Your Symphonic Behavior

it depends on my mood! I’ll usually listen to the entire work but I’m not above listening to individual movements. so my answer is b I suppose?

generally a) but exceptions made sometimes usually for the last movement of Mahler's Number 9

oh and i shuffle the individual movements of quartets quite often

oh that's fascinating to me NV! I'll listen to a single symphonic movement often for time constraints, it's like with opera, do I honestly have time for all of a Mahler -- not every day, but I may want a Mahler fix -- but with quartets usually I want the whole enchilada

Hi dere, I'm the guy who puts the second and sixth movements of the Brahms Requiem on a loop

This relates to something I've been curious about. I have a tendency to think of symphonies as akin to albums and the movements as tracks. That's obviously a bit of an anachronism, but is it just a coincidence that whole symphonic works (from the classical and romantic periods, anyway) tend to be roughly the same average length as rock/pop/jazz/etc. albums in the recorded era?

Is it that albums initially grew out of those works (the LP being designed for them, perhaps), or does it represent some general fact about listeners' receptive capacities/attention spans?

in two minutes I'm gonna make it to the end of the truly massive opening movement of Shostakovich Symphony No. 7 and I have a decision to make after that about whether I'm going to get work done this morning or spend another hour steeped in the vicissitudes of war

i *think* the quartets thing started for me with Messiaen's End of Time because there's a lot of different moods in there and each movement kind of stands as a piece on its own

but more often than not a lot of my listening is playlists on shuffle that fit a mood or share some sonic affinity (in my head) outside of strictly genre so it became second nature to throw quartets in there, Ives, Bartok, Schoenberg work well, depends on what i'm mixing it up with

if anything i think i tend to listen more to symphonies as a whole except like i said for those odd classic movements where you just want *that* feeling

Almost always (a) but I do seem to be distracted by more pressing matters quite often when it's, say, Bruckner or whatever. I probably know some earlier movements far better than final movements as a result and might benefit from more (b)!

Is it that albums initially grew out of those works (the LP being designed for them, perhaps), or does it represent some general fact about listeners' receptive capacities/attention spans?

i think there's a (possibly apocryphal) story about the original run-time of CDs being based around being able to fit (i think) a couple of Beethoven's symphonies on one disc, somebody with a better memory can correct this. wouldn't surprise me if one of the first uses of long-playing vinyl was classical music but obviously the run-time on a LP is a little more elastic

That's obviously a bit of an anachronism, but is it just a coincidence that whole symphonic works (from the classical and romantic periods, anyway) tend to be roughly the same average length as rock/pop/jazz/etc. albums in the recorded era?

Wasn't the initial maximum length of CDs (74 minutes) decided so that they could fit even the lengthiest performance of Beethoven's 9th on one disc?

xpost

https://www.classicfm.com/discover-music/why-is-a-cd-74-minutes

In the 1980s, when Sony and Philips were beginning to negotiate a single industry standard for the new compact disc technology. One key issue was whether the circumference of the new disc should be 11.5cm or 12cm.

Both Sony and Philips knew that the legendary conductor Herbert Von Karajan would be instrumental to the success of their new format. He had agreed to endorse the CD at the Vienna press conference where they would announce the company's prototype.

But he had one condition: that the new technology could allow listeners to hear the whole of Beethoven's Ninth Symphony without interruption.

The longest recording Sony could find was Wilhelm Furtwängler's glacial 1951 recording which ran to a length of - you've guessed it - 74 minutes.

yeah it's probably true but i wouldn't trust Classic FM as far as i could throw them

Yeah, the real story seems to be more complicated than that:

https://www.wired.com/2010/12/1216beethoven-birthday-cd-length

But Philips engineer Kees A. Schouhamer Immink, who participated in the technical negotiations between his firm and Sony, says that's only part of the story. Writing in the December 2007 issue of the IEEE Information Theory Newsletter, he notes that, yes, there was pressure from execs to fit the Ninth on a single CD, but commercial and technical considerations played a bigger part. For one thing, Sony knew that Philips already had a factory capable of producing 115mm CDs, and Sony wanted to change to a 120mm standard to erase Philips' head start in manufacturing.

Also, as negotiations neared an end, Philips engineers made a technical breakthrough that, at the data compression then planned, would have allowed 97 minutes of music to fit on a 120mm CD, or 75 minutes on a smaller disc. That, Immink writes, was never seriously considered, because the higher-ups had already decided on 120mm, for reasons perhaps competitive and perhaps Beethovenian.

Instead, engineers increased the track pitch from 1.45 µm to 1.6 µm, and the bit length from 0.5 to 0.6 µm. The 30 percent lower information density made production easier and playback more reliable. Maximum playing length was set at 74 minutes, 33 seconds.

That was theoretically long enough for Furtwängler's Ninth, but in reality it wasn't. The real limit for CDs started at 72 minutes, the maximum length of the U-Matic videotapes then used for audio masters. So the Furtwängler performance couldn't be released on a single CD until new digital audio technology made that possible in 1997.

Is it that albums initially grew out of those works (the LP being designed for them, perhaps)

I believe so?
https://books.google.ca/books?id=r76XCwAAQBAJ&lpg=PA87&ots=Cykw_7UYmA&dq=lps%20designed%20for%20classical%20history&hl=fr&pg=PA87#v=onepage&q=lps%20designed%20for%20classical%20history&f=false

There's a famous legend that CDs were designed to hold 75m (or 74m) of music bc the Sony CEO (or his wife or von Karajan) wanted to listen to Beethoven's 9th on one disc but idk what the evidence is: https://www.classicfm.com/discover-music/why-is-a-cd-74-minutes/

Lol 8xposts

It depends on the piece. It's also really dependent on length. I listen to a lot of music at work, and I often get interrupted. When I listen to Bartok's 2nd Violin Concerto, I usually stop after the first movement, because by that point I am just fucking EXHAUSTED. The fourth string quartet? I'll listen to just the last movement for that King Crimson shit. If I'm listening to, like, Beethoven's Fifth? I will listen to the whole thing, because I can't stop listening to it. The Ninth on the other hand is long enough that breaking it up into movements makes more sense.

I also find that if I listen to too much of one kind of music for a long period of time I get burned out on it. I don't know that I could listen to more than a couple symphonies a day.

c. is the only correct answer.

Automatic thread bump. This poll is closing tomorrow.

A is preferable but I do B more often. And sometimes you just want to skip to the demonic end of Symphonie Fantastique

I listen to whole symphonies (and whole string quartets, for that matter) whenever possible. It helps that I only listen to them when a) I'm doing laundry, so I have ~2 uninterrupted hours with headphones on, or b) I've decided to devote a portion of the afternoon to laying on the couch and listening to a goddamn symphony. I never listen to a single movement of a piece unless it sucks and I get bored.

my opinion is not what i'd call strong BUT it seems ~illogical~ (© mr spock) to listen to only part of a symphony so i would never try to do so intentionally

What about Schubert's 8th or Bruckner's 9th?

Automatic thread bump. This poll's results are now in.

damn you

Would have voted a. I do not agree that isolating mvt 2 of Beethoven 5 is analogous to listening to "Good Girls Don't" outside the context of Get the Knack. Symphonies are conceived as unified works, generally. Maybe listening to "Run Like Hell" on its own is like listening to "Der Lindenbaum" on its own, which is more common.

Nobody actually listens to the second mvt of Beethoven 5 by itself, do they? If people listen to any movement by itself it's the first, and if they're doing that they're probably listening to A Fifth of Beethoven by Walter Murphy. That's valid, even though "Night on Disco Mountain" is better. Personally, if I'm listening to the fifth I do listen to the whole thing, but for the Ninth I will just do the Ode to Joy. Yeah it's better in context but it works great out of context.

Man the scherzo would be my extract from the 9th if I were gonna extract the 9th

Nobody actually listens to the second mvt of Beethoven 5 by itself, do they?

I think that's my point, though? The analogy in the OP seems disingenuous (maybe it's meant to be?). A lot of pop albums are really just collections of songs, not necessarily conceived as unified works in themselves; the issue with 'privileging' albums over tracks is that it favours genres that are built around the promotion and consumption of full albums over those that are built more around the promotion and reception of singles or e.g. club tracks. (The argument could be debated but it's at the least comprehensible.) I don't see how the individual movements of symphonies work in a similar way. You can certainly perform or listen to them on their own but they are usually conceived as part of a larger work. If there is an analogous situation, it might be more like operas vs art songs or symphonies vs tone poems. There are real questions of genre privilege that could be raised about absolute music vs program music or orchestral writing vs solo writing.

I guess things that are disingenuous are by definition meant to be so that parenthetical comment is redundant.

(maybe it's facetious?)

No, I'm not trying to be disingenuous, I just thought that your example was not a good one; the idea of the symphony as a Unified Work rather than a collection of discrete notionally related pieces is not, I don't think, inherent to the symphony, but is an occasional addition to the symphony, which was done in symphonies such as, for example, Beethoven 5. Honestly I can't think of a multi-movement symphony that's _more_ of a unified work than Beethoven 5. Even the other Beethoven symphonies that are a cohesive whole, such as the 9th, have movements that can be listened to out of context.

Tbc, I was responding to the analogy in the OP of symphony:movements::album:tracks, not commenting on whether one can listen to movements out of context. (I would do that when studying or analysing something, less often - but not never - when just listening for pleasure; hence answer of a.) Orchestral music isn't my specialization but are there many symphonic composers since the time of Haydn who have thought of their symphonies primarily as compilations of individual pieces that can just as well be listened to on their own or possibly in a different order for a different market? Aiui, there are typical plans for the overall structure and order of types of movements, etc., they are generally written to be played together in order, etc. JCLC probably did mean less by the rockism reference than I read in and was probably mostly just asking about whether people enjoy listening to recordings of individual movements.