The art of brevity in music

Short songs are normally throwaway - interludes maybe, or just scraps picked up from the cutting room floor. But when they are done the right way, short tracks can be up there with the best. There is something very poignant about an infectious melody that disappears so suddenly after being introduced. The idea was dwelt on extensively by Sartre in Nausea. When I look at my record collection, I'm hard pushed to find much decent music under 7 or 8 minutes in length. Electronica especially seems to lend itself to long, drawn out ideas that need time to develop. Such is the case with much music.
But Brian Eno's Another Green World is a perfect example of a piece of music that achieves both brevity and profundity in its short duration. Arena references aside, the music lingers long after it is over. Daringly, and cleverly, Eno even allows much of the track's short lifespan to be measured out in silence, as the refrain slowly seeps into the mix. Yet, at around 1:47, this is probably one of his very best tracks.



An outfit on the old Evolution Records label put together music designed to be short enough to fit on an answering machine. Perhaps that is too short - the results there (I think it was Jak and Stepper who made it) were mixed at best. But such brevity was back in those days a welcome antidote to the long-established tendency to drag things on. The Orb famously did this with their endlessly massive A Huge Ever Growing Pulsating Brain. Their Blue Room EP as well went on for about an hour.
Of other examples of the short but sweet that spring to mind, Prefuse 73's savagely effective The End of the Biters International is in my view one of the highlights of modern hip-hop, at less than a minute and a half.



But perhaps there is no mystery in this at all. Pop music has excelled for decades at short lengths. Indeed, back in the 50s and 60s, two and a half minutes was standard duration for a song. And going much further back than that, the poetic lyric - the very quintessence of expression - has for centuries thrived on saving rather than wasting words.
We keep hearing that we live in a time of information overload and of short attention spans. So maybe the short song really is the best way forward for us all.