Mini-episode: Why is some Classical Music so damn long?

There’s a string quartet written by the American composer Morton Feldman in the 1980s that is about 6 hours long. ‘Einstein on the Beach’, the opera by Phillip Glass and Robert Wilson, is about five hours long and is performed without an interval. There is of course plenty of classical music that is well under these eye-watering durations. A Vivaldi concerto can be over in ten minutes… Aaron Copland’s ‘Fanfare for the Common Man’ is under four minutes and most Chopin Nocturnes are three to five minutes long. But there is still a perception and an understandable one… that classical music is long. And it is a quick leap to the conclusion that it is too long. Well, there might be another way of looking at it.