4. Is Everything a Song?
What do you consider to be a normal or expected length for a song? When pop radio only played songs in the sixties and seventies, most music was on 45 rpm records: 7” across. Typically, the maximum time for a 45 was three minutes. With a typical 12” long-playing record holding about 20 minutes on a side, you could only cram about six songs on a side, or 12 total for an album.
After many decades of the idea that songs were usually three minutes long, a funny thing happened when Steve Jobs decided to shake up the music industry with iTunes and offer music for just a few cents per cut. Jobs decided to call every piece of music a song, and since a song was three minutes, suddenly everyone expected all music to be about 3 minutes long.
For many dogs this really wasn’t a big change, since (of course depending on the breed) dogs don’t have attention spans much greater than a few minutes. The exceptions might be waiting for their master to come home or waiting for a can of food to be opened. But as you probably noticed, even the best howling session only goes on for a few minutes and then the excitement wears off and a good belly rub or nap seems like the next right thing.
Composers of various kinds of music, writing over the centuries, responded to the typical attention spans of the day. An opera in the nineteenth century could last for three or even four hours. In the sixteenth century, Shakespeare’s audiences expected a play to go for two or even three hours.
Hollywood movies almost never run less than an hour and a half, and can run to two hours or even more. Binge watching a long-form series or an entire season can wrap one up for the better part of a day.
So it seems that our attention spans for drama, when it’s a play or film or series, is as long as it was for people in earlier centuries. But something has happened for many of us when it comes to listening to pieces of music that are longer than a ‘song.’ What might we be missing if it’s really hard to pay attention to music that lasts more than a few minutes?
A shift in expectation may be what’s called for. Let’s start with your dog, since I’m going to assume that your attention span is likely to be longer than your friend’s. If your dog is attuned to fast food, it’s probably because you generally deliver his or her meal at the same time and in the same way. Even though you might add delicious scraps, or mix in the hot water just so, if your friend is used to gobbling it down it’s going to be a real challenge to get them to slow down and just savor the subtle goodness. I did spend some time trying to get both Ziggy and then Tesla to slow down. Both were really great at language commands, like ‘use your inside voice’ to back off on loud barking, or ‘walk with me’ when crossing the street. But the command ‘chew!’ Just never got a lot of traction. Even when I demonstrated how one might really take some time and enjoy the delights of a great barbequed rib, the hounds just found it too unnatural to slow down, bite a little, chew, swallow, wipe that drop of sauce of the lip and repeat.
The challenge is pretty much the same with music. If the dogs or us were raised on the instant gratification of a three minute — or we’ve even been successful at a five minute howling session — we’re probably still not ready for an hour-long symphony or two hour opera.
Here’s where story might help. Music that tells a story will help get us over our fast food fast music expectations and help us retrain. And at this moment, what might constitute a ‘story’ for you might depart from what your canine will find as a compelling narrative. Peter and the Wolf is pretty sure-fire for kids and adults.
But dogs, if they understand the story, can get pretty empathetic with the wolf’s fate and get turned off to the very long form we’re trying to encourage. So start with Peter and the Wolf for you, but don’t overdo the story-explaining to ‘you know who’ who’s sitting next to you on the couch waiting for you to stop reading and start listening.
The composer of Peter and the Wolf was Sergei Prokofiev, a Russian composer born in the very end of the nineteenth century and who grew up as movies were beginning to tell long stories. Prokofiev’s movie scores for Alexander Nevsky and Lieutenant Kijé are as thrilling today as when they first were heard with their films. And their influence is felt everywhere today: John Williams scores for films like Star Wars are built on the Prokofiev sound world.
Fortunately, Prokofiev took his storytelling abilities that he’d refined writing for movies and wrote a piece for children that is often the first piece of ‘classical’ music many of us hear. Here’s the time to listen to a good performance of Peter and the Wolf. If you’re all grown up, try to forget that you are, and instead become eight years old again. Imagine that you’re Peter, venturing out in the wintry Russian woods just a little too far. My favorite recording is a little hard to find these days, but worth it for the wonderful Peter Pan Pirate voice of Cyril Ritchard as the narrator. I won’t give it away here, but don’t miss what Ritchard does with the duck’s last moments (hope that wasn’t too much of a spoiler.)
Peter and the Wolf was intended to introduce some of the major sounds of the orchestra to a young listener, so the basic groups were Peter, represented by the strings (that means all the strings — the violins, violas, cellos and basses) Grandfather by one of the reed family — the other ‘reeds’ are the instruments that have bamboo reeds in their mouthpieces — the clarinets, oboe, English horn, which is really a larger more mellow oboe, and the flutes. (Sorry to make this confusing because there are lots of exceptions to the generalities in classical music. Flutes are reeds but they don’t use any bamboo vibrators to get a sound. The flutist just blows precisely across an open hole and that starts the sound going.)
The other sections that Peter introduces us to are the brass — the hunters are a bunch of French horns, and their guns are done by the tympani drums in the percussion section.
How did your pup do with Peter? Were the hunter’s kettle drums too much? They can be a little alarming, even for kids.
Now we need to find a ‘story’ piece for your dog. If your dog has some hound in her, a composer by the name of Einojuhani Rautavaara might be just the ticket. Rautavaara was born in Finland in 1928, and in 1972 wrote a piece that attempted to capture his northern soundscape: Cantus Arcticus. The work is in three parts, or movements, and, frankly, I don’t think most dogs are going to get all that worked up over the second or third movements. I could be wrong, of course. Some poodles are very smart.
The first movement incorporates some very unusual sounds for the normal orchestra. Birds! I can imagine that someday, somewhere someone is going to perform Rautavaara’s Articus with live birds, but until now, and on the recording you are likely to find, the birds sounds were recorded and mixed by the composer and then played back during the live orchestra performance.
Here’s how to introduce your dog to Rautavaara: find a good quiet time, like after a walk or a good meal, and settle down on your favorite listening spot, and without making too much of a do about it, just put the music on. You might even want to appear not to be too interested — so maybe you want to open a book or check your mail. Ho hum. And then the music will go on for a while, setting the stage, and then — whoa! Is that what I thought I heard? Don’t be surprised if someone jumps off the couch and starts sniffing around the speaker. It really can throw you off your game if you believed through your whole life so far that if there was a bird around you will be able to smell it as well as hear it.
Then your dog is likely to look at you for some confirmation. Did you hear that, Dad? There’s a bird around here somewhere! All you need to do is listen to the music yourself for a moment, nod your head and say something penetrating and wise, such as ‘Birds,’ and go back to your email. In the meantime, you’re getting your dog off of the fast food regime, since now they’re convinced there’s something to listen for. Something that might happen again. And it’s pretty cool, too. Birds! What might happen next?