An improvised Fur Elise

Today, I'm playing a classical song called "Fur Elise," composed by Ludwig van Beethoven. This might even be the first song that you think of when someone mentions classical music. So, I decided to make it a bit different than the official version that's been published, by playing the main theme in different ways. I hope you like listening to it!


Listen to the song here
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I'm pretty sure you all know this song. You could have heard it on the radio, or in the background of a video, or on the classical music playlist you were listening to while puzzling over how to adjust your clock. So, why am I playing it?

Maybe I wanted to play it so that you'd be able to hear it even when you were right here on Tea with Liya. You wouldn't have to go somewhere else, look it up, and choose the recording you wanted when you were already here. 

Image by Gerd Altmann from Pixabay

Or maybe I wanted to play this song so I could demonstrate that old ideas can be used to create new things. Fur Elise was written in 1810, but I can still do something different with it in 2021 (there was once a 2020 here, but then I remembered to correct it - three months after the year changed).

Here's something you might not know: Fur Elise might have never even become an idea, or at least a public one that we would know about today. Beethoven actually put the song in a pile of draft compositions after he wrote it, to remain there for the rest of his life. Similarly to a waltz by Chopin that I played, Fur Elise wasn't published until after Beethoven's death. 

Maybe the same thing could happen to me and the folder on my computer of song files. Someone might discover it 50 years from now and wonder why I never recorded the songs that would still be sitting there, waiting to finally see the light of day.

So, I've taken this idea from the 1800s and used some improvising to make it different now. I'm not making up something entirely different, but what I'm playing is based on the original melody. You could even hear some music teachers saying things like this - if you are playing random notes and stringing all kinds of different melodies together, then you aren't really improvising; you're just playing notes. 

There's a lot of different ways of doing this. You could take a popular song, add some swing to it, play it in an ensemble, and now you have a jazz song. Or you could take a song like this one and start shifting some pieces of the melody around. If you have an idea and some imagination, there's always something new you can do with it.

Keep filling your teacup with music!
~Liya