I was moderately upset today when the classical music station where I live played only two movements of a Beethoven String Quartet. The String Quartet is meant to be heard as a whole, not in pieces. All four movements relate to one another and make a musical whole. We live in an impatient world, with short attention spans, craving for instant gratification, short cuts in the movies we watch, sound bites, Twitter snippets–everything packaged in tiny packets that take up less and less time. And our short attention span reflects these tiny packets of data.
How many people have an hour and a half to listen to the whole B-Minor Mass of Bach? 45 minutes to listen to a Beethoven symphony? Does my classical radio station need to chop up whole pieces to package music in small bites because of today’s short attention span?
Maybe. Our world is different than the world of Bach and Beethoven. Imagine a world with no TV. No radio. No internet. No cell-phones. No electricity. Can you imagine such a world? That’s the world of Bach and Beethoven. Imagine what time, and pass-times would be like then! I imagine that people in such a world would have a lot of time to kill. How long could the nobility just chat, who had no job they had to go to to fill up their day? I imagine they would welcome a 50-minute string quartet they could listen to in someone’s chamber. On Sundays, everyone had to go to church. Then what? No football games to watch. Why not hang around the church and hear a musical mass for another hour. Why not a cantata? Why not a 20-minute prelude and fugue before the preacher? They had the time.
The fact is, people in the 18th and 19th-century did have an hour and a half to listen to Bach’s B-Minor Mass. They wanted a 50 minute symphony. But we need to carve out time specially if we want to listen to a whole string quartet. I’ve only heard the whole B-Minor Mass once, and it was a live performance. As it happened, it was on a Sunday afternoon, too. It was really rewarding.
The social forces today are different than those of Beethoven. We can wile away time mindlessly glued to the TV, as I often do. But I do, on occasion, set aside an hour or two in order to live with sublime art. Art that was generated by a society that time to kill. Art from a society much different than ours. This blog could be considered deconstruction, if you like.
David Fekete 