thirty three one third
long playing, unlimited
wasn’t long enough
With a movie on his life coming out, Leonard Bernstein has been much in the news of late and it got to me thinking about recordings of his work as a Director of an orchestra.
Looking through files available to me, I found the complete 9 Beethoven symphonies.
I downloaded the files and was adding them to my iphone when I noticed something odd.
The 9th symphony was in five sections.
The 4th movement was in 2 parts.
I listened to the files and tried to puzzle out why one section of the 4th movement was the first 8 minutes and the 2nd part was 19 minutes long and why there were 2 sections to start with.
I checked the notes that downloaded with the files and they said the CD that the files came originally from was produced back in 2004.
This CD is available still today on Amazon.
I was about to put the notes away when I noticed in small small print the line, LIVE PERFORMANCE and the year, 1980.
Ahhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh, I said.
This set of recordings were originally offered as records.
LP records.
Long Playing records that turned at constant speed of 33 1/3 revolutions per minute.
Those old records could hold about 22 minutes of music.
The 4th movement of Beethoven’s 9th symphony is about 26 minutes long.
Somewhere, someone had to choose a point to break that 4th movement into two parts.
My first thought was to wonder why someone didn’t bother to take the time to couple the two electronic files together into one file for the CD.
How lazy could you get that someone just took the digital masters of the vinyl recordings and lumped them together on this CD with an unfortunate skip 7 minutes into the 4th movement.
It really got to bug me when I thought of the mostly apocryphal story that when Sony created CD’s, the President of Sony, a one time classical music conductor, demanded that a CD had to be long enough so that Beethoven’s 9th Symphony could be played on a single CD which is why a when a CD came out it had 88 minutes of music.
Then another thought came to me.
No one argues that Mr. Bernstein and the music he created or had a part in creating is all incredibly wonderful.
While we have the recordings, we have the recordings via the technology of the era.
Records limited to 22 minutes.
When RCA Victor standardized the 33 1/3 record (and the first record, sold in 1931, was Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony, performed by the Philadelphia Orchestra under Leopold Stokowski) they only lasted 15 minutes.
The LP that made 23 minutes of sound available was ground breaking technology in 1948.
23 Minutes of recorded music.
Unlimited in many aspects.
But the long playing album wasn’t long enough.
Not until that 88 minute CD came out was there room enough for Mr. Beethoven and his 9th.
There are some technological advances that ARE cultural ones I guess.
Technology comes into the music picture often today with advances in recording, mastering, editing and even instruments themselves.
Listening to these audio files from 1980, what I noticed the most was the changes in microphones and what can be picked up an reproduced.
The whole concept of sounds and sound and recording and then stepping ahead to digitally reproducing the sounds gets me to the edge where, like sausage, I no longer want to know.
Just let me listen.
Somehow, regardless, the recordings or maybe the music itself still picks up personality.
Mr. Bernstein was famous for his energy as he directed.
Mr. Beethoven was famous for the energy as he composed.
The musicians, unless they were dead or something, picked up on both sources of energy and produce sounds filled with energy.
Beethoven has been dead for almost 200 years (2027)
Mr. Bernstein has been dead for over 30 years.
Loud and clear today.
No Haiku For You 