The Long-Form Predicament

In praise of the things which just take however long it takes

When you have got somewhere you need to get, but you are not familiar with the route you will need to take - what do you do?

If you’re like me - and I would have thought the majority of people - the first thing you do is to open up Google/Apple Maps, tap in the address, and see what it comes up with.

For context, as a musician, I drive a lot, playing music all over the country and beyond; plus a confession: I’m also a geek when it comes to roads, places, geography…the lot. You don’t get ascribed a teenage nickname of Sat-Nav-Sim for nothing!

Have you noticed how the settings for mapping and directional apps all default towards sending you on the quickest, most convenient route? I know you can change these, as well as a range of preferences like avoiding motorways and tolls, but at heart, the principle behind the UX of these apps is predicated on the fact we have all been conditioned to expect to get to wherever we are going by the quickest route possible.

Last week, I was heading to play a gig, needing to leave on a Friday afternoon (never a good time) - and this Friday just happened to be the last day of term for schools - with people heading off on summer holidays, which would normally have meant going towards, around and past Manchester, which can often be less than ideal.

On a baking hot day, I just couldn’t face the M62 and its likely standstill traffic. I did some research, set off twenty minutes earlier, taking the definitely-not-direct-or-most-efficient route across the upper portion of the Peak District, towards the Staffordshire Moorlands. It was such a treat to take the Scenic Route, traverse such glorious undulating countryside, and just take it all in. I arrived feeling good, energised to play, and pleased that a not-much-fun-but-necessary part of my day felt like it had been well-spent.

I know there are a lot of contextual reasons as why this might not be always be possible to do. However, I think there are many lessons to learn from this, both as people and in our creative endeavours. It also relates closely to some of the conversations I have had in recent times about making and creating music, and crucially, the way in which we hope audiences will engage with what we do.

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Being Online: Social Media & The Curse Of Short-Form Content

As artists and musicians - and creative people in general - we have simply had to come to terms with the fact that an important part of sharing our work and connecting with our audience is almost certainly going to need to include the use of social media. It has quickly become a “baked-in” assumption that not only will we need to do it, but also have a decent handle (thank you) on how to do it, and with the expectation we will do so with a degree of success.

A fundamental challenge this creates is the pressure we can feel to always need to be be “making content”. It’s not a particularly pleasant phrase - I certainly don’t spring out of bed in the morning longing to make more content. It also has a detrimental impact on the time we are able to utilise the creation of the art which is at the heart of what we do as artists and creators. I know there are lots of talented people who work in social media, branding and marketing; however I know of no musician who worked hard to get into music, to then end up as a part-time, unpaid social media marketer on the side.

The impact of social media on creators, their creations and their ability to function creatively has been and continues to be severe, and we can be sure of thing: this doesn’t look likely to change any time soon.

I’m keen for this not to come across as a complete bashing of social media. The way it has enabled a vastly different and often positive approach to building an audience, connecting with fans, and sustaining this over time has been game-changing for many smaller, independent artists, myself included.

You sometimes hear some people reference topics like this, alongside streaming, as ways in which the music industry has been democratised. Whilst understandable, I think this might be a bit of a stretch, in that many of the well-worn methods of exploitation within the industry have just shifted to different places, people and platforms.

What is important to acknowledge is that the vast majority of our audiences really want and like to have this look behind the curtain of their favourite artists, a realisation which is really quite a privilege; that someone who isn’t your mum or best mate is genuinely interested in what you do and make. As a result, to ignore or dismiss the role social media plays for artists would be a very brave choice.

The net result of these societal and behavioural changes both in fandom, and audience development and sustainability is that we are consistently told by every conceivable platform, channel, expert and practitioner that short-form content is the key to everything; ideally made in vertical video form (what even is horizontal now?!), aiming to grab everyone’s attention in the first 0.3 seconds with a clever hook that convinces them to give you an extra few seconds, before doom-scrolling onto the next victim/challenger for their (brief, often passive) attention.

It won’t surprise you to know I find this quite sad and frustrating. It has shifted so much of our perspective about what music is and what it is for. Read more here…

What Is Music For?

What I find most galling is the way in which this natural sense of pressure manifests itself in our own work being affected by these changes. In the musical community, and especially within the broad genre I operate in - which often gets called Modern Classical - there has been a gradual reduction in the length of pieces, whilst I would also suggest there has been a “broadening out” of stylistic tendencies within the music created in this area of the musical landscape.

I am trying very hard to avoid using the term “dumbing down” or other similar phrases which are often used derogatorily to entrench an elitist mindset. What has been very much evident, though, is an overall trend towards the composition and releasing of music which hits certain elements, targets and musical markers, in the belief this will give the song/piece the best chance of achieving successful playlist placements, alongside a number of other key determinates.

