No. 9

9 is a very fascinating number. Wherever it travels, it comes back to the start. Irrespective of what you multiply it with, the sum of the result is the very number itself. It fits in everywhere - for instance, a quicker way to arrive at a single-digit "summation" is simply to take the value modulo 9, substituting a 0 result with 9 itself. In music theory, ninth is the note nine from the root and also the interval between the root and the ninth, signifying the completeness of the scale. The ninth century had the privilege of giving to this world Adisankara (Sankara Bhagavadpadacharya, the first in the lineage of adi sankar), Pope Joan (legendary female Pope), who propounded (in their respective faiths), the theory of one complete soul. Perhaps, that is why numerology defines this number as "complete".

To a music lover, it cannot mean anything but Symphony 9 (Beethoven essentially and other symphony 9s too). The morning ride to ICC today found me immersed in Beethoven's Symphony 9 and I remembered that this was the last symphony that Beethoven completed (he died leaving his tenth symphony unfinished). He was the first victim of the curse of the ninth, a superstition which says that a composer who writes his ninth symphony will die soon. There could be no better word to describe his Symphony 9 than "complete". At the end of the hour long symphony, I felt complete. In another sense, I felt nothing at the end of it. Symphony 9 goes straight to your heart. You do not stop to identify the sonata (first movement) as you would have been stormed by the rising tempo. Beethoven must have had in his mind a layperson like me when he wrote Symphony 9, for he has been sympathetic enough to employ silence as notes, not only between the movements but also within them. However, the silence only magnifies the recapitulation of the stormy notes that take you to where vanished objects would go - as Professor Mcgonagall would have put it, into non-being which is to say everywhere. Only when you hear the lyrical slow movement do you even realise that you have been taken into the third movement. This movement corresponded so well with the winter in the Hague yet making winter more enjoyable than it otherwise is (I always thought Vivaldi's Spring Largo should indeed be winter owing to the melancholy it carried, while Winter Allegro has such beautiful fast notes which might as well correspond with the flowers and beauty of spring). Vivaldi wrote 12 movements for his four seasons, while Beethoven has written them in just four!

The famous fourth movement, or the finale, is a symphony within a symphony, as Charles Rosen once said (the fourth movement has four movements within itself). It is Beethoven's expression of univeral brotherhood and has a thematic and musical unity all through the four movements (within the finale). The music cannot fit the text better, for both emulate joy. The storm in the first movement, the waverings in the second, the melancholy in the third - all vanish into non-being with the joy in the fourth. Perhaps, that is what makes one feel complete.

Which brings me back to what I thought once I came to my desk after going through the mundane exercise of going through security check at the entrance and plugged in my MP3 player to sink into more music - Beethoven wrote a fifth movement for his Symphony 9 before he actually made it four - we lost the fifth season.