In recent decades, scientists have begun asking: how does creativity work in the brain? Thanks to a composer and publisher named Anton Diabelli, musicians got a head start on this question two hundred years ago.
Diabelli wanted to celebrate the composers of his native Austria. So, in 1819, he invited fifty-one composers around the country to write a variation on a waltz theme he’d composed. Today, it would be like asking fifty-one bands to do covers of the same song.
In response to Diabelli’s call, fifty composers contributed one variation each.
Ludwig van Beethoven sent in thirty-three.
We now consider Beethoven one of the greatest Western composers who ever lived, and his “Diabelli Variations” one of his towering achievements. The variations written by the other fifty? They’ve largely been forgotten.
Diabelli's original theme
Why? What is it that makes Beethoven’s variations so special? And what can that tell us about how creativity works in the brain?
It turns out that Beethoven took a very unusual approach. In traditional Western music, a melody is generally supported by a harmonic progression: that’s what you hear on a Karaoke machine when the vocal line is stripped away. When you wrote a variation back in Beethoven’s day, you generally kept the same progression as the theme. In answering Diabelli’s call, that’s what eighty percent of the other Austrian composers did. Here are four variations that all follow Diabelli’s progression.
Kreutzer's Variation
Pixis' Variation
Rieger's Variation
W.A. Mozart Jr.'s Variation
What about Beethoven? Surprisingly, he never exactly followed Diabelli’s progression. Not only that, he never repeated himself: instead, he wrote thirty-three different progressions—each one loosely related to Diabelli’s theme. In doing so, Beethoven exercised his harmonic imagination more than the other fifty composers combined.
It makes for great music. And it also makes for a great example of divergent thinking, one of the cornerstones of the science of creativity…
