Fast music and slow music

I spend a lot of time at my desk, listening to music, and something triggered me the other day to look at something I wrote in my now out-of-print book, The Speed of Nearly Everything. I decided to share it.

Somebody whose music always
seems never to end, even though
the fat lady is singing all the time.

At the age of 17, Mozart composed his 27th symphony, all in a single day. That was fast music indeed, but at least he never had to put up with a sheet music publisher giving it a nickname.

Later composers mostly hated the nicknames given their works, but it is likely that few would have as good a case as Frédéric Chopin with his Waltz in D flat Major, Opus 64, No. 1, known around the English-speaking world as The Minute Waltz.

From a sampling of recordings, it appears that the usual playing time is between one and a half and two minutes, and those who try to play it in less are usually dismissed as “musical gymnasts”. Artur Rubinstein recorded it at 1:48 and Vladimir Ashkenazy at 1:49, and times up to two minutes are not unknown.

Legend has it that Chopin was inspired by the sight of a small dog chasing its tail, and that he called it by the French title Valse Minute, meaning the little or tiny waltz, so time was not involved. All the same, many performers have managed to get through the work in less than a minute: probably the fastest ever was Liberace, who could complete the work in just 37 seconds, and often did.

Sergei Rachmaninoff made an arrangement of Flight of the Bumblebee and cut an Ampico piano roll that lasts a fraction over a minute. While Ampico rolls are open to doctoring, accordionist Alexander Dmitriev has been filmed playing this work on a bayan (Russian chromatic accordion) in just over 65 seconds by my timing. Accordionist Liam O’Connor, acclaimed by the Guinness Book of Records for achieving 11.64 notes per second could probably do better.

Gabriel Fauré was once asked how fast one of his songs should be sung. He suggested that if the singer was notably deficient of talent, it should be sung very fast indeed.

Then there is slow music.

Few pieces of musical composition can have an accurate time attached to them. John Cage created 4’ 33”, a piece of absolute silence which lasts exactly that long. Most classical music station engineers loathe it, because networks typically have a system that plays standby music after the transmitter has been silent for 90 seconds, and the very nature of Cage’s work ensures that this fallback is triggered at least once (and often twice) in a playing.

By an odd chance, Cage brought fame to perhaps the longest piece of music ever conceived. Erik Satie produced Vexations, his marathon piece on a single sheet in 1893, and Cage arranged for the first complete performance in 1949. There is a catch: while the music can be written on a single sheet, the theme is to be played 840 times, “very slowly”.

Another piece of French music, from Poulenc’s Dialogues of the Carmelites, only seems excruciatingly slow. A chorus of nuns sing Salve Regina as they file off-stage to their deaths, with the interpolation, every so often, of the swoosh of a guillotine blade falling. Each time the sound is heard, one of the performers stops singing. To listeners, the chorus seems to go on for hours.

The guillotine, on the other hand, is very fast. It takes less than one second for the 40 kg blade to drop 4.3 metres, by which time it is travelling at just over 9 m/s, 33 km/hr, 20 mph, severing the neck in 2/100 of a second. Death may take a few seconds, then all is silence.

Some pianists may be tempted, after attempting to play Vexations as a solo work, to wish they had lost at least their fingers to Madame la Guillotine.

At least they would still be able to play 4’ 33”.