What an alarming article to read this morning! If you’re a fool, Ted, may I bask in your sunny, wise foolishness while we savour glorious music to touch and enrich our hearts, minds and souls. Do that in 19 seconds? I don’t think so!
Hi Ted. In my opinion, you nailed it. I'm new to substack and this post just confirmed that I made the right choice to be here. As a musician I feel the pressure to reduce the length of my recorded songs, music videos, etc to please algorithms although I keep reminding myself that the goal is a positive emotional response for the listener, a moment of escape, and - as you say, "our bodies need more than a few seconds to respond to the trance-inducing power of music." Some of my favorite songs are well over 5 minutes...those take courage to record and release these days. Cheers.
Deutsche Grammophon has been making some alarming releases of late to get down with the kids & extract revenue from the easy listening crowd, but they still put out austere things like the occasional Sofia Gubaidullina record, so not all is lost....
Great piece Ted. I see the shorter song length as a phenomena connected with all the other media that is being thrown at consumers. Short films and within them constant cuts of the camera. Short stories and newspaper articles. That 15 minutes of fame is down to 15 seconds. Even life expectancy in the country has dropped to 77.
A band writes songs in the vein of CSNY, The Beatles, and other 70s singer-songwriters. A small label signs them and tells them to focus on writing an EP of 5 singles; each track should be somewhat danceable and be 3.5 minutes or less. The band does this. The label tells the band it must be on TikTok. The band isn’t interested in TikTok. The band is no more.
This is spot on. I think there’s a modern illness where the causes are confused with the consequences and the problems are confused with the solutions.
The focus should be on how to FIX the attention span problem (if it’s real and not just an algorithm failure), not on how to cater to it with non-songs.
Some classical music stations/networks, such as Classical 24, which is based in St Paul, MN, have been contributing to this for many years by playing a single movement of a symphony, or maybe an allegro, only. How can a classical music lover take such a source seriously, and don't they know that classical music requires total immersion, or something pretty close to it?
Classical 24 made me disgusted for the first time a decade ago, when the young announcer referred to Antonin Dvorak, after he had spoken the full name, not as Dvorak, but, so help me, as "Anthony."
You don't want to get me started on this subject! I was a classical announcer on a public radio station for better than 30 years. I was lucky enough to have as my mentor a man who saw to it that there were pronunciation guides appended to every single disc we had in our library. I won't say I never got it wrong, but if I wasn't sure, we had a whole shelf of how-to-say-it guides on our shelves (Hungarian and even Welsh among them). We all worked hard to get it right, but you won't be surprised when I add that our station was absorbed into a statewide public-radio network, with classical relegated to online-only.
It seems as though the lights are going off all across Western civilization to me. You, at least, can look back upon a career as one of the valiant bearers of light.
Singularity, Ted. I was lunching with folks in Silicon Valley in 2010, and we were discussing it then. I was highly skeptical at the time - much less now. Much less. Happy to be mortal.
Singularity doesn’t depend on physical architecture. It begins with psychological dependence and attention span (which are also dynamically trained).
I debated singularity initially, because I doubted the evolution of computer science would ever approach human cognition (and I still do). What I didn’t consider, was the devolution of human cognition, which has greatly exceeded projections. What Ted is describing is a symptom (among thousands), an effect - not a cause. And a minor one.
This is all accelerated by mobility, AI, consumerism and app dependencies. It’s a marked transition.
As is often the case with your articles, Ted, I emerge both despondent and buoyed. Your observations are so insightful, but there is so much pleasure in discovering all that is contrary to this undeniable trend toward brevity: the remarkable Bing & Ruth, for example, one of my current favorites, and so much contemporary music that falls into the "post-rock" category (MONO, This Will Destroy You, Explosions in the Sky, Mogwai) that stretches out into longer forms, and contemporary composers like William Basinski and Loscil and Max Richter, and on and on....
I listen to classic music - entire symphonies that can last for an hour, more or less. I used to listen to Indian music, some of it lasted for hours. I studied African drumming with a djembe Fola and learned that one played until the song was complete - that might be an hour, it might be six hours. That is long form music. I don't listen to modern drivel - it hurts me.
Miniaturization doesn't have to be all bad. I read a great little interview once with Brian Eno about making the startup sound for Windows 95. For him, miniaturization was a challenge that shook loose new ideas.
But then, not everyone can be Eno. And more to your point: his miniatures (or Bach's or Jimmy Giuffre's) exist in the context of longer form works. Scale can only have an impact when there's enough variety for it to be meaningful.
Even John Cage went to 4'33.
What an alarming article to read this morning! If you’re a fool, Ted, may I bask in your sunny, wise foolishness while we savour glorious music to touch and enrich our hearts, minds and souls. Do that in 19 seconds? I don’t think so!
Ted: "You're going the wrong way!"
