One of the odd side trips I’ve been taking in writing a book on the long career of Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony has been the recent history of Beethoven’s Fifth as a telephone ringtone. This goes back to the early 1980s, when electronic chipmaker General Instrument released the AY-3-1350, an integrated circuit capable of providing synthesized tunes for “toys, musical boxes, and doorchimes” (the latter especially)—among the 25 pre-programmed “popular and classical tunes chosen for their international acceptance” were Beethoven’s Fifth and Ninth symphonies. (Also included were the Marseillaise, the “William Tell” Overture, and the theme from Star Wars.) Hobbyists soon figured out how to wire an AY-3-1350 to an existing phone, creating the first Beethoven’s Fifth ringtone.

Beginning in 1996, when the Japanese telecom company NTT DoCoMo released the Digital Mova N103 Hyper, the first cell phone preprogrammed with multiple melodic ringtones, the notion of a phone call preceded by Beethoven’s Fifth really began to seep into cultural consciousness. In reality, both “Für Elise” and the “Ode to Joy” (the latter was programmed into phones supplied by the organizers of the 1998 Nagano Olympic games) seemed to be more common. But Beethoven’s Fifth became a common reference for writing about the possibility of a classical ringtone. (After all, the original already sounds like a ringtone.)

As early as 2000, the prevalence of Beethoven’s Fifth as a ringtone, or, more to the point, the prevalence of the idea of Beethoven’s Fifth as a ringtone, was enough for InfoWorld editor-at-large Dan Briody to include it in the second of a list of ersatz-Mosaic cell-phone commandments. “Thou shalt not set thy ringer to play La Cucaracha every time thy phone rings,” he preached, in the June 12, 2000 issue. “Or Beethoven’s Fifth, or the BeeGees, or any other annoying melody.” (Is it the mere translation into ringtone that makes the melody annoying? Briody’s placement corresponds to either the prohibition against worshipping graven images or the misuse of the Lord’s name, depending on whether one adopts a Talmudic or Augustinian numeration.)

Like many a Cassandra, Briody was spitting into the wind. But as the technology advanced to the point of sampled, not synthesized, ringtones, popular music began to dominate the market. Where Beethoven’s Fifth did become enormously popular as a ringtone is in the universe of mass-market fiction. Instantly familiar and unsusceptible to cultural obsolescence, the Fifth fairly rings off the hook in such writing. Pick up a thriller, mystery, or romance novel at your local airport, and chances are, if a cell phone rings during the story, it will ring Beethoven’s Fifth.

To trace the symbolism of these fictional ringtones is to revisit familiar contexts for Beethoven’s Fifth, and Beethoven’s reputation in general. Sometimes it hints at a more privileged path through life; in Christopher Reich’s 2002 thriller The First Billion, Hans-Uli Brunner, the Swiss Minister of Justice, receives an untimely interruption on the links, the melodic content an indication of his class:

Sink this one and the match was his.

He steadied his head.

He drew back the blade of the putter.

As he stroked the putter toward the ball, an ominous tune chimed from within his golf bag. The first bars of “Beethoven’s Fifth.” The blade met the ball askew and it sailed three feet past the cup.

“Damn it!”

With the advent of technology that allows multiple ringtones, tailored to particular incoming callers, Schindler’s fate-knocking-at-the-door story again surfaces. For example, disillusioned political wife Helene Zaharis in Beth Harbison’s 2007 chick-lit Shoe Addicts Anonymous:

Helene woke with a start to the theme somg from Bewitched.

It was her cell phone, the ring she had designated for social calls. Fun stuff. Political calls came in with the ominous opening of Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony.

