Unity and Variety in Very Short Songs
What makes a short song a real song and not just an unfinished idea?
As I teach composition, I find myself coming back to the idea of unity vs. variety over and over again. Unity is the repetition of ideas and musical elements that we have already heard, and our brain finds it comforting. Variety is the delightful surprise of the unexpected and new. Unity is important, but too much unity, and we get bored. Variety is delightful, but without a backdrop of repetition, it becomes randomness.
I’m currently teaching middle schoolers how to compose their own melodies, and they just completed an assignment to create a short melody using ONLY 1-3 rhythmic cells (a cell being a four-beat sequence of notes, ignoring pitch. Students can plug any notes they want into the rhythms, but they most limit themselves to those rhythms).
For example, here are three rhythmic cells:
(This exercise is from William Russo’s excellent book Composing Music, which I come back to over and over again).
Some students play it safe and only use one rhythmic cell. It’s fine, it meets the criteria of the assignment, but I gently suggest to them that sprinkling just one more rhythmic cell here and there might make their melody more interesting.
Some students try to use well beyond three rhythmic cells, and the result is also unsatisfying - but, it’s interesting to listen to those too-much melodies as an adult. When I listen to those melodies, I feel like my ear is looking for something to grab onto, a framework of some sort that will repeat. If I can’t find the repetition on a measure-by-measure level, my brain will try to hear it on a broader scope - 8-measure phrases, etc. There’s lot of variety, and my ears will work very hard to find the unity.
We need both unity and variety, regardless of the genre.
I think what makes these Very Short Songs exceptional is their clever (and subtle!) balance of unity vs. variety.
Here’s a few songs that do some clever (and subtle!) things
Lou's Tune
DARGZ and Moses Boyd
This one feels like a complete piece, and I love it! It never gets old largely because of a clever—and subtle—switch up in the repeating flute sample.
The song starts with a circular flute motif that, at first, avoids chord tones. In the first measure, this melody begins on the 2nd scale degree and ends on the 6th, and in the next measure it begins on the major 7th, none of which are tones in the underlying Bb chord. So, there’s a lot of forward motion in the beginning of this phrase. The measure phrase ends on D, which is chord tone, but it’s the third scale degree, which is A) always pretty and B) always wants to go somewhere else.
At 0:25, the flute line drops out and a new vocal melody (or a sequence of vocal chops) steps in over the same chord progression.
At :51, the flute reappears alongside the vocal line. However, this is where the trickery begins!
At :55, the chords and flute line seemingly restart the second half of the phrase:
The chord progression gets back into synch, but the flute melody continues out of synch compared to what it was before. It’s a really subtle change, but it gives us the variety we need (I kind of wonder if this was a copy-paste mistake that sounded cool and the producer decided to keep it).
After a break of just vocals, bass, and drums (a very short bridge!), we hear the last two chords in the sequence…the last two chords in a phrase are a textbook-perfect definition of a cadence, so this song ends with the IV chord going to the I chord, which my fellow nerds may recognize as a plagal cadence.
lil bear
sadsackjoe
This haunting, lo-fi guitar instrumental sounds tantalizingly evokes Southern Gothic vibes (or a great soundtrack to a haunting movie of a similar vein).
The movement from from the minor root to the flat seventh always makes me think of the B section of Afro Blue.
The other songs on lil bear’s six-song EP reveal sadsackjoe to be a (presumably female) singer-songwriter...and that's literally all the information I can find about this artist.
(incidentally, The Algorithm tells me you can also hear this track on the "Shortest Songs on Spotify" playlist, if you want more of less!)
Chips & Dip
Sam Greenfield
Does this feel like a real song or just an unfinished idea? As much as I like this track, I often wish I could hear the rest of it, which pushes it into the "unfinished idea" zone. Sorry, Sam Greenfield.
Greenfield seems to be one of those "my chops are the only thing about me that's serious" young jazz musicians, sprinkling high-level musicianship with silliness and absurdism.
This tune is a fancy a 12-bar blues, which Green solos over deftly. (My quick transcription is six bars, which means I did something wrong. You can buy a transcription from Greenfield’s website for the authoritative answer!)
with flowers
water feature
Have I mentioned I'm a sucker for samples that change their pitch proportionally to their playback speed? There's just something magical about hearing the attacks of instruments that don't really exist and hearing an idea repeated in a new key and with proportionally longer notes (yes, I know how unbelievably geeky that sounds). This song makes great use of that effect, adding some gentle clarinet improvisation (the variety) over the original and altered background (the unity).
And, if you're ready for a longer song, the last track on the album is similar to this one, except that it's 10 minutes long (and beautiful!)
I hope your ears, eyes, and brain enjoyed my not-very-short entry in my series on Very Short Songs, inspired by an influx of very short songs into my soundscape. I compiled some of my favorites in this playlist, which I hope you’ll enjoy (it won’t take long!)
In the next entry I’ll be looking at some classical songs (er, I mean some pieces) that are also very short (er, I mean miniatures.)
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