March 6ths

3/6/2012

The objective of a composer is to make complete musical statements—however long they take. Faster tempos will have a natural tendency to decrease total duration, as the musical ideas lose kinetic energy more quickly, especially if parts are played manually (as opposed to looping them).

Short pop songs tend to be fast, typically with manic drumming. Slower songs, in the days when all music was on some type of fixed medium, were tacked on at the end, or on cassette tapes and CDs, hidden tracks.

The meaning of the short song has also changed over the decades. In the 1950s and 1960s, short songs were the result of the constraints inherent in the medium itself, and of radio play. Over time the strategy becomes more clever, as in the Silverstein songs, e.g. “People won’t listen to more than 30 seconds, so let’s make it that long”, or with streaming audio, the ability of the artist to earn a micro-royalty (or “nano-royalty” some may proclaim).

Some music sounds longer because of more musical density or how we perceive it in the context of our lives. Durations can sometimes be shaped by our perception of them, based on how we feel at that particular moment. Sometimes spatial dimensions can impact how we perceive temporal dimensions, such as where we are at the time we are listening. If one is feeling rushed, short songs might seem too short, or even ironic or annoying.

Longer pieces at fast tempos can become tedious in the absence of variation in melodic and/or harmonic elements. The challenge for composers is to spin out sonic elements to target certain lapses in perception and tweak the music accordingly. Philip Glass’s works can seem overly repetitive to many listeners not familiar with his composition technique or understanding it in a cultural or historical framework. Of course, the Serialists had that problem and will continue to be misunderstood when the music is deracinated from the era in which it was created.

In some respects, the short song has now become more of a gimmick or novelty, done for irony rather than a spontaneous or emergent property of the creative process, but time will tell. In fifty years Silverstein’s treatment of the short song may sound as dated as a short Beatles song.

The 2:30 Threshold

2:30 seems to be the threshold for lapses in attention of unfamiliar work—meaning it is all people can endure before turning it off, or walking out of performances. Short songs eliminate this altogether, as they naturally strip away intros, outros, bridges, climbs, refrains, and solo sections.

In the classical period, composers followed the sonata form as a template for composing music, which consisted of an exposition section (where the musical ideas are introduced), the development (where the elements are transformed and expounded), and the recapitulation (where the main ideas are penultimately restated in preparation for the Finale.) The length of the phrase or section was irrelevant, as it was dictated by what composers thought of as being a cogent musical idea—not overcooked or undercooked in terms of what the seed ideas could produce—no more no less.

But this is a very different strategy than doing something reflexively different. Short songs as a strategy can actually be a cunning creative device depending on whether it ends up being seminal in some way, rather than a rehash of an old idea. In the art world, minimalist procedures were hugely seminal as it reacted against Abstract Expressionism.

In the punk era, short, loud, angry songs were profoundly epochal. But the short song genre isn’t really having the same impact now as it seems to have no larger influence on musical practice generally. However, duration as a constraint, like any other limitation, can be a useful creative device.

3/6/2021

Popular music is really a form of conceptual art because some people will get it and some won't. It's "coded" in some respects. But as you get older you get to interact with more conceptual art and don't always need new concepts. You might try out the new concept and you can say that's sort of like the old concept—I don't need more concepts. But when you're younger you have these new concepts that you're first encountering and they're very interesting and you want to experiment with them and you see them as the future. The future is made up of many "pasts"—going back to the beginning of time if you want—so you're not creating anything new, you're just getting older and going into the future and you're seeing that all these ideas that you thought were new were in the past in some way. They're re-contextualized but they're basically the same.

[3/6/2025: All music that has words is essentially 'conceptual' because it conveys an idea. Song lyrics can be didactic in a different way than pure poetry. Lyrics have a way of making the superficial elements less opaque].

3/6/2025

Reading more of David Hadju’s Uncanny Muse. It's interesting that in the early days of mechanical instruments like the orchestrelle and pianola in the early part of the 20th century, people were buying them because they wanted to vicariously play with “feeling,  But if you look at it from the aspect of what is actually happening cognitively when you play music and you play it with “feeling”, is different from a machine activating mirror neurons. This is happening today with people generating music with AI. Sometimes it generates emotional-sounding music, but you weren't “instrumental” in that emotion, you're just feeling that emotion. (“With no artist in sight, an unexpected art emerged with unforeseen effects.”) When you're actually playing music, it is in fact mechanical, even for people who’ve been playing for a long time. Feeling is mostly a fleeting illusion, at least as it relates to playing music. The lasting impact of music on emotions is that if there's some kind of encoding involved, which can occur from the coupling of an experience in a place while listening to music, and the experience of looking at images along with the music, such that when you re-listen to the music or look at the images again it reactivates that experience as a form of nostalgia–”bringing you back”. And typically those kinds of emotions are more powerful than the ones you'd experience when you are playing music. So these feelings that we have for music are the result of mechanical processes, primarily recordings. Many times we’re moved just as intensely by things that work as a beautiful machine, like an expensive sports car. If that’s thrilling in itself, isn’t that a satisfying emotion as well? And if you’re really into cars, you’re not looking for anything else emotionally, and will probably find art and music less interesting in evoking it. In a Lester Bangs interview with Eno, he said that what people call unemotional simply doesn't have one single overriding emotion to it, and the things he likes best are the ones that are ambiguous on the emotional level. I feel this as well when I'm working with random elements in some kind of AI context, and produces a result that causes some kind of an emotion, but it's not a standard generic emotion that crowds of people would react to. It's an emotion that I'm personally feeling that's unique.