How Long Were 19th Century Songs?

Factual Questions
1

I’ve just started Playback: From the Victrola to Mp3, 100 Years of Music, Machines, and Money, by Mark Coleman, which looks to be fun and fascinating.

Even in the first few pages, though, Coleman has already said a variation of the following several times:

OK, we can all agree that since the invention of playback machines the length of popular music has been artificially limited.

But wasn’t most popular music of the 19th century already fairly short? Wasn’t the popular music that came from vaudeville, traveling minstrel shows, marching bands, folk music and Americana, ethnic dances, ballads and all the other sources composed to be short and memorable? (Barring the occasional 100-verse comic folk epic.) Most people can’t manage a fast dance of more than a few minutes at a time.

Fairly short is relative to the hour-long symphony, of course. The question that I have is how short short is. Three or four minutes? Eight minutes? Ten?

Did playback machines really cut the length of popular music by half or more, or was the technology just following the ordinary length of music at the time?

2

Slight hijack - it’s reputed (yeah, I know, urban legend) that the 74 minutes running time of the original standard for CDs was set to accommodate Beethoven’s ninth symphony.

3

A quick look at a couple of 19th Century popular songs (e.g., Stephen Foster), show the sheet music ran 3-5 pages, and the longer version had multiple part harmony. It would take around three minutes to sing.

Remember, too, that Edison’s singers were usually using existing songs, not creating them for the phonograph. Finally, if songs routinely ran longer in Edison’s time, why wouldn’t he just use a longer cylinder to fit them in?

4

Well, there’s the Minute Waltz, of course. And the Blue Danube – that’s about 1:20.

And many of the classical dance pieces seem to be about that range – between 2 minutes up to about 4 or 5 minutes. And all those were long before the influence of gramaphone, LP record, CD, etc. technology. So I would expect it is more related to the stamina of the average dancing couple (especially given the costumes worn back then) than to technology.

5

I’ve got three recordings of the Blue Danube, and the shortest is over 7 minutes long. And besides, neither of these is a “song.”

6

So you’re all basically confirming my notion that the author is full of it. I’ll keep that in mind as I get farther into the book.

Thanks, all.