Yesterday I talked about how Beethoven replaced the minuet in his four-movement pieces with the scherzo . Scherzo means “joke,” in Italian, but in Beethoven’s scherzos you won’t usually find anything that qualifies as out-‘n-out funny . What you usually will find is a certain playfulness, with lots of fast notes, abrupt accents, surprises, and quick changes of musical direction. Composers after Beethoven—from Schumann and Mendelssohn all the way through Prokofiev and Shostakovich—continued the