Taking More Time

I was just perusing the prose score to a work by Douglas Leedy, Ocean Park 2 (or, Entropical Paradise Lost) from 1969-70.  It's one of Leedy's environmental pieces  (he was a pioneer in the field,  before the label "ambient" took hold in the 70s, with his models Satie/Milhaud and spatial/environmental music traditions like those for wind bands or carillon) and uses an ensemble who have recordings which they play back on portable cassette players of or related to his own synthesized work Entropical Paradise (released as a 3-LP album in 1968 by Seraphim Records.) While it is notable as a useful solution to the problems of presenting recorded music in live recordings (the performers begin, seated, among the audience, and then exit the hall with their sounding cassette players in tow) the most striking aspect of the score to me was this:

"Ideal total duration: 6-7 minutes."

By contemporary music concert standards, 6-7 minutes has come to represent a very brief duration for a program item, making an incredibly modest demand on an audience.  We have come to expect pieces pushing 20 minutes or so, whether at Da Proms or Da Rmstadt or at some Laptopping or Circuitbreaking gig.  Indulging the better part of an hour is not rare. Have we, as audiences, really become so much more patient?  Or do composers, generally speaking, really have that much more to say and require so much more time to say it?   While I would like to say yes to both of these questions: yes, that there has been some social-psychological change in the past decades (yes, Marge, those years of yoga class have paid off!) which has led to a net increase in listeners' patience and, yes, composers have gotten both smarter and more productive of compelling music, I just can't discount some other concerns, for example, the practical one, that once over a threshold of, say, 10 minutes, the license fees for a concert performance go up significantly (or simply, more time played means more money for the composer) or that concert organizers prefer to minimalize the number of items on a concert.  I don't, a priori, have any opposition to a piece of long duration (in fact, many of my best friends...), but do find the ratios between material and duration as well as between audience patience and composerly indulgence to be important but frustratingly sensitive to assess in advance (yes, an ideal total duration is hard to find) and  I do find it unfortunate, for too many reasons, that it's probably much harder these days to put a three-minute solo piano piece (or a 6-7 minute piece for cassette playing ensemble) on a program than it is to take up a much larger fraction of an hour with pieces demanding significantly more resources.