To demonstrate the overall argument that creativity has been and is affected by technological and societal change, and in a vague attempt at an evidential approach (granted, with not the most thorough survation), I’ve gone back through the majority of my own discography (not including the ones I go on to reference later in the article) from 2016 through to 2023, to find the average duration of my pieces and releases from each year, to see if there were any identifiable results and trends to notice.

Here's a nice bar chart for you:

As we can see from the above - even in this smallest of sample size - it’s clear my own work was in some ways affected by the trend towards shorter pieces. One might also argue this has been “successful” - whether strategically planned or otherwise - if, of course, we were simply using the number of streams a piece of music receives as the primary barometer of determining such “success”.

It would be slightly facile and reductive to say longer pieces make for better pieces. This is evidently untrue, or at the very least, unsubstantiated.

However, at the heart of this, an important issue pervades this topic of interest, not least in respect to understanding why it feels uncomfortable - incongruous, even - for musicians to contend with, which is the relentlessness of pursuing and achieving efficiency in all we do.

This creates a major dilemma for us as creatives - in that the outcome appears to matter more than the process. When most of us face such a strong battle to even be able to acknowledge that a piece or creation we are working on is “finished”, there is such an overwhelming sense of relief in being able to trust the process, knowing we will likely arrive at the *right thing* eventually. Unless we don’t. In which case, we have still “won”, because the process teaches us more than we could ever know, rather than just a monetisable outcome.

I hope this reminds you, as it does me, that the creative process is more than just an endless quest to maximise deliverables, hitting our KPI targets and achieving a “productive” outcome.

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Sharing examples of my longer-form music

(When listening to all of the following musical examples, do try and listen with headphones of any kind rather than your laptop/phone speakers. It’s a profoundly better experience!)

Moving swiftly away from data (not always a musicians’ best friend!) and “scientific analysis”, towards the good stuff. It feels right at this moment to share three important long-form pieces of music of mine from recent years, in an attempt to help explain, show and demonstrate in musical form (preferably with fewer words from me) why long-form is always such a wonderful and treasured way of capturing musical creativity and intention.

Earlier this year, I released a piece of music very dear to me, and which has received a lot of interest and resonated with people. It’s a fifteen minute-plus continuous piece featuring four individual mini-movements (titled Scenes) which attempt to document the memory of a special morning at Shingle Street in Suffolk in 2019, whilst I was conducting a composition residence nearby…

Click on the article below to delve deeper into what this was all about

New Music: Four Suffolk Sea Scenes

In the article linked above, I go into more detail about all kinds of things surrounding the piece, its inspiration and other things. However this paragraph is too relevant and important not copy across to this post to give you a stronger idea of what I was attempting to achieve…

I was adamant this piece needed to be heard and experienced in the order in which I composed it to be heard - no breaks between mini-movements, with sections bridged by the use of field recordings and found sounds which were captured at the actual location, giving additional context and embedding a natural sense of place in the music.

Click on the link above to listen to the piece in full.

‘Roam’ - THESIS DRIVE (2020)

A further piece of long-form music of mine was my contribution to THESIS DRIVE - an extended compilation which asked musicians to create a long-form composition which could serve as an accompaniment to a journey.

The idea was created, compiled and curated by my regular visual and artistic collaborator Gregory Euclide, and features a quite staggering range of artists and musicians. This one is seventeen minutes long, contains two main “sections”, a cod of gently-increasing-intensity, and a meandering extended semi-improvised opening.

Give it a listen…

It’s only available on Bandcamp - a platform which works so well for this type of music (not least because of the ability to directly support artists and creators).

I was working on this throughout the first half of 2020, and the catalyst for finishing it (and its title ‘Roam’) was the fact we spent April, May and June of 2020 barely leaving our houses. I was itching to be able to roam wide and free again, and I think you can hear this sense of longing for freedom coming through in the music.

‘The Lengths’ (2022)

This is another extended piece, fifteenminutes which utilises field recordings and found sounds to capture an indelible sense of place in the recording.

I was privileged to be invited to spend four days in residence at The Lengths - an incredible renovation and reimagining of a small former primary school on the bank of Loch Eil in Scotland, across the water from the town of Fort William, with the UK’s highest mountain Ben Nevis brooding in the background.

With my love for Scotland’s west coast, alongside my interest in architecture and mid-century design, this really was all my dreams come true. The charming and inspiring owners, Susie and Ziggy (artists and musicians in their own right), were in the process of creating a funded residency scheme, inviting myself and others to give it a trial run.

I went into it with no preconceptions or plans about what I might hope to create. However, I found the landscape and natural environment there to be so amazing, beautiful and awe-inspiring, that the music genuinely did flow out of me. Sometimes you hear artists and composers saying things like that, and we all roll our eