Thoughts on modern music

Just ran out of new ideas, so thought about writing down some old ones.

Talking about myself and my lifetime journey on music composition I tend to believe that music as a form of art has changed dramatically although it still resists modern days. Art itself has changed dramatically, because individuals, society, expression, feelings have changed. Music is still a mind game, but times have changed.

Modern people tend to live fast. Extremely fast. They consume art faster than ever. So what is the modern form of art?

In visual arts we can definitely imply that memes and selfies are the modern form of visual art, while animated gifs are the modern form of animated art.

"Hey!!! But that's cheap art!"...no no no...there is no thing as cheap art. Art is a mind game. It's intriguing our senses mostly on a mental way and then on a sentimental way. The current forms of art are not cheap. Cheap art was always there, being 90% of the art production, but always there was a 10% of exceptional art.

So what about music?

Music has the tendency to need more time. Time is essential to music to unfold it's ideas or as Schoenberg said to create a problem and then move towards the solution.

In my personal music journey in composition which started about 20 years ago, well, I wanted to write songs. Songs that differed in some way so that they could stand out. And that is what I was doing when I was around 20.

Around my 30s I got rid of lyrics and moved towards composing instrumental music. Although lyrics still have more power because they get directly to the point and music originally is about singing(...anyone wants to be able to sing a favorite song). However instrumental music goes beyond the language barriers and can be universal. After all music itself is a language that works for anything in the universe.

Here is an inspiration test I did trying to write 3 songs with the same 3 instruments lasting exactly 3 minutes each:
1/3 For Your Eyes
2/3 For My Heart
3/3 For Our Souls

Nowadays, I believe that music should follow the other forms of art and be short in duration. This is because as I stated before, most people live extremely fast. I rarely can listen to a song completely...perhaps the first 10-15 seconds, then move forward, and even more rarely I can appreciate modern music.

Here is an attempt to write shorter pieces:
Sweetsy

The solution to my problem was presented by my looper pedal. Music doesn't have to be linear on a horizontal time level. Music can also be vertical to the time level. This means that all the music ideas can be composed vertically and then layered horizontally on time. It's like having 4 measures and doing continuous overdubs to the same thing. Then split all those ideas and layer them on time.

An application of this concept is tested to this last song:
Touche for cliche

In support to my thoughts, we know that for some years now every song should have a 3 minute radio edit. Nowadays 3 minutes is too much. We should be able to do less and tell more in a shorter duration...perhaps moving towards new soundscapes by actually using the polyphony of the Renaissance to modern music, because this is what it is mainly about.

All images are downloaded from Pexels free stock photos