So How Long is Too Long?

So How Long is Too Long?

There’s nothing comparable to the experience of listening to a single-movement, extended-duration work. If you are able to focus on it without distraction, it completely takes over your life and makes you lose all sense of time and place. But you also experience sound and form in a different way even if you let your life go on as you’re listening.

Written By

Frank J. Oteri

Frank J. Oteri is an ASCAP-award winning composer and music journalist. Among his compositions are Already Yesterday or Still Tomorrow for orchestra, the "performance oratorio" MACHUNAS, the 1/4-tone sax quartet Fair and Balanced?, and the 1/6-tone rock band suite Imagined Overtures. His compositions are represented by Black Tea Music. Oteri is the Vice President of the International Society for Contemporary Music (ISCM) and is Composer Advocate at New Music USA where he has been the Editor of its web magazine, NewMusicBox.org, since its founding in 1999.

For the past couple of years I’ve frequently had the problem of not being able to sustain a musical idea in a composition for longer than two minutes, sometimes even far shorter—well under a minute. Admittedly this is partially due to the fact that I have so little time to actually compose music. But it is also because I have gotten deeply interested in creating things that can all be reduced to a very small and readily perceptible musical cell which is then expanded through a series of permutations (not exact repetitions) and when all the possible manipulations are exhausted there’s really nothing else to say. Introducing additional ideas seems like interloping, so a way I’ve gotten around this (when I’ve had additional ideas) is to stitch together a chain of separate, all short, movements.

But I have also recently been very eager to compose a really long piece of music. I mean a really, really long piece. (No doubt it’s yet another manifestation of my whole fascination with impracticality. ) For decades I’ve been fascinated with La Monte Young’s The Well-Tuned Piano (which in live performance hovers somewhere between five and six hours), the late Feldman pieces (some of which go on for six hours), and an even earlier work—Erik Satie’s 1893 Vexations which lasted some 18 hours when finally realized according to the composer’s instructions during a marathon reading session coordinated by John Cage. There’s nothing comparable to the experience of listening to a single-movement, extended-duration work. If you are able to focus on it without distraction, it completely takes over your life and makes you lose all sense of time and place. But you also experience sound and form in a different way even if you let your life go on as you’re listening—which is the more frequent approach most folks take to such works (admittedly myself included), especially when experienced on recordings. In fact, recordings are the only way most people will ever get to hear such music, since live performances of extremely long works are also extremely rare.

FlamingLips24Hours

Trick or treat? The physical carrier for The Flaming Lips’ 24-hour 7 Skies H3, released October 31, 2011

Of course everyone has a different threshold for listening. For many people, anything longer than a three-minute song is inexorable, but for some a two-hour Mahler symphony races by. Obviously, the Young, Feldman, and Satie examples cited above require an even greater endurance than what it takes to wallow in Mahler. There are even longer pieces. A few years back Dennis Báthory-Kitsz told me about a 24-hour orchestral work by the late Québecquois composer Gilles Yves Bonneau. It has yet to be performed to the best of my knowledge, but if someone wants to present it, I’m eager to hear it. On October 31, 2011, fresh after releasing a six-hour “song,” the Oklahoma-based alternative rock band The Flaming Lips actually released a 24-hour “song” titled 7 Skies H3. Wayne Coyne, one of the band members, has acknowledged that it was somewhat “kneejerk” to call such things songs, but that’s fodder for another discussion. Whatever you call the band’s magnum opus to date, it’s too big to fit on a CD or even a DVD, so the band has issued it in a limited edition hard drive that is (since they issued it on Halloween) purportedly embedded in an actual human skull. That’s not the kind of thing I’d want to keep around the house, so luckily they’ve also posted it online.

And there are even longer pieces. If ever completely realized, Lux et Tenebrae, an electronic composition by Arne Nordheim, would last 102 years. A church in the German town of Halberstadt is the first venue ever to present John Cage’s Organ2/ASLSP; the performance will not be finished until the year 2640. And John Luther Adams’s environmentally based sonic installation The Place Where You Go To Listen conceptually never ends. But anything lasting longer than a human lifetime is obviously impossible for anyone to hear in its entirety, so the compositional impulse and the way it can be experienced by others is clearly about something other than total temporal immersion.

So just how long is too long? Might a 24-hour composition actually be viable? Sure it’s a large amount of time, but it’s not completely unrealistic. I’ve had days in my life where not much was going on, and spending a day doing nothing but listening to an entire piece of music would have been an improvement. That said, since discovering The Flaming Lips’s 7 Skies H3 online last Friday, I’ve only be able to listen to about an hour of it thus far. So why on earth would I want to write a 24-hour piece myself (I actually do) and when would I find the time to write such a thing, let alone hear it once it’s done, considering that even a couple of minutes is a time stretch these days?