ABSTRACT
Digital music is currently in vogue. Studies on electronic classical music, however, is relatively rare. In ‘Re-Scaling Beethoven: Very Long, Very Short’, Professor PerMagnus Lindborg of Th City University of Hong Kong considers our perceptions of iconic musical works as filtered through the technology of sound recording and reproduction. He discusses how musical pieces of extreme (long or short) durations are perceived and characterised by listeners in terms of continuity, slowness, and repetition for very long pieces and recognisability and specificity for very short pieces. With an experiment based on Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony and a couple of its derivatives, the overarching concept of iconicity is brought out as a quality enabled by technologies of appropriation.
