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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