Music is Time
While in the year 2010 it is virtually impossible to get a consensus on exactly what music is, very few people would exclude time as a defining element. Of course, in sound installations the time element is usually determined by the listener, but even then time still plays an important role in the perception of the work.
Yet there is often an extreme difference between the time it takes to compose, say, ten minutes of music, and ten minutes. For some composers, myself included, a ten-minute composition can take anywhere between, well, ten minutes (a lucky improvisation) and several months, sometimes even longer. I’ve met composers of compelling music who claim to have written the music in far less time than it takes to perform it. There’s a process-driven electronic piece from the early 1970s by the late Norwegian composer Arne Nordheim that’s supposed to last for over a century, although in a concession to the commercial recording limitations of the time he excerpted it for the side of an LP. If all goes according to plan, a performance of John Cage’s Organ2/ASLSP (As SLow aS Possible) begun on September 5, 2001, will not end until the year 2639. Clearly neither composer took nearly as much time to compose these works!
These scenarios beg several questions. If you are taking over a month to create a 10-minute piece, are you needlessly filling your music with details that no one will ever be able to grasp in such a short amount of actual performance time? Contrapositively, if you are knocking off a six-hour-long piece during a lunch break, might you be putting too little time into something you expect your audience to be attentive to for much longer? Of course the slow composer of short duration music will argue that if people don’t get the whole picture from the first go ’round they can always listen again. But in our busy world the likelihood of hearing a very long piece multiple times is slim, even though I’ve listened to all of the available recordings of Morton Feldman’s extended duration works several times.
So for the composers out there, what is the relationship between the length of a piece and the amount of time it takes you to write it and why? For everyone else, and composers too (since we’re all listeners), how many times does it take you to listen to something before you feel that you know all its secrets? Of course, the answer to this latter question will probably vary greatly depending on the work you’re writing about. Hence a follow-up, do you believe there are a requisite number of times you can be expected to listen to something in order to “get it” beyond which it might be taking up too much valuable, limited time?