Vox has created a stir this week with a podcast claiming that Ludwig van Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony is, for some reason, a particular “symbol of exclusion, elitism, and gatekeeping”. It’s not super clear why Vox singled out the Fifth for abuse, and my conscience is frantically reminding me that I am not to provide sustenance to trolls and nitwits who aren’t me, but this is certainly intriguing. Nate Sloan and Charlie Harding suggest that “women, LGBTQ+ people, (and) people of colour” may resent Beethoven, but they conflate two arguments to produce this conclusion.
One is just that Beethoven is a dead white male who is universally deemed an incomparable composer. The other is that concerts of classical music are kind of classist and snooty, and if you showed up with a piercing or anime hair or dark skin, you might get beaten up, or sneered at, or something.
The first accusation attracts an immediate guilty plea, and identifies a real problem: no one (of any colour or creed or sexual orientation) who takes up music composition in 2020 has any real hope of becoming the equal of Beethoven. Vox found musicians to complain about the suffocating centrality of Beethoven within their tradition of creating and performing, but this sentiment isn’t the exclusive property of minorities, or of musicians. It persecutes all indiscriminately. No young mathematician setting out on a career imagines that he is going to give Euclid or even Poincaré a serious run for their money.
[…]
The second charge in Vox‘s indictment — that concerts of classical music discourage outsiders — is something that (surviving) symphony orchestras have been working their fingers to the bone to address, and not without obvious success. At this point there can’t be an ensemble of any size on this continent that hasn’t spent several summers going to battle in public parks, armed with trendy film scores and orchestral pop, to play for people in jogging outfits and tank tops.
Colby Cosh, “Roll over Beethoven, you exclusionary elitist”, National Post, 2020-09-16.
June 24, 2026
QotD: Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony is a “symbol of exclusion, elitism, and gatekeeping”
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