk about Beethoven and Mozart as kind of like the Big Two composers for you. So I’d like to ask you some questions about them. More about Beethoven, because he resonates more for me. I'd also love to hear from you how I can appreciate Mozart more.
But to start with Beethoven. You said at one point that the Diabelli Variations are the key to unlock the rest of his music. Can you expand on that? What piece makes more sense to you after cracking the Diabelli Variations?
Dean: An obscure take of mine! First of all, the Diabelli Variations are, in some sense, the most Beethovenian composition he ever did. There’s an element of humor, an element of spite, an element of “I’m going to show off here,” they’re all shockingly in C Major. He took this one trifling theme from Diabelli, who asked for one variation, and Beethoven did 33.
I say this all the time about Beethoven. The thing that Beethoven taught me, and something I say when I speak to young people about AI policy and writing in general: what you need to understand is that there are $50 bills laying all over the ground and no one notices them. And it is the people with eyes to see the amazing things and eyes to transform them, that are the ones who do really incredible work.
I learned that most viscerally from Beethoven, because Beethoven… he’s almost a minimalist composer, in some ironic sense. He just takes these fragments and builds them up into these grandly architected things, but in a fractal-like way, where it's still just made out of the fragments. And nothing captures that like Diabelli.
It’s like a sample book of all the different ways you can do that. “I'm going to take this descending fifth,” just this one little thing, “and I’m going to take that into a series of variations.” As simple as it can possibly be. He starts with the Diabelli theme, but later he quotes himself, his previous music at various points, he quotes Mozart, right? One of the themes is just Don Giovanni. He quotes Goldberg Variations.
It's just this incredible range, and all out of the simplest parts. And if you really just acquaint yourself with it. On a technical level, how is he doing this? You'll see all of the tricks. It's like little microcosms of all the tricks he's learned throughout his career.
Ben: I'll be honest, because of its density, that's the kind of piece that intimidates me. I've dabbled, but I've never really gone deep on it. It happens to me with a lot of late Beethoven, it's a little intimidating. So how should I approach that work? How should I listen to it, as well as who should I listen to?
Dean: So I would say… no judgements, but do you read music?
Ben: I used to play drums, so I read rhythms well, and I do like watching videos with sheet music, because I can follow along much better. It helps my attention, but I'm missing the stuff that's going on harmonically.
Dean: I mean, Beethoven is 80% rhythm anyway.
Ben: Yup, that’s part of why I like him.
Dean: Absolutely, me too.
I would say that Diabelli took me a long time to come around to. I would suggest listening to other variations of Beethoven first. So, for example, the Eroica Variations, his sort of notes on the Eroica Symphony. Obviously the final movement of the Eroica [Beethoven’s 3rd Symphony], like many Beethoven final movements, is a Theme and Variations.
So that’s a good example. In fact, the apocryphal story, and I think it might actually be true, is that the theme of the final movement of Eroica comes from essentially a rap battle with another pianist. He took their sheet music, the other composer sheet music, and flips it upside down.
That whole story is very amusing and I think some version of it is probably true, because he does just start out with a bass line. And then he invents the theme from the bass line.
He’d been fascinated with that theme for some time. You can find it in some of his folk music sketches. You can find it in Creatures of Prometheus [Beethoven’s only ballet score].
So I’d recommend listening to some of his other piano Theme and Variations works. There’s another really beautiful one in Piano Sonata No. 30, Op. 109, third movement. Another great example from his Late Period.
Ben: A very minor Beethoven piece that I really love, maybe more than it deserves, is his “7 Variations on God Save the King,” the British National Anthem. I get some of what you get from Diabelli, though it’s much simpler. With such a basic theme it’s much harder to miss his tricks.
Dean: That's a good way of putting it, I think you're right about that piece.
Ben: But whose performance should I listen to of the Diabelli Variations?
Dean: Maurizio Pollini is my go to.
Ben: Speaking of piano and different performances, are there any Beethoven piano sonatas or movements that you were lukewarm on until you heard a particular performance?
Dean: Oh, good question. In many ways, I was never that big on Appassionata [Piano Sonata No. 23, Op. 57, one of the most famous] until later. That took a while.
Ben: What unlocked it for you? Did you change or did you hear the right performance?
Dean: Probably both. But I remember when I heard Emil Gilels, I was blown away. That is a masterpiece, it's still my favorite.
If I could only have one complete Piano Sonata Cycle of Beethoven, It would be Igor Levitt, but there's this problem with the Appassionatta. It’s just a thing that happens with Beethoven, especially later in his career when the hearing starts to go. There are some times when music just spills out of the piano. Notes almost comically, slapstick, just spill out of the piano.
I think that most versions of Appassionatta are either too slow and they kind of kill it, or they're just garbled. What Gilels taught me is that it’s heavy metal. That's how it should be played. It should be played like a heavy metal guitar. When you do that, it's like, “oh yeah, that sounds right.”
