Once, while driving through Austin, I happened upon a program on a local radio station where a number of musicians were having a round-table discussion. They were talking about how unfortunate it was that music companies were responding to the changing tastes of the public and had begun to speed up original recording tracks to make the songs faster. The concern, it seems, is that the listening public increasingly requires an MTV-like experience, needing speed and action in order to hold their attention. What struck and disturbed me about this discussion is that they were all classical musicians. They were talking about Bach, not Britney.
I’m sure I just heard what they were talking about. Like several other million people, Bach’s Brandenberg Concertos are some of my favorite classical pieces. I’ve heard them all hundreds, if not thousands, of times. WRR has just played a version of #2, recorded by the Marlboro Festival Orchestra, that sounds like they were given 3 minutes to perform a 4 1/2 minute movement. Movement was certainly the word for it. Frantic might be another. I have to wonder if the violins could actually play that fast for that long.
Has it really come to this? Are our attention spans really that eroded?
