The other day, I was listening my favorite local news radio station while driving to work. The news guys mentioned that it was Don MClean's birthday, and they began to disparage his magnum opus American Pie. Their main complaint was not the content of the song per se, but rather just the length of it. I believe the phrase was "that song is a beating", and it was just "too long, way too long".
I couldn't help but chuckle about this-- oh how far we have come from the days of minstrels and balladeers. When one thinks that a work like The Rime of the Ancient Mariner could be performed by a bard or gleeman in High Chant, and just how long that would take... and people used to sit and listen to such, enraptured.
The closest thing we have left to such performances now is classical music, and that is definitely on the wane as well. (But, to be intellectually honest, it wanes not just from the length of a given sonata or symphony, but from a general divergence of the public from that sort of music altogether...) And so we live in a world of entertainment now, where the song cannot be too long... "I do not like a long, long song. It's much too long"
I wonder what would have happened had the minstrel of the Fields of Cormallen stepped forward and begged leave to sing of "Frodo the Nine-Fingered and the Ring of Doom", only to be shouted down with requests for Beyonce. Thom Merrillin, the brilliant gleeman character from the Wheel of Time series, complains that the folks in the common room only wanted to hear "The Hunt for the Horn" in Common, rather than even Plain Chant or High Chant: were Thom to be transported via Portal Stone to our world, they would not want to hear it at all, for it would take too long.
As the great Billy Joel said:
Ah, it took me years to write it,
They were the best years of my life.
It was a beautiful song.
But it ran too long.
If you're gonna have a hit,
You gotta make it fit--
So they cut it down to 3:05
I hearby authorize all artists and musicians to write your songs as your muse guides you... regardless of the length. Make the lays compelling, and hopefully we'll follow along. Maybe, just maybe, we can put off the day "the <long> music died......."
I couldn't help but chuckle about this-- oh how far we have come from the days of minstrels and balladeers. When one thinks that a work like The Rime of the Ancient Mariner could be performed by a bard or gleeman in High Chant, and just how long that would take... and people used to sit and listen to such, enraptured.
The closest thing we have left to such performances now is classical music, and that is definitely on the wane as well. (But, to be intellectually honest, it wanes not just from the length of a given sonata or symphony, but from a general divergence of the public from that sort of music altogether...) And so we live in a world of entertainment now, where the song cannot be too long... "I do not like a long, long song. It's much too long"
I wonder what would have happened had the minstrel of the Fields of Cormallen stepped forward and begged leave to sing of "Frodo the Nine-Fingered and the Ring of Doom", only to be shouted down with requests for Beyonce. Thom Merrillin, the brilliant gleeman character from the Wheel of Time series, complains that the folks in the common room only wanted to hear "The Hunt for the Horn" in Common, rather than even Plain Chant or High Chant: were Thom to be transported via Portal Stone to our world, they would not want to hear it at all, for it would take too long.
As the great Billy Joel said:
Ah, it took me years to write it,
They were the best years of my life.
It was a beautiful song.
But it ran too long.
If you're gonna have a hit,
You gotta make it fit--
So they cut it down to 3:05
I hearby authorize all artists and musicians to write your songs as your muse guides you... regardless of the length. Make the lays compelling, and hopefully we'll follow along. Maybe, just maybe, we can put off the day "the <long> music died......."
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