The piano sonatas, for the most part, I’ve always loved. The thing that I came around to that took me a while, I definitely had to become older for it, was the Late Quartets. Which I think is a very common experience for young fans. They’re intense, they’re complicated, they’re difficult.
At the time of Beethoven's life, the Quartet was viewed as where you did your most sophisticated stuff. The Quartet was the most sophisticated form. The most sophisticated stuff he was doing at every period is basically captured by the quartets.
Ben: I love the early quartets and they’re the peak of his Classical Era style, at least for me.
Dean: Yeah! #10 and 11 are kind of transitional, but the Razumovskys [#7-9] are fantastic. When you get into #12 through 16, those just took me a long time. I mean, at a structural level, I don't think the best musicologists in the world fully understand what's going on. They're almost biological.
I've always kind of modeled Beethoven as being like this deeply epistemological composer. He’s on a quest to model the world with sound. He's trying to architect the world.
Like, at the beginning of the 4th Piano Concerto, there's this moment where it's very clear to me that he was watching a young bird take flight for the first time. And the orchestra is trying to just like [sings] and it's clearly wings.
I've joked before that Beethoven's like the first particle physicist. And in some sense I view the late quartets as modeling what we would now call complex systems. The modeling of water flowing and trying to model how that sounds. Not in a programmatic sense, not in the sense that a composer today might, but in a somewhat more abstract sense. Abstracted it might be more elegant.
Ben: I like the biological metaphor you use. They’re very organic pieces. I was able to see the 15th live recently and, similar to what you said earlier, there's stuff I understood by being able to watch the body language of the performers, that it's hard to hear on a recording.
Dean: The 15th has maybe the most beautiful thing he ever wrote, that one’s slow movement.
Though I think that the single most beautiful thing Beethoven ever wrote, not even my favorite or the most enjoyable to listen to, but just purely aesthetically, is probably the violin solo in the “Benedictus” section of his Missa solemnis.
Ben: That's another one of these late works that intimidates me.
Dean: It’s kind of hiding in there too, because the Missa solemnis is this gigantic piece. And hiding in the last 20% of the piece is this violin solo that's just out of this world. Really simple. But not simple in the way Beethoven usually is. It’s really melodic in a way that Beethoven usually is not.
Mozart (and a little Haydn)
Ben: Speaking of melodic, let me ask you my Mozart question. Cards on the table, my brain kind of slides off Mozart, I think partially because I'm more rhythmically minded and I like some of the tension and dynamic changes of Beethoven. I like some of Mozart’s works like the later symphonies that sound almost like proto-Beethoven.
But I’d like to get it! Similar to how you worked on some of those Late Beethoven pieces over time.
So what would you recommend as a bridge towards the more harmonious, neat Mozart that everybody loves. Because I'm already on board with the tempestuous, tense stuff.
Dean: The first thing I would say is that a lot of Mozart, in my view, is conducted poorly. If I am listening to Mozart, I will reach for John Elliot Gardner. And for the operas, Teodor Currentzis.
If you just listen to a more traditional Mozart opera recording of Don Giovanni or Cosi Fan Tutti or something, and you compare the way that Currentzis takes it versus the way that it's traditionally played, I think his is just so much more alive. Some of this is just about tempo. Some of it may be historically informed practice, as well.
So there’s that. In terms of good pieces, there’s the Requiem, which is very famous. The operas are all, I think, very bouncy and rhythmic.
You know, I do know what you mean about how some Mozart sounds a little bit like “study music.”
Ben: It's background music.
Dean: And, you know, it's also worth noting that was its social function—
Ben: Yeah, some of it was literally background music, especially the chamber music.
Dean: But, you know, he did view the String Quartet as the highest form. So there's some very sophisticated stuff that goes on in his quartets.
I would also say the 20th Piano Concerto in D Minor. In fact, Beethoven wrote a cadenza for that concerto.
If you're familiar with Beethoven's 3rd Piano Concerto, which is one of his most underrated pieces, an early exploration of the C minor mood. But I think there's a lot of inspiration that Beethoven took for his C Minor concerto from the 20th D Minor Mozart.
Late symphonies are another good starting point. In terms of the lighter stuff that I find really interesting musically… The Oboe Concerto is fascinating. The Sinfonia Concertante, what a later generation of composers would have called a Double Concerto, it's viola and violin. The really good recording is Itzhak Perlman and Pinchas Zuckerman. Those would all be on my list.
Ben: Where does Haydn fit in for you?
Dean: It's funny. I was gonna mention that if you are looking to get more into the Classical Era and Mozart isn’t doing it for you—
Ben: I like Haydn for exactly the reason that I think you're that you're getting at. It's more playful, it's more rhythmically interesting. There’s more crazy, dynamic stuff. It feels like proto Beethoven in the best way.
