[smashing]

Wonder if all these estimation includes the longest music ever by John Cage (BBC News | EUROPE | World's longest music performance starts) which is still currently playing and will last for another, hmm... 631 years?

Also, if we were to include Morton Feldman's numerous works, like "For Philip Guston" (4 recordings so far, each more about 4 hours), I seriously doubt that 10,000 hours is even close.

 

[ukrneal]

Strange, but interesting question. I had a different approach. You can get complete editions of various composers. For example (from brilliant):

1. JS Bach: 155 discs
2. Mozart: 170 discs
3. Beethoven: 85 discs
4. Haydn: 150 discs
5. Complete Brahms: 60 discs
That is just FIVE composers. And if you assume 1 hour per disc, you get roughly 520 hours from just FIVE composers.

Let's take into account a few more compilations:
1. Hyperion Schubert Songs: 40 discs
2. Elgar Collectors Edition: 30 discs
3. Stravinsky Complete Works: 22 discs
4. Vivaldi Masterworks: 40 discs
5. Hyperion Liszt Piano Music; 88 discs (if I counted correctly)
6. Complete Chopin: 17 discs
THat's another 237 hours.

THen we take into acount the (easily) over 450 operas that exist. I did a quick count from an old Kobbe's Opera. This is easily over 1250 hours of music. And this only includes 5 operas by Offenbach. He wrote at least another 90 operas and operettas (most of which have not been recorded).

So even 10,000 hours seems like a low number. With just a few calculations, we are at over 2000 hours having barely scratched the surface. And we have not counted the other Bachs, Shostakovich, Strauss (I think the Marco Polo complete edition had 70+ discs), Prokofiev, Rachmaninov (30+), Dvorak, etc, nor the lesser known operas, ballets, solo works, chamber works, etc. I would guess the number of hours to be significantly higher.

 

[Moontan13]

2k hours is about what a person spends in a year at a 40/hr/wk job, so 10k hours is doable.
If the listening can be casual, non-"serious" listening while you do other things, the time needed would be shortened a lot.