Music in the long form is seriously undervalued nowadays. Especially classical music – typical, but not exclusive domain of the long form – is distorted in public perception into something that is pleasing, calming, soothing, relaxing, inconsequential. Inoffensive snippets and soundbites of Mozart, Beethoven and Bach (and maybe a few others) are what most people get to identify with classical music.
This is caused by the victory of the “song” model of music, where music only exists as a roughly 2-5 minute snippet of melody, typically with voice, and ideally without any difficult melodic development, maybe in an A-B-A form. There is of course value to such music; but it should not be all there is.
Even genres like pop, rock, country, hip hop/rap, R&B etc. have suffered from this. Contrast albums (and their songs) from the 1960s through the early 2000s with what you typically get today. A song like Michael Jackson’s “Thriller” – which did launch the music video business for real – could probably not find (and sustain) an audience today. Concept albums like Eminem’s second and third albums (The Marshall Mathers LP, The Eminem Show) or Fluke’s Risotto and Puppy, or Moloko’s Statues (or even better, Live at Brixton) or Klaus Schulze’s Dig It need to be seen as coherent pieces of work, not just composed of single songs. The iTunes-i-fication has seriously endangered albums, the long form, and our attention span.
Music needs the long form. It needs the symphony, the music drama, the complete concept album. It needs pieces longer than 5 minutes, needs listeners able and willing to sit through a work of more than 30 minutes in concentration, without interruption, and let it work on them, in all their ambiguity, ups and downs, nuances, contradictions.
If you cannot have this, cannot have a serious interrogation of musical material, and the resulting emotional drama, there cannot be true catharsis. Maybe that’s what we are missing today.
Erratic Attempts 