'One Minute More': Gimmickry trumps artistry in 60-second works

The shortest piece of music written by a major composer lasts three seconds: The snippet Brian Eno wrote to be the sound you hear when Windows starts up on your computer. This nugget of information was offered by the pianist Guy Livingston during his performance Friday at the Library of Congress of "One Minute More," his second evening of 60-second compositions by 60 composers.

Part of the point is to explore the question of music and time, or music in time. Livingston pointed out, and the works he played emphasized, that a minute can seem long, or fleeting.

Some composers took a conceptual approach involving instructions or spoken texts that directly addressed the difficulty of the assignment. Others took it at face value, writing short, graceful little pieces that sped by.

And the concert as a whole played with the notion of time, since the 60 60-second works actually lasted -- with talking, applause, intermission, and so on -- not one but two hours.

Livingston's previous 60-second project, "Don't Panic," was audio-only; "One Minute More" adds a significant video component, with six Dutch filmmakers creating films to accompany 10 short pieces each (the project is available as a DVD).

This visual element challenges the question of authorship, because the linked videos strongly affected the way one heard the music, and the filmmakers had a chance, with 10 videos each, to establish a stronger profile in the audience's mind than the individual composers were able to do in a mere 60 seconds.

Thijs Schreuder, who made the first 10 films, did a particularly fine job of linking images to the music: blurred hexagons of light dancing on water for Alicia Grant's "Water Shadow," a ballet of amusement-park rides for "Hoedown in Sixty Seconds" by Washington composer Brian Wilbur Grundstrom.

The composers were, in a sense, at the mercy of their directors, even though their music ostensibly took center stage.

The risk with presenting so many individual snippets is that they start to blend into a dull roar by the end, and it's the gimmicks that stand out, rather than the grace, as each composer vies for attention.

The audience favorite was Jed Distler's "All 32 Beethoven Sonatas," an ingenious compilation that delivered on its name by shoehorning musical quotes into an impossibly short format.

Livingston, who played urbanely and sometimes gamely (one sequence of videos has him playing the piano outdoors on an icy-looking day in the Dutch countryside), appeared to be having fun, but conceded in his remarks (which lasted considerably longer than one minute) that this was probably his last 60-second project.