Algo: "He said we're going the wrong way. How would he know where we're going? We don't even know where we're going."
Being owned by machines…not my idea of either freedom or creativity.
Hi Ted. In my opinion, you nailed it. I'm new to substack and this post just confirmed that I made the right choice to be here. As a musician I feel the pressure to reduce the length of my recorded songs, music videos, etc to please algorithms although I keep reminding myself that the goal is a positive emotional response for the listener, a moment of escape, and - as you say, "our bodies need more than a few seconds to respond to the trance-inducing power of music." Some of my favorite songs are well over 5 minutes...those take courage to record and release these days. Cheers.
Deutsche Grammophon has been making some alarming releases of late to get down with the kids & extract revenue from the easy listening crowd, but they still put out austere things like the occasional Sofia Gubaidullina record, so not all is lost....
Great piece Ted. I see the shorter song length as a phenomena connected with all the other media that is being thrown at consumers. Short films and within them constant cuts of the camera. Short stories and newspaper articles. That 15 minutes of fame is down to 15 seconds. Even life expectancy in the country has dropped to 77.
A brief story from firsthand experience:
A band writes songs in the vein of CSNY, The Beatles, and other 70s singer-songwriters. A small label signs them and tells them to focus on writing an EP of 5 singles; each track should be somewhat danceable and be 3.5 minutes or less. The band does this. The label tells the band it must be on TikTok. The band isn’t interested in TikTok. The band is no more.
&/but the Hitler\Kenny G video is worth subscribing to "The Honest Broker" all by itself!!!!
This is spot on. I think there’s a modern illness where the causes are confused with the consequences and the problems are confused with the solutions.
The focus should be on how to FIX the attention span problem (if it’s real and not just an algorithm failure), not on how to cater to it with non-songs.
Some classical music stations/networks, such as Classical 24, which is based in St Paul, MN, have been contributing to this for many years by playing a single movement of a symphony, or maybe an allegro, only. How can a classical music lover take such a source seriously, and don't they know that classical music requires total immersion, or something pretty close to it?
Classical 24 made me disgusted for the first time a decade ago, when the young announcer referred to Antonin Dvorak, after he had spoken the full name, not as Dvorak, but, so help me, as "Anthony."
You don't want to get me started on this subject! I was a classical announcer on a public radio station for better than 30 years. I was lucky enough to have as my mentor a man who saw to it that there were pronunciation guides appended to every single disc we had in our library. I won't say I never got it wrong, but if I wasn't sure, we had a whole shelf of how-to-say-it guides on our shelves (Hungarian and even Welsh among them). We all worked hard to get it right, but you won't be surprised when I add that our station was absorbed into a statewide public-radio network, with classical relegated to online-only.
It seems as though the lights are going off all across Western civilization to me. You, at least, can look back upon a career as one of the valiant bearers of light.
Singularity, Ted. I was lunching with folks in Silicon Valley in 2010, and we were discussing it then. I was highly skeptical at the time - much less now. Much less. Happy to be mortal.
So you haven't yet had the latest greatest Chip & App grafted into your skull & Neural Network yet ?
Singularity doesn’t depend on physical architecture. It begins with psychological dependence and attention span (which are also dynamically trained).
I debated singularity initially, because I doubted the evolution of computer science would ever approach human cognition (and I still do). What I didn’t consider, was the devolution of human cognition, which has greatly exceeded projections. What Ted is describing is a symptom (among thousands), an effect - not a cause. And a minor one.
This is all accelerated by mobility, AI, consumerism and app dependencies. It’s a marked transition.
Great article, Ted!! Thank you for all you do for the arts 🙏🎶🎵🌹
As is often the case with your articles, Ted, I emerge both despondent and buoyed. Your observations are so insightful, but there is so much pleasure in discovering all that is contrary to this undeniable trend toward brevity: the remarkable Bing & Ruth, for example, one of my current favorites, and so much contemporary music that falls into the "post-rock" category (MONO, This Will Destroy You, Explosions in the Sky, Mogwai) that stretches out into longer forms, and contemporary composers like William Basinski and Loscil and Max Richter, and on and on....
I listen to classic music - entire symphonies that can last for an hour, more or less. I used to listen to Indian music, some of it lasted for hours. I studied African drumming with a djembe Fola and learned that one played until the song was complete - that might be an hour, it might be six hours. That is long form music. I don't listen to modern drivel - it hurts me.
Hope these folks don't make love like they make music . . . oops, sorry. My time is up. Gotta run!
Miniaturization doesn't have to be all bad. I read a great little interview once with Brian Eno about making the startup sound for Windows 95. For him, miniaturization was a challenge that shook loose new ideas.
But then, not everyone can be Eno. And more to your point: his miniatures (or Bach's or Jimmy Giuffre's) exist in the context of longer form works. Scale can only have an impact when there's enough variety for it to be meaningful.