Contemporary??? Whats is it really??

[Hookjaw Brown]

Bill,

We once hired Buffalo Springfield for a college party. There was only around 60 people in the crowd. They sounded FANTASTIC live, and I bought their album.

I don't listen much to the album since it doesn't jive with what I heard them play.

A couple of things pop up in previous posts concerning contemporary sound:

Bass - in a lot of music there is no bass, a la White Stripes. (I have received comments like "Nice to hear bass again" while testing songs on Jango.)

Repetition - Contemporary Songs rely on repeating a phrase, repeating a phrase, repeating a phrase, repeating a phrase, repeating a phrase, repeating a phrase....

Counterpoint - there are very few contrapuntal lines. Even in songs with bass, the bass follows the lead guitar.

As an aside, the Author of FutureHits DNA states that intros should be less than seven seconds. He stated on the Taxi TV show that he rather likes Mumford & Sons. I timed their intros at up to 50 seconds. Just goes to show that no one knows what they are talking about.

[mazz]

I think there might be two separate discussions going on here. As I interpret them:

1. How to write contemporary music as a professional composer/writer either for publishing/film/TV or for other contemporary artists. Staying abreast of trends and styles is key to success in this line of work.

2. How to maintain artistic integrity as an artist and still be viable commercially, i.e., be appealing to a contemporary audience enough to make a living and still be true to thyself as an artist.

Referring to #1: There are some people who thrive and do well in this line of work, they actually love it and enjoy it besides being very good at it. To them it's artistically satisfying. To those who are more in the #2 camp, the #1 job might be torturous. Of course, it's not all black and white, some folks can do both to one degree or another.

(My hat's off to anyone pursuing either path (or some combination of both). It's not an easy business any way you slice it. Seen from the outside we must look like a bunch of insane people, doing something intensely for years and years with no guarantee of return on investment. Most people don't love their jobs enough to put up with that.)

Am I seeing this correctly?

Great thread.

Mazz


EDIT: I guess there's a third camp that pays no attention to contemporary trends, or has no interest in writing to them.

[t4mh]

I think there might be two separate discussions going on here. As I interpret them:

1. How to write contemporary music as a professional composer/writer either for publishing/film/TV or for other contemporary artists. Staying abreast of trends and styles is key to success in this line of work.

2. How to maintain artistic integrity as an artist and still be viable commercially, i.e., be appealing to a contemporary audience enough to make a living and still be true to thyself as an artist.

Referring to #1: There are some people who thrive and do well in this line of work, they actually love it and enjoy it besides being very good at it. To them it's artistically satisfying. To those who are more in the #2 camp, the #1 job might be torturous. Of course, it's not all black and white, some folks can do both to one degree or another.

(My hat's off to anyone pursuing either path (or some combination of both). It's not an easy business any way you slice it. Seen from the outside we must look like a bunch of insane people, doing something intensely for years and years with no guarantee of return on investment. Most people don't love their jobs enough to put up with that.)

Am I seeing this correctly?

Great thread.

Mazz

+1 to the entire thread!

I have to say that I count myself in the combination crowd and still tryin' to find the "handle". Without a doubt I like older music but I hear new things that I also like! The best new stuff I hear is done right here in P2P! I have never regretted spending bucks on something musical. I know guys who have spent truck loads of money to go fishing and I tend to think of them as being insane!

[Hookjaw Brown]

All I got to say is that popular music written today is predominantly homophonic.

[billg1]

Probably trying to understand or learn how to write contemporary music has a lot to do with genre. If you have to ask what contemporary means in regards to this than you're probably just too old to ever grasp it
http://www.billboard.com/charts/pop-son ... /pop-songs

If you're talking about adult contemporary you've probably just upped the age of some of the writers by a couple of decades. There's some pretty old contemporary country writers too. Some of the charted Americana stuff is written by writers who have passed away!

Somehow I just assumed we were talking about Billboard "pop", the fashion stuff but there's lots of other contemporary styles as pointed out in an earlier post.

I think Mazz should have added a 4th type . . . I'm always trying to decipher a common thread that might give music more than a 20 min shelf life, without a lot of success I might add.

[mazz]

I think Mazz should have added a 4th type . . . I'm always trying to decipher a common thread that might give music more than a 20 min shelf life, without a lot of success I might add.

