Timekeepers. Simon Garfield

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      So much happened in 1948 – the establishment of the state of Israel, the Berlin airlift, the birth of the NHS and the Marshall Plan – that the launch of a 12-inch record that spun at 33¹ 3 revolutions per minute seems like a minor thing in comparison. But the impact of the LP was astounding. The possibilities of 22 minutes per side, rather than 4 or 6 on the older 10-inch or 12-inch 78 rpm records, changed the way composers and musicians thought about music and wrote it. It changed the way a generation obtained much of their pleasure and enlightenment, and it’s not for nothing that Philip Larkin dates the start of sexual intercourse around the time of the Beatles’ first LP.

      It would be simplistic to claim that the standard lengths of musical performances have been determined largely by the technical constraints of recording them. But before the wax recording cylinder and the gramophone there was certainly far less need for structure. Songlines on the African plains rang continuously through the centuries; in medieval courts, entertainment lasted for as long as it pleased the throne, or until the money ran out. In more recent times, performance merely tested human patience: how much could we concentrate, and how long would we behave ourselves? A concert would often end when the candles ran down. It was the same with ancient theatre: how long would an audience sit in an unheated space without demanding the Roman equivalent of a choc ice?

      But the recording of music – which effectively began in the 1870s – did change our capacity to hear it. The two-minute and then four-minute limit of the early Edison and Columbia wax cylinders concentrated the mind like a guillotine. Likewise the 10-inch shellac 78 rpm record lasted about three minutes; the 12-inch record (before the micro-grooved long-player) ran about four-and-a-half. The 7-inch 45 rpm vinyl single, introduced in 1949, varied little from this, perhaps three minutes, before the grooves wound so tightly that the sound would deteriorate and the needle would skip.¹⁵

      Mark Katz, a leading historian of recorded sound, has noted that listening to music at home before the LP was a distinct nuisance.¹⁶ He quotes the blues singer Son House from the 1920s, who bemoaned ‘gettin’ up, settin’ it back, turnin’ it around, crankin’ the crank, primin’ it up and lettin’ the horn down’. Bad enough for blues and jazz, fairly catastrophic for classical, for which a recording of a symphony was split into 20 sides on 10 discs (which is how the ‘album’ got its name – a collection of 78s in a folder).

      One got used to it, of course, and in the early days recorded sound must have seemed like a miracle. But creatively it was more than a nuisance; it was a hindrance. An opera or a concerto was no longer split up into the acts or movements intended by the composer, but into false movements created by the limitations of a four-minute wax cylinder or disc. Music would suddenly stop, and the only way it would continue was when someone got up from the armchair. What was the effect of this? Shorter recordings, or more recordings of shorter pieces. Mark Katz has noted that while concerts in the early half of the twentieth century contained the usual array of symphonies and operas, ‘any survey of record catalogues . . . will reveal the dominance of character pieces, arias, marches and brief popular song and dance numbers . . . It was not long before the time limitation affected not only what musicians recorded but also what they performed in public.’ Audiences increasingly wanted the short pieces they knew from their records.¹⁷ The length of the three-minute pop song was cemented, if not created, by the ability to record little more, but it is more surprising that this practice existed both before and beyond pop.

      When Igor Stravinsky composed his Serenade for Piano in 1925, there was a specific reason why the piece only lasted 12 minutes and appeared in four almost equal segments. ‘In America I had arranged with a gramophone firm [Brunswick] to make records of some of my music,’ Stravinsky explained. ‘This suggested the idea that I should compose something whose length should be determined by the capacity of the record.’ Hence four movements of under three minutes, each of which fit snugly on one side of a 10-inch, 78 rpm disc.¹⁸ Composers were also willing to cut their own work to fit the limitations of a record. In 1916, Edward Elgar reduced the score of his Violin Concerto to fit four 78s; an uncut performance would easily last more than twice that length.

      The performance offered by musicians may also change from a concert recital to a recorded version. The visual texture of a live performance may have to be somehow recreated in the listener’s mind by the introduction of vibrato and other resonances. The conductor Nikolaus Harnoncourt believes that ‘if you don’t see the musicians . . . you have to add something which makes the process of music making somehow visible in the imagination of the listener.’ The timing may also change, not least the gaps between movements or other dramatic pauses. A silent musician in a concert hall may provide drama to proceedings by wiping a bow or brow, or damping percussion; on CD this would be dead air. In becoming tighter, a performance may become less broad, and the rhetorical effect reduced.