I was writing an e-mail to a friend today when I began to muse on the subject of life expectancy versus attention span. According to Wikipedia, the average person born into a first world country during the pre-Industrial Revolution 19th-century could look forward to around thirty-seven years of life. That's not very long, especially considering that things took far longer to accomplish then than now: letters were written and delivered exclusively by hand, wholly free of mechanical intervention; there were no cars, planes, or high-speed trains; any internet in existence was surely a fishing or hunting tool and presumably not much help to anyone looking to collect masses of information in a tight time frame. My not having lived in the 1800s prevents me from saying this with any great authority, but it seems that the pace of life then was less frantic than what we have today. Things were meditated upon. Skills were more fully learnt. Hobbies were undertaken in earnest.
By way of comparison, Wikipedia lists the average 21st-century first world life expectancy as 64.77 years. That's nearly double the 19th-century lifespan, and it would seem this time windfall would take the edge off the carpe diem ethos and allow people to more fully pursue individual interests. But it's not so. High speed travel, the internet, and an abundance of popular media allow us to flit from place to place and from topic to topic with the capriciousness of hummingbirds, seldom pausing for a sustained look, always confident that anything of interest can be revisited with terrific ease later on, or learnt expeditiously. We cherish our remarkable technological advantages for reasons of quantity, which is to say that we love them for the huge volume of stimuli they inject into our lives. Life moves fast nowadays, and it affords us the experiences of four 19th-century lifetimes. We see more, and do more, and absorb more, but perhaps know less.
Looked at from the viewpoint of "classical" music, the world seems to be coming to an end. Or at least that's what scores of critics have been trumpeting for decades. This notion is supported by the clash of 21st-century ethos and pre-20th-century euphony, but is undermined by audience numbers, which, if anything, are increasing with every passing year. Older music is clearly being experienced differently these days than when it was originally composed, and I'm very curious to see how this new paradigm is ultimately interpreted. We're certainly able to pack more in, but are we missing the point along the way?
Incidentally, I found myself in a last-minute sprint to Tanglewood last night in order to hear Hilary
Hahn play Dvořák's Violin Concerto with the Boston Symphony Orchestra. It was worth the rush though, because she was terrific, and capped off her performance with Heinrich Ernst's Erlkönig, which is difficult as hell what with all its triple-stopping, harmonics, and left-hand pizzicato, yet was played alarmingly well by HH. So well, in fact, that it made the BSO's rendition of Eroica, which occupied the second half of the bill, seem a bit wishy-washy in execution. All told, it was a great, rainy Berkshire night.