For better or worse, Bill, I think that's what the world has come to, and it's only speeding up!! Music has become, in a lot of cases, background noise or wallpaper for people's lives. They are so used to hearing it literally everywhere, that they just become numb to it as anything beautiful and special and just expect it to be there like air or sunlight. I'm over generalizing, of course, but think about it, there's music everywhere these days, you can't get away from it. I remember the days when you had to get up and turn the record over. It made the music more visceral and tactile to interact with it in that way. These days, it's like it doesn't really exist, it just magically plays from your ipod or whatever and if you choose, it will never stop, you don't have to turn the record over and there's an endless supply of it.

I don't want to sound negative, but that's my observation of modern culture's relationship with music, in a very general way. Since people's appetite for new music seems bottomless, that's a good thing for folks that can figure out how to tap into those that want to hear what they do. But it's going to be hard not to be "flavor of the minute" these days. I don't know the answer, but I'm not going to stop doing what I do, because I have to, because for me it's life giving and I don't take it for granted.

May we all live our dreams.

Peace,

Mazz

[billg1]

I think Mazz should have added a 4th type . . . I'm always trying to decipher a common thread that might give music more than a 20 min shelf life, without a lot of success I might add.

For better or worse, Bill, I think that's what the world has come to, and it's only speeding up!! Music has become, in a lot of cases, background noise or wallpaper for people's lives. They are so used to hearing it literally everywhere, that they just become numb to it as anything beautiful and special and just expect it to be there like air or sunlight. I'm over generalizing, of course, but think about it, there's music everywhere these days, you can't get away from it. I remember the days when you had to get up and turn the record over. It made the music more visceral and tactile to interact with it in that way. These days, it's like it doesn't really exist, it just magically plays from your ipod or whatever and if you choose, it will never stop, you don't have to turn the record over and there's an endless supply of it.

I don't want to sound negative, but that's my observation of modern culture's relationship with music, in a very general way. Since people's appetite for new music seems bottomless, that's a good thing for folks that can figure out how to tap into those that want to hear what they do. But it's going to be hard not to be "flavor of the minute" these days. I don't know the answer, but I'm not going to stop doing what I do, because I have to, because for me it's life giving and I don't take it for granted.

May we all live our dreams.

Peace,

Mazz

I'm afraid you're right. And I've always been involved in making music really because I've felt like I had no choice, it was just what I was supposed to do. I just hope now that I'll be able to continue until I croak & even then leave something behind that someone might enjoy after.

[mazz]

Bill, I think that's the most we can hope for, and that's enough for me. Anything more is a great bonus! To live a creative life is swimming upstream in our culture, but it's a noble and good life.

[mojobone]

All I got to say is that popular music written today is predominantly homophonic.

Heh, it's like the sax player said; sometime's polyphony is overrated.

[Casey H]

There ARE mutliple discussions and cross purposes (e.g. different folks' goals) on this thread.

My answers are geared strictly to pitching music for film/TV, especially for Taxi listings. When a listing (Taxi or anywhere) asks for contemporary songs a la Kings Of Leon, Spoon, Bright Eyes, etc, what they want is something that has a lot of similarities to one or more of those acts in all or most aspects-- production style, lyrical style, melody, vocal, arrangement, instrumentation, musician parts, etc, etc.

So, even though an act like Kings of Leon or Spoon might make songs that are a bit more ageless and timeless, what you submit still really has to match well with their charting hits of recent times. Admittedly, the simpler acoustic singer-songwriter stuff is easier to match (musically) because there are less parts. I have found that this genre tends to market well and for more listings. In addition to the ageless and timeless factor, you don't have the complications of how the bass and drum lines are, etc.

But the bottom line is for film/TV, most of the time the phrase, "Contemporary [genre] a la Band X, Band Y, Band Z" defines the word "Contemporary" right in the sentence.

If you look at forwards by folks like Japanese Princess (Where is she lately?), Keith L, Big Blue Barry, Peeyo, and many other successful film/TV writers here, you'll see their approach. They listen carefully to all aspects of an 'a la' and design a track with imitation in mind. And that doesn't mean they aren't applying creativity.

BTW, I'm terrible and doing this myself and know if I ever mastered it I could up my forward and placement rate many fold. It's more likely that I'll get better as 'a la" more authentically for SOME era than I'll ever crank out songs like what's on the current Billboard charts. I'm writing new songs and also always thinking about how to re-work songs to be more well defined in 'a la' mode. (get it? "a la mode? )

Casey

PS There ARE general mood, tone, and tempo pieces - more often instrumental used in film/TV which don't require as much contemporary sound-like. More contemporary is always better but I have a number of rock instrumentals which are definitely dated but continue to be placed as cable TV show BG by a well-known Taxi-client library. And in the orchestral arena (which I'm not that familiar with), it appears to me that general style, mood, and tone reign.