From Songs To Symphonies

Introduction

This is a Seven Days In excavation from 31st January 2020 about how musicians expanded their musical pieces from three-minute songs to twenty-minute opuses and further. I will expand this piece as well because I know there are other pieces that are relevant.

From Songs To Symphonies

I was reading "Follow The Music" and reached the part where the Elektra label got its first rock acts, The Paul Butterfield Blues Band and Love. Love, led by the unfeasibly talented Arthur Lee, were the first band to fill a side with a single piece, the eighteen-minute "Revelation" on "Da Capo", their second album, which you can listen to by clicking on the title link. It starts off with a cod harpsichord before reverting to more standard 4/4 pop rock, progressing/descending into a jam, though more than listenable, owing a lot to long blues jams.

"Revelation", the first piece by a rock band (Love on "Da Capo") to take up a side of a vinyl album, got me thinking of what followed from that.

Classical music seems to have often consisted of lengthy pieces in the form of symphonies, but these were usually split into movements to give orchestras and audiences a rest. Remember, permanent functional recordings that could cope with that sort of length of music did not come until the vinyl album, which was around the late forties, early fifties, and some symphonies outlasted the realistic forty-minute vinyl limitation (anything else results in groove cramming and sound degradation).

The Who had a rock opera in "Tommy" but had started with the mini operas "Rael" (from "Sell Out") and "A Quick One" which, like "Tommy" were sequences of related songs that told a story.

Pink Floyd took up the side of "Meddle" with "Echoes", and "Atom Heart Mother's title track took up the first side. Yes, did the same with "Close To The Edge" and "Relayer", opening with the first side being taken up by "Gates of Delirium".

"Dark Side of the Moon" by Pink Floyd and "Sgt. Pepper" by The Beatles were merged song cycles that had defined songs that segued into others.

Yesterday, on my walk to work, I listened to Jethro Tull's "Thick as a Brick", which is just a single forty-minute piece, obviously consisting of movements, and it amazes me that artists can remember everything to perform these live. That was followed by "Passion Play", which was split by the silly "Hare Who Lost His Spectacles" by effectively took up a full vinyl album.

I recently did a piece on "A Plague Of Lighthouse Keepers" by Van Der Graaf Generator from "Pawn Hearts" which you can read and listen here:

However, Tull were outdone by Mountain, who on the original vinyl album of "Twin Peaks" stretched "Nantucket Sleighride" over two and a half sides, even though it was only thirty minutes long, so we'll go with the studio take of that for this last post in January. It's only six minutes long and an amazing song about whaling, a section of it was also used for an ITV news program "Weekend World", and I always loved the early Mountain album covers, amazing artwork.

Conclusion

Any form of media storage is a limitation to the length of a musical piece, but in live situations, pieces can last a very long time, examples of which are documented here:

An organ in St. Burchardi church in Halberstadt in 2001 began a performance that is due to end in 2640. This makes it the longest running non-computerized piece currently being performed. The most recent note was played on February 5, 2024. The next note will be played on August 5, 2026.

Thank you for reading and I hope to managed to sample a little of the music I have shared in here.