From Hesitation to Horizon: Kinderman Unpacks Beethoven’s Ninth at the Barnes

William Kinderman’s talk—“A Process of Becoming to the ‘Upward Gaze’: Beethoven’s Choral Finale of the Ninth Symphony”—took us through an hour of deep, philosophical reflection on how the famous choral movement actually came into being.The lecture was at the Barnes Foundation in Philadelphia last Friday evening. I don't think I will ever listen to the Ninth in the same way I had before.

William Kinderman's A Political Artist in Revolutionary Times

The Barnes itself is such a perfect setting for something like this—quiet, beautiful galleries full of art that invite you to slow down and think.

Kinderman moves back and forth between the podium and the piano like someone guiding you through a forest of ideas. He made it very clear that the choral finale—the huge “Ode to Joy” section—doesn’t arrive as some pre-ordained triumph. Instead it grows slowly out of uncertainty, discarded sketches, and real hesitation. What we often hear as a straightforward celebration is actually the end of a long, difficult search.

He spent quite a bit of time talking about the text Beethoven eventually chose: Friedrich Schiller’s poem “An die Freude” (“Ode to Joy”). Kinderman reminded us that Schiller wrote the poem in 1785, right at the beginning of the French Revolution, and that it was soaked in the revolutionary spirit of the time—ideas of brotherhood, freedom, and a new kind of universal human community. For Beethoven’s generation, those ideals were still very much alive, even if the Revolution itself had long since turned sour. When Beethoven finally decided (after years of hesitation) to set Schiller’s words to music in 1822–24, he was reaching back to that earlier moment of hope.

Kinderman pointed out how Beethoven didn’t just take the poem as it stood in the 1780s. He edited and reshaped it quite heavily—cutting stanzas, changing the order, and above all giving it a much more cosmic and philosophical tone. The result is less a political anthem and more a meditation on what humanity might be capable of when it looks beyond itself—toward a “cosmic horizon,” as Kinderman put it.

One image from the evening is still vivid: as Kinderman walked to the piano, he passed right through the beam of the projected score (his own transcription of Beethoven’s manuscript). For a second the black notes were literally written across his face—quavers and arpeggios running over his forehead. It was striking. The music had inscribed itself on him, as if he had stepped inside the score.

He also drew a fascinating parallel between the Ninth and the monolith scene in 2001: A Space Odyssey—two completely different works, yet both capturing that same sudden leap of awareness, that same upward gaze into something immense and unknowable.

At the piano, Kinderman played short passages from Beethoven’s earlier works—sonatas, string quartets, sketches—and showed how tiny musical ideas from years before already carried the DNA of the Ninth. It felt almost like eavesdropping on Beethoven’s workshop: hearing thoughts form, get abandoned, then slowly come together again.

What I appreciated most was Kinderman’s own manner. No theatrics, no professorial distance—just the quiet authority of someone who has lived with this piece for decades and is still discovering new layers in it. You could feel that he, too, is still asking the big questions.

In one short hour the room became a place where music turned into philosophy, philosophy turned into vivid images, and those images turned into something you could really feel. I left moved—not by any grand declarations, but by the way Kinderman showed the Ninth as a living document of searching. In his reading, it isn’t a monument to victory. It’s a testament to human aspiration: joy not as a finished state, but as a fragile, shared hope that still invites us—more than two centuries later—to lift our eyes and keep looking upward.

PhD in Creativity: A Frame Worth Naming

One important detail I neglected to mention is the remarkable frame that made this evening possible—and the person behind it. The event was organized by Jonathan Fineberg, PhD, Founding Director of the PhD in Creativity at Rowan University, a program designed to support rigorous, interdisciplinary work shaped by committees tailored to each individual project. 

Seen through that lens, Kinderman’s lecture did not feel like a standalone “music talk,” but rather like a model of creative research in action: ideas tested against drafts, revisions treated as evidence, and meaning assembled through process rather than proclamation. In that sense, the Barnes became more than a venue—it became a laboratory for thought, where scholarship and imagination converged in real time. 

If creativity is not merely inspiration but a disciplined way of becoming—patient, iterative, and accountable—then Kinderman’s walk through Beethoven’s Ninth offered a vivid demonstration of that principle.