Of his 50-odd symphonies, produced between 1764 and 1788, the earliest ones are conventional but precocious, reflecting influences of Johann Christian Bach, Giovanni Battista Sammartini, and Joseph Haydn.
There is a school of thought that Beethoven made history with his odd-numbered symphonies and marked time with the even-numbered ones.
That's the drama of Beethoven's brawny, odd-numbered symphonies, from the Third through the Ninth, where scenes of a sombre, searching, soliloquizing nature give way to festivities of dancing or marching.
Thursday night was devoted to the odd-numbered symphonies, Friday to the even.
Such little crescendos and diminuendos could be heard throughout the symphony; odd additions that did not add much to the music.
A long one, like an odd-numbered Beethoven symphony?
Like his debut, Overtones features decorously funky house, downtempo coffee-table breakbeats and the obligatory string-laden ballad; only the odd, lurching rhythm of Symphony of Sirens breaks the rather polite atmosphere.
So it often struck scholars as odd that his greatest symphony of darkness and light — the huge, still unsettling "Gross Clinic" from 1875, showing an operation in a surgical theater, a bloody union of human progress and frailty — always seemed to have a little too much light in it, in all the wrong places.
When you listen to music on headphones, you hear a symphony of odd noises during quiet passages.
Mr. Glass's symphony is an odd duck.
