Modern Times -- The High Cost of Speed
Albert Mohler
Posted: Monday, May 01, 2006

Tony Long contributes a thoughtful piece on the speed of modern life in "A Sour Note on Modern Times," published at Wired magazine. Long begins with a lament on the fact that classical music stations, in a desperate attempt to attract new listeners, are chopping up symphonies for quick bite-sized listening.

Take a look at his lamentation:

I tuned into my local classical music station the other day and was pleased to hear the andante from Beethoven's Sixth Symphony. I would like to have heard the movements that followed it, too, but the station chose to play Ludwig's scene by the brook as if it were written as a stand-alone piece of music.

The standard symphonic form contains four distinct movements (although the Sixth has five to accommodate Beethoven's sudden summer squall) with a total duration lasting anywhere from 20 minutes (common in Mozart's and Haydn's day) to an hour (for those expansive Romantics Beethoven, Mahler and Bruckner).

Regardless of its length, the symphony -- or concerto, or chamber work -- was meant to be heard as a unified piece of music, not chopped into bits and served as finger food. Yet increasingly, classical stations everywhere are doing exactly that. There are some legitimate reasons, survival being foremost among them. the rest