210 CHORAL MONUMENTS message by the protesters in Tiananmen Square in Beijing. From the Associated Press on June 3, 1989, Soldiers advanced down Changan Avenue ... but tens of thousands of students and others poured out into the street to stop them in front of the Beijing Hotel, several hundred yards east of [Tiananmen] Square. The middle of the square remained calm, with the "Ode to Joy” from Beethoven's Ninth Symphony blar- ing over the students’ loudspeakers. In popular culture, Beethoven's ode has been used in Stanley Kubrick’s 1971 film A Clockwork Orange, and also in the film HELP by the Beatles. Most common in modern times, the ode has become a fashionable vehicle in flash mobs across the world. Some of the more popular of these, posted on YouTube and receiving hundreds of thousands of viewers, include renditions at the Hauptbahnhof (Central Train Station) in Leipzig, Germany, on November 8, 2009, to commemorate the twentieth anniversary of the falling of the Berlin. Wall; the Plaga de Sant Roc in Sabadell, Spain, on May 19, 2012; the Blue Back Square in West Hartford, Connecticut, on October 20, 2012, with performers from the Hartt School of Music; the Sha Tin New Town Plaza Shopping Mall Hong Kong on July 28, 2013, with student performers; and the Privoz ish Market in Odessa, Ukraine, on March 25, 2014, with performers from the Odessa Philharmonic and the Odessa Opera Chorus. Finally, the ode is the subject of a 2013 documentary, Following the Ninth, directed by Kerry Candaele, Genesis and Historical Perspective Like a number of composers both before and after him (e.g., Mozart, Mendelssohn, and Brahms), Beethoven's youth was focused on keyboard music and performance. He studied and played keyboard pieces (including those by J. 8. Bach), his first compositions were written for the piano, and he developed into a highly skilled keyboard performer. These factors are all mentioned in the following excerpt from an article in Carl Friedrich Cramer's Magazin der Musik on March 2, 1783. A boy of eleven years and of most promising talent, he plays the piano very skillfully and with power, reads at sight very well, and I need say no more than that the chief piece he plays is Das wohltemperirte Clavier of Sebastian Bach... He has also composed nine variations for piano, which have been published in Mannheim. This youthful genius ... will surely become a second Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart if he were to continue as he has begun