Parents are often the symbolized authority. In Caroline Cooney’s Hit the Road, the 16-year-old Brit ensures ample warning as she embarks on an illegal road trip: “For her mother’s ring, Brit had chosen the Beethoven’s Fifth theme, that ominous one: dum dum dum daaaaah.” (In the 2007 Rear-Window-for-teens movie thriller Disturbia, the girl-next-door Ashley similarly has the Fifth to ominously warn her of a maternal call.) One can even find the American death-knocking variant, as in E. R. Webb’s Christian-inspirational serial-killer novel (yes, there is such a genre) Gemini’s Cross, as part of the usual cat-and-mouse game:

Immediately a phone rang somewhere in the shop. The ring tone was Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony. Da-da-da-dum. Death, knocking at the door. Da-da-da-dum. Following the sound, Baxter looked under the table. Nothing. He turned over the chairs, one by one.

“Sir?” the girl said. “What are you doing?”

There it was, a cell phone taped under the chair. He ripped it off and put it to his ear.

“Okay, Darrell. I’m here.”

“Good. Remember what I said about law enforcement.”

“I’m alone.”

Jonathan Kellerman, in his 2005 detective novel Rage, uses the Fifth to hint at a character’s Beethovenian outsider gruffness:

He downed two Bengal premiums, called for the check, and was slapping cash on the table when his cell chirped Beethoven’s Fifth.

“Sturgis. Oh, hey. Yeah. Good to hear from you, thanks… Would that be okay? Yeah, sure. Let me write it down.”

Tucking the phone under one ear, he scribbled on a napkin. “Thanks, see you in twenty.”

Rising to his feet, he motioned me toward the exit. Some of the twenty-somethings stopped laughing and looked at him as he loped out of the restaurant. Big, scary-looking man. All that merriment; he didn’t fit in.

(Dropping Beethoven into this sort of tough-guy, Hemingwayesque prose also finds a distinguished precedent in similar highbrow/lowbrow juxtapositions in the works of Raymod Chandler or, especially, James M. Cain.)

Then there is the Fifth as a pretension to be mocked. In Linda Ladd’s Die Smiling, detective Clare Morgan considers the Fifth to reflect poorly on both her partner, Bud Davis, and his new girlfriend:

Bud’s cell phone started up, an annoying chimed rendition of Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony; he’s pretentious sometimes that way, but I betcha he keyed it in in place of his former selection, “Friends in Low Places,” which I totally preferred, only to please his girlfriend, Brianna Swensen.

On the other hand, in Christine McGuire’s serial-killer mystery Until Judgment Day, DA investigator Donna Escalante’s ringtone impresses sheriff’s chief of detectives James Miller, echoing the turn-of-the-century use of the symphony as a signal of feminine refinement—or perhaps passion (the sort of fictional trope that reached a satiric apotheosis in E. M. Forster’s Howard’s End):

“Is that your phone chirping or mine?” Miller asked Escalante….

“Yours,” she said. “When mine rings, it plays music.”

“What music?”

“The first four notes of Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony.”

“Pretty classy.”

After a while, fictional phones ring out the Fifth simply as a play on the convenience of recognizability. My favorite Beethovenian cell-phone adopter is Moxy Maxwell, the stubborn 10-year-old heroine of Peggy Gifford’s series of children’s books. From Moxy Maxwell Does Not Love Writing Thank-You Notes:

Moxy was so quick on the draw when she picked up her cell phone that Ajax often remarked that she would have made a first-rate gunslinger in the Old West. And this time was no exception.

After the second but before the third note of Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony, Moxy was saying “Yes” into the phone. “Yes” was what Moxy said instead of “Hello,” unless it was someone she didn’t know.

If Beethoven’s Fifth stops after the first two notes, is it still Beethoven’s Fifth? Moxy does not have time for your trumped-up pop koans. But the joke only works if the tune is something everybody knows, once again both reinforcing and perpetuating the ubiquity of the Fifth symphony’s iconic opening. The fictional progress of the Beethoven ringtone, then, encapsulates the progress of the symphony itself in Western culture: from an exotic novelty, to a pre-packaged interpretive meme, to a neutered, omnipresent cultural artifact.