Dean: Yeah and he taught Beethoven, so it makes perfect sense. The Late Haydn Quartets are very sophisticated pieces of music that sound to me like Middle Period Beethoven, or like late Early Period.
You know, it's always complicated with “Periods” for Beethoven. I think it might be Lockwood, the biographer, who refers to the different phases in Beethoven's trajectory as “maturities.” The First Maturity, Second Maturity. I think it's much better than “The Heroic Period” or whatever.
But yeah, I think Haydn would be a really good place to look. The symphonies, the quartets, the piano music as well. I think he's tougher in a lot of ways than Mozart.
Ben: Maybe that’s why I like him.
Dean: You're not wrong. I think Haydn is extremely underrated today.
Ben: I think so too. A few times I've gone to the symphony and they stick a Haydn piece earlier in the program and it ends up being the best thing they play all night.
How to listen to new music
Ben: A process question for you. Let's say you have a big new work that you've never heard before. Say, a big symphony by a composer you know you like. Something you know is going to be important and worth paying attention to.
How do you go about listening to it? Do you read about it beforehand? Afterwards? How do you pick a recording? Do you look at the sheet music? Do you just put it on in the background?
Dean: It depends to some extent. But if I don't know anything about this piece, I will listen to a recording with headphones and do nothing else but listen to it. Usually with eyes shut. I typically will not read about it, just go right in.
In terms of how I find a recording… It used to be that I would look for orchestras or soloists or conductors that I like. If I see, for example, that [John Eliot] Gardiner has a version, I'll take it. If it's Bach, it’ll be Masaaki Suzuki or Gardiner.
And then, you know, more recently, I do actually ask really good [AI] language models for this. Especially if it's a more modern, like 20th century recording where I know the landscape a little bit less well. I will ask language models.
Ben: I was able to see [Bach’s] Mass in B Minor performed in a church recently. I had a little companion GPT chat going the whole way. And it was honestly amazing, much better than the program notes that I got at the door.
AI and the future of music
Ben: Anyway, perfect segue to my final question. Tying back to your AI work. How do you think about the impact of AI on music going forward?
To give one example from another form of media, David Perell said that eventually we'll think about it like sampling in music. At first it was seen as cheap, but later people said “who cares how you got there as long as the song’s good?” [Note: See the 3 minutes in the clip below, starting at 30:08.]
Is that how music is going to be?
Dean: Good question. I tend not to think so, to be honest. I've played around with Suno [a leading AI music generation service] and things like this. And I've just never found them to be very good at all, at least for classical-ish music. Maybe it's possible that if you scaled up enormously, they would become great composers. I’d be open to that, it’d be cool if that were true. But right now, it's definitely not.
It's actually sad. There's a great community of people for [AI image generation service] Midjourney who produce unbelievably excellent artwork. People that are really good at prompting those models and steering through latent space well can do incredible stuff.
And I thought, “surely a similar community must exist for Suno.” And I just haven't found that to be true. I don't find that what it produces is quite as original. I can't say that I’ve ever heard anything on Suno that sounded original to me in the way that I've seen Midjourney stuff that truly does strike me as genuinely original and novel and artistic.
Maybe it's a scale thing, I don't know. It's also possible that, for what I care about in particular, that the models won’t work. You can't just go token-by-token for music in the way that you often can for words. Because there are structural dependencies in classical music and there's rigor about the theme. The theme can't be changed.
I assume that Suno is using auto-regression, not diffusion, though I don’t know. But if it's auto regressive, then the second that you deviate in a wrong way from the theme, then you've ruined the effect. This is also one of the reasons that I don't tend to think that people will read AI generated novels a lot.
My main assumption is that the actual function of something like Suno is going to be background music at every resort, cabana, pool. And they already do something similar. They use this kind of thin four-on-the-floor covers of popular songs.
Ben: That stuff is all over streaming services too. So much of Spotify by volume is background music like that.
Dean: It’s funny, too, because people in the recording industry will get all mad about this. But the actual function that this is replacing is of, like, restaurant and hotel lobby and poolside music that (a) already was complete background music and (b) there's music that I heard that I'm confident wasn't AI generated, but might as well be. I was at a resort recently and thought, “This sounds like an AI generated cover of a Taylor Swift song.”
Ben: Think about old “lounge music.” People are “lounging,” they need some music to put on in the background. But the problem is that it's independent artists, probably a lot of whom are just doing AI generated stuff these days, rather than being captured by the record labels.
Dean: Yeah, exactly. So that’s my view. It's actually a little disappointing to me that we haven't seen anything cooler out of the AI music world, at least that I'm aware of. I haven't looked super hard, but every couple of months I will go into Suno and make sure I buy access to the top tier model, and I will play around. And thus far, I have not been impressed by anything.
What is this "sheep music" of which you speak :-)?