best and greatest
Aug. 2nd, 2003 09:45 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
mmcirvinSomething I forgot to mention earlier: if you search for "the greatest piece of music ever" on Google, the results are much more dominated by Beethoven's Ninth and Handel's Messiah than if you search for the best piece of music ever, which brings up more random pop and rock songs.
So is there a distinction between best and greatest? Some people make a clear distinction between what they consider greatest and what they enjoy the most. Guilty pleasures are not great though they may be very good. The pieces considered great tend to be very big ones, like the above or Wagner's Ring cycle. I suppose that makes etymological sense, at least.
(Listening to all of the Beethoven symphonies, one thing that strikes me is how different in length they are. The Ninth is gigantic, even for a major symphonic work; it runs about an hour, and even the famous choral movement is longer than some of his earlier symphonies, at about half an hour if you include the five-minute instrumental prelude where the Ode to Joy theme comes in for the first time in the strings. I remember hearing a rumor that the 70-minute CD format was determined by the length of some recording of the Ninth that some executive liked. But the Fifth is actually kind of short and really clips along.)
Correction: I misremembered: the last movement is really only about 21 minutes long. That's still pretty long for a movement.
Also: Here's the Snopes page on the CD length legend, which is probably bogus. For one thing, most modern recordings of the Ninth Symphony are, as I said, more like an hour.
So is there a distinction between best and greatest? Some people make a clear distinction between what they consider greatest and what they enjoy the most. Guilty pleasures are not great though they may be very good. The pieces considered great tend to be very big ones, like the above or Wagner's Ring cycle. I suppose that makes etymological sense, at least.
(Listening to all of the Beethoven symphonies, one thing that strikes me is how different in length they are. The Ninth is gigantic, even for a major symphonic work; it runs about an hour, and even the famous choral movement is longer than some of his earlier symphonies, at about half an hour if you include the five-minute instrumental prelude where the Ode to Joy theme comes in for the first time in the strings. I remember hearing a rumor that the 70-minute CD format was determined by the length of some recording of the Ninth that some executive liked. But the Fifth is actually kind of short and really clips along.)
Correction: I misremembered: the last movement is really only about 21 minutes long. That's still pretty long for a movement.
Also: Here's the Snopes page on the CD length legend, which is probably bogus. For one thing, most modern recordings of the Ninth Symphony are, as I said, more like an hour.
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no subject
Date: 2003-08-02 03:19 pm (UTC)Then the market figured out the length, maybe. Or maybe someone picked up a Popular Science magazine and read out of context that 74 minutes is the length of human musical endurance or something. Who knows.
no subject
Date: 2003-08-02 04:23 pm (UTC)Here's a little discussion from alt.folklore.urban on the issue (http://www.urbanlegends.com/misc/cd/cd_length_karajan.html); apparently there are relatively obscure recordings that go to 73 or 74 minutes, one of which has a Nazi youth choir.
A case of a parallel radius/time relation
Date: 2003-08-02 11:42 pm (UTC)For the traditional <50 minute IMAX documentary film, a 4'-or-so diameter platter is adequate, but for second-run feature length movies, larger platters are required, and while as recently as a year ago the limit was 2 hours with a 6'+ platter. This was good enough for the abridged versions of "Apollo 13" and "SWEp2: Attack of the Cl0nes." "The Matrix Reloaded" upped the limit to somewhere around its length of 2:18 with a new platter almost 7' wide. (The feature is uncut but the credits are abbreviated time-wise because they have more screen area they can fill.) The film itself weighs over 600 pounds (and almost 9 miles long), and I don't know what the operating limit is for the platter's drive system. I do know that platters any larger would limit one's ability to move safely in the projection room, and the center of the spindle is only some 5-6 feet from the projector-box, and its bulky cooling system.
But for the time being, you may correctly tell people that the IMAX projector platter is as large as it is because some Warner Brothers executive really wanted it to fit "The Matrix Reloaded" uncut, exercising a power that, mere months before, George Lucas himself could not muster.
Re: A case of a parallel radius/time relation
Date: 2003-08-03 12:06 am (UTC)Re: A case of a parallel radius/time relation
Date: 2003-08-05 03:28 am (UTC)Which makes me wonder one more thing-- why do we still see cigarette burns in movies, and why at such odd times? When I saw a movie recently, maybe "Northfork" (pretty, but unsuccessful), there was one at like 20 minutes into the movie, well before a reel change could possibly have been called-for.