Liberal Rewards

The average duration of a track of classical music is around 8:26 (8 minutes and 26 seconds), based on the website www.naxos.com/workman, which features a reasonably good representative sampling of classical music. Compare this to the average duration of a pop song, which is around 3:43, based on my own digital collection. On average, then, classical music tracks are more than twice as long as pop music tracks.

That is point one. Here is point two:

In The NPR Guide to Building a Classical CD Collection, Mstislav Rostropovich, the famous cellist and conductor, provides an illuminating introduction, titled "On Listening to Music." In it, he brings up the point that getting distracted while listening to classical music is akin to reading a novel and skipping over pages.

So, not only are classical music works long, but you have to pay close attention to them, too. For these reasons, it is not surprising that newcomers to classical music may feel intimidated. What is worse, in my experience, many people innocently approach classical music the way they would approach pop music (after all, it's all music, right?), whereas an approach more like the one people use for watching movies or for reading novels is in fact appropriate.

Listening to classical music requires effort on the part of the listener, there is no doubt. Granted, sitting quietly in a room for half an hour listening intently to music might feel less natural than sitting quietly in a room watching a movie. But, for those who enjoy classical music, they have learned that all of their effort is liberally rewarded.