March 11, 2018 at 05:13AM

Today I learned: 1) I'm a big fan of Beethoven, espeically his piano sonatas. I love how beastly they are, how passionate, how ridiculously ahead of their time they are (did you know Beethoven invented boogie-woogie? https://youtu.be/ccyHT1sFmsg?t=1032). Today I learned that Beethoven's sonata no. 23 ("Appassionata") was *so* ahead of its time that it was never performed in public until after Beethoven's death. He played it for some of his colleagues and students (including Czerny), nobody wanted to play it. One critic (often-quoted online, but without citation) called it "incomprehensibly abrupt and dark". From the sound of it, Beethoven's contemporaries couldn't, for the most part, parse it. On a related note, apparently Beethoven never technically bought a piano. All of his were loaned, rented, or gifted by piano manufacturers. Beethoven was famously frustrated with the piano of his time. Pianos of the late 18th and early 19th century were sickly cousins of their modern descendants in a lot of ways. They were smaller both in soundboard size and range, they were more limited in their ability to play repeated notes, and they generally sounded much weaker (compare harpsichords to a modern concert piano). The biggest single advancement in piano technology was the cast-iron frame, which lets modern pianos be strung with absolutely immense tension, and lets you put a ton of kinetic energy into a performance in a quite literal way. Unfortunately, the cast-iron frame was only invented in the last couple of years of Beethoven's life, and he was constantly frustrated by the lack of his pianos' abilities to express what he wanted. He pushed what he had to the limit, though -- the Appassionata, for example, goes all the way to the highest and lowest notes available on his piano at the time. 2) If you're eating a Thai curry and you bite into a chunk of something that looks, tastes, and feels like ginger, odds are it's not ginger. It's probably one of the four varieties of galangal, a ginger-like root used as one of the main ingredients in Thai curry. 3) You can buy oreos in eastern Asia, but they're packaged a little differently -- each oreo is individually wrapped. In fact, single-bite individually-wrapped packages inside a larger package seems to be a common motif of east Asian snack foods.