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As some of you may know, I bought myself a crapload of CDs for my
birthday, containing a selection of the very best music from the 1950s
and later. And let me tell you, some of this music is very, *very* good.
But hey, what do you expect from a deliberately unrepresentative sample? ;-)
I've noticed several things while listening to this stuff. Probably the
most striking thing is the track times. For example, take an iconic
track such as Darin's "Dream Lover". It's so well-known that "almost
everybody" who was alive at the appropriate time has surely heard it and
would instantly recognise it. But did you know... from the opening chord
to the final fade out, the entire masterwork is less than 120 *seconds*
long? (A quick Google search states that it's 1 minute and 57 seconds in
length, and that's probably including a brief silence at both ends.)
Last night I transcoded 4 hours of this stuff, and I could barely find a
track that was longer than 3 minutes. Almost all of them are two minutes
and something, and a few aren't even two minutes long. A vanishingly
small number exceed 3 minutes, and not one single one reaches to 4
minutes. And yet, these are (almost) all iconic era-defining
masterpieces of popular music, instantly recognisible to anyone who has
heard them.
Now, consider another iconic track: Cafe del Mar. It's a trance anthem
that anybody even vaguely familiar with that scene would recognise
instantly. There are several hundred billion remixes of this track (as
is usual in the trace world), but the three most famous mixes are from
Three 'N' One, Nalin & Kane and Macro V (in chronological order). The
track times are, 8:43, 9:44 and 8:34 respectively.
But let us remind ourselves: This is a song with no words. It consists
almost entirely of an arpeggio of 5 chords. (Specifically, F minor, C#
major, D# major, A# minor and A# minor in a different inversion.) That's
*it*. That's the whole thing. (Well, OK, there's a somewhat
characteristic bassline too.)
Taking the Three 'N' One version, most if not all of the track is
buildup. You get a thunderous drumbeat and a throbbing bassline, and
teasing hints at what the melody is going to be. Only about 3 minutes or
so before the end of the track does the euphoric melody finally erupt
spectacularly to life. And then there's a minute or so of calm-down
afterwards. So the core of the song is actually fairly small, and yet
the whole thing is nearly ten minutes long.
Now, this is after all trance music, which is kind of a special case.
But I have many, many CDs in my collection where a typical song is
easily 5 to 10 minutes in duration. And many of them aren't nearly as
memorable as Dream Lover.
It seems that somehow, these musicians have shoehorned an entire
soundscape into just a few hundred seconds of recording, and made it so
memorable that 50 years later people are still willing to pay good money
to listen to it. That's quite an achievement! We could probably learn a
lot from these guys...
Then again, perhaps it's just that of the thousands of millions of hours
of music that was recorded, time has filtered out all the inevitable
junk and kept only the transcendental genius. Who knows?
To quote a song, "Time can make the Sun grow cold. Time can wash the
clouds of gold. Time, who knows the miracle that Time can do?"
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