How Long Has This Been Going On?

Come on… you gotta do this in 2 minutes or less!

Up until very recently if you wanted to listen to music at home, you had to have your own orchestra.

or Chamber Music group..

or at least a piano.

Lots of people in fact had pianos at home and knew how to play them fairly well.

It was not uncommon for people to gather around the piano after dinner for a round of music.

This is before iPods, phonographs or TV.  There was, in short, no other alternative.

In our list of ‘stuff killed by the digital revolution’, let’s not leave out the piano.  In the past 100 years, piano sales for both acoustic and digital pianos in the United States have declined 83 percent, from 364,000 pianos in 1909 to 62,536 pianos in 2007 according tobluebookofpianos.com.

At the same time, the U.S. population figure increased 233 percent in the last century. 

For the super-rich, at least for the past 2,000 years or so, if you wanted to crank up the tunes, you called in the court musicians.  Now THAT was expensive.

And if you were going to go to all that expense of hiring your own orchestra, your own choir, your own composer and your own Chappelmeister, then when you finally got the thing together in the dining room after dinner, they sure as hell were not going to play a few 3 minute tunes and call it a night.

Oh no!

For that kind of effort you got a symphony. Or an opera. Or something big and long.

When music went to CDs, the length of the old music first drove the parameters of the new technology.  The CD, when it was manufactured was designed to accommodate Beethoven’s 9th.  71 minutes.

But as music began to be created in the post-radio, post record era, more and more songs were cut off at 3 minutes.  The attention span of the average listener. No one really, except for your occasional WQXR listener, would hang around for 71 minutes any longer.  Even Rock Operas like Tommy by The Who were broken up into 3 minute segments.

Now we come to video.

For all of its life, video was the product of a technology, that, like having your own orchestra was incredibly expensive to throw together.  While the King might have his Royal Philharmonic, Bill Paley had his CBS.  There isn’t much difference here actually.

When music got ‘democratized’, the talented musicians said ‘screw you ‘ to the King and began to crank out Whiter Shade of Pale for the public.  4 minutes and change.

Today, pretty much all of the music produced is in the 2-4 minute range.  That is what people want to hear.

Now video goes where music has gone before. From the expensive trinket of Kings and media moguls to something that anyone can make and play whenever they want.

So what happens to the length of a composition.

The hour and half-hour format were the product of a broadcasting world that was linear and had to keep to a clock for commercials.  But the hour long construct is really the child of an expensive infrastructure. I mean if you’re gonna assemble all the writers, and cameramen and editors and producers you need to make Law and Order or SNL, then the damned thing had better be an hour or more, or why bother.

But maybe we are missing the boat here.

Maybe like music, you can also tell a great and compelling story in video in 3 minutes or so.

Maybe in the non linear, online world, the whole notion of a ‘show’ is something we should just forget about.

Or at least consign to the newly emerging world of Classical TV.