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24 Hours Of Beethoven's 9th Symphony

Posted by Hemos on from the hold-that-whole-note dept.

Ermintrude the Flying Cow writes "Ever wonder what "Ode to Joy" would sound like if stretched to 24 hours? Now you can find out. 9 Beet Stretch is the result of running Beethoven's 9th Symphony in a digital stretching program, turning the one hour piece into a 24 hour attention span acid test. Thankfully, for those of us who know our limits, it's been cut into 19 parts."

4 of 348 comments (clear)

  1. Re:strange people by xinit · · Score: 5, Informative
    Apparently the theory behind Empire was that it could be displayed as a piece in a gallery... you could look at it and see an effectively still image. The image changed, of course, but not like you'd expect a MOVIE to.

    So, what the piece was was more of a painting or a photograph with some dynamic content.

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    --- http://foo.ca
  2. Re:how's the stretch come out? by delfstrom · · Score: 5, Informative

    It's really amazing! I'm listening to section 4.1 right now. It sounds like a complete orchestra making very long, slowly changing notes, such as background music for a movie.

  3. Re:strange people by lingqi · · Score: 4, Informative

    I know "Empire" because I took a philosophy of art class.

    Now, I am probabbly getting a lot of this wrong and my professor will smack me for getting them wrong, but as far as I remembered, one of the mojor reasons why it was so "genius" is because it explored the medium of film and contrasted it to the ideas of stillness.

    The idea is that on a static medium (painting / photography), you obviously cannot show movement, as even the best painting is only the capture of a moment (lets not get into Van Gough and the funny square stuff for a second);

    Similarly, a moving medium like film can capture motion, but in turn, it REALLY captures something static in a much more "complete" sense than, say, a painting can - case in point, you can see the empire state building, unmoving amongst the birds (there is this famous scene when a seagull flew by), clouds, etc. This contrast of moving (the environment) and the still (the building) is only captureable, and experssed, on film. In turn, the stillness of the building is understood in a way that is unexpressable on a photograph, a painting, or whatever.

    Of course, maybe there are some obscure purpose to this stretching of the symphony too? I really don't know - one thing the class taught me was that art is wayyyy over my head. :-)

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    My life in the land of the rising sun.

  4. Just a nitpick by selan · · Score: 5, Informative

    "Ode to Joy" is a poem written by Schiller. Beethoven used the poem as the lyrics for the fourth movement of the symphony, which is the choral section and most famous part of the symphony. The symphony also has three other movements, so it's not really accurate to refer to the whole symphony no. 9 as "Ode to Joy."

    </pedantry>

    Phew. Now that's off my chest, you can continue about your business.