How long is a piece of classical music?

Sometimes, limitation means inspiration. One of my first assignments in graduate school at Penn State was to write one sentence on the importance of practicing scales. The catch was the 12-word limit! I wrote a 12-word sentence, but I didn't like it, and I don't even remember it. After crossing that one out and thinking a while, I came up with an inspired, pithy, and accurate sentence:

"Practicing scales fosters the foundation of error intoleration."

Those 8 words store meaning, and feature an alliteration and a rhyme! The professor hated it because of its "preachy" tone. I can see why, but one of his rules of writing was "write your draft and cut it by a third." I did exactly that. I got an A.

What happens to a piece of classical music with similar limits? You get the "InstaConcerto."

Today's social media world emphasizes shortness of expression, and that has literally squeezed new genres of micro-art into existence. Classical musicians have recently taken to this trend. Composer, Peter Breiner wrote the "InstaConcerto" as "an experiment in art, music, social media, and composition." Each movement of this piece fits into 15 seconds, or the original time limit for sounds on Instagram.

Here is the complete performance by Avi Avital.

A good piece of micro-art is memorable, thought provoking, and leaves the audience wanting more. I think of good micro-art as a very rich chocolate cake. You eat one tiny slice and you want more, but you just can't do it.

Other composers will surely follow this trend of miniaturization, and the days of huge new classical works may be over; however, mammoth Mahler Symphonies, Beethoven's behemoth 9th, and other colossal classical works of the past are not going anywhere. The value of large-scale works remains high, but tiny works are making inroads.

So, a piece of classical music can last anywhere between 75 seconds and a couple of hours. I love miniaturization of art forms such as music and poetry, and at the same time, I hate it. On one hand, it distills works into the purest, densest expression. On the other hand, it plays into our culture of the shrinking attention span. In today's fast-paced world, few people would ever sit down and listen to a performance of Mahler's Symphony no. 1. Perhaps some may lose interest before the end of the InstaConcerto.

Thinking back to my writing about practicing scales, the assignment could have been a 3-page paper on the subject. My professor would have been stuck reading 30 papers full of fluff and B.S.--an unimaginably boring job. Instead, the class produced many fun, informative, witty, dense, and pure sentences. Writing on a tiny scale requires a different type of thought. The writer has to make tough decisions on what is most important and how to pack it. A great long novel, or symphony carries a heavier payload than a short work, but it's refreshing to see the writer's expression fully distilled.

By their nature, artists will take to any medium and limitations with which they are presented. They take strict limits and outlandish media as a challenge. What will the social media sphere come up with next? I don't know, but artists and musicians will exploit it, limits and all!

For those of you who read to the end of this post. Here is a link to the NPR News story about the InstaConcerto.