Beethoven Walked, We Text
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At my last job interview, I was asked the question "Are you able to multitask?" It's a common interview question. I'd been asked it before, and knew that "no" was not the answer they were looking for. Multitasking is an essential skill in the business world. One must be able to talk on the phone and respond to someone else on Instant Messenger while locating a file for a coworker.
Certainly though, multitasking is not just a phenomenon isolated to the business world. Visit any coffee shop, and you'll find a simple face to face conversation is the exception to the rule. Whilst holding a conversation, someone will be glancing down at a blackberry, while someone else will be texting, drinking, and listening to the friend across from them.
Multitasking is becoming so widespread that this year, the Iowa legislature is considering doing what many other states have done, outlawing texting while driving. Our penchant for freneticism is so rampant, lawmakers are considering regulating it!
So how does this frenetic pace affect composers?
We are all a product of our environment. Certainly the pace of our lives affects our perception of rhythm, tempo, and form - or how music changes over time.
In Beethoven's time, walking or riding a horse was the primary method of getting from point A to B. Though Vienna may have been a bustling metropolis during his day, his perception of time would certainly be different.
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Now, contrast that experience with riding in a car. If you're driving, you may not even notice the sculpture, or catch it out of the corner of your eye as you go past. If you are a passenger, you may see it, but for 15 seconds.
What if you're flying? Well, most likely, you can't even see the sculpture at all.
So in Beethoven's day, things unfolded and revealed themselves more slowly. When one is walking all of the time, one can take in more of each scene. Today, when we literally move at 10 to 20 times that rate, every scene changes more quickly and we are not able to draw in as many details.
And so, as listeners and composers, we want, and expect music to change at a quicker pace. We are less patient with slow music, we may want a little more rhythm or a more active texture to hold our interest. Unfortunately, someone in generation-Y may no longer have the attention span to grasp 20 minute movements, no matter how brilliantly they are conceived.
In my own music, I have addressed these challenges by using more compressed forms. Forms that explore an idea for 90 seconds to three minutes, then move on to music that is entirely different - almost as though the music had entered into a different world.
In 2005, I wrote Fricas, Fracas, Frucas - a ten minute work for flute, percussion, and violoncello consisting of five small movements with lengths of 90 seconds, 2 minutes, 45 seconds, three minutes and three minutes. In the excerpt below, I've extracted about 20 seconds of each movement to show the marked change between movements.
For me, this approach is about more than responding to how everyone else is experiencing the world around me, it's about how I'm participating in that world. And yes, like many composers, as I enjoy my existence in this world...
I am easily distracted by shiny objects.
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I occasionally find myself going in the opposite direction of the frenetic pace. I actually find myself wishing a piece would slow the heck down. If you have a good idea you should ruminate on it for awhile, not just burn through it like a lightsaber through a battle droid (unless, of course, that's not the point). I was at a premiere of a piano concerto awhile back and the piece began with a very nice idea that I could have easily lost myself in for the next ten minutes. But the composer decided to move right on to the next idea. I know it’s not fair to project what I want the piece to be in these circumstances, but I do think there’s merit to sitting on an idea and exploring it for awhile when you have the opportunity to do so in a large symphonic format.
Personally, I like John Adams' metaphor of form as a long car ride where the landscape gradually comes into view, fades away and is gradually replaced by a new landscape (or, for those of us that live in the Midwest, oftentimes not). I've thought about this a lot on many trips around the Midwest and I would like to think that it has in some small way seeped into and informed my writing process.
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Thanks for these ruminations. I too wish pieces would slow down and let me (and the rest of the audience) sink inside their soundworlds before moving on to new ones or disappearing. As a curator, I have often suggested that short works be repeated somewhere on the program - this has created a alternate sense of time and context for the works involved, and certainly gave everyone a better understanding of their language. There seems to be a fear of inviting people deeper into the soundworlds that are being created and explored. Perhaps there is a lack of comfort with context and usefulness.
I am working on a project called "And Beethoven Heard Nothing" so have been similarly contemplating how different his world was from mine/ours in distinct ways. Sense of time, perspective, the soundscape itself, the context of making and playing music, the relationships between composers, conductors, performers and other artists. Thanks for the reminder about Beethoven's practice of walking and your insights about its impact on his sense of time and pace.
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This sounds superficially convincing...until you consider that the really extravagantly long chamber works only appeared in about the last 50 years: Dennis Johnson's piano piece November (1959), which clocks in at 4 hours; Morton Feldman's String Quartet No. 2 (1983), a whopping 6 hours; LaMonte Young's The Well Tuned Piano (not sure of the date, he keeps revising it), 5 hours plus... Well, you get the idea.
Here's another possibility: in the late 20th century we witnessed an extreme expansion from the median length to either extreme of the bell curve for length, both to much shorter and much longer compositions.
In any case, using the Romantic period as the preferred index for normative copositional length seems an unwarranted assumption. Why not use the Gothic era, with its immensely long masses?
Good solid thought-provoking essay, in any case.
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I agree, our lives are so different now, but I think there is still universal appeal in the old composers' music, slower developing though it may be. But maybe that's because I'm a cellist and have played a lot of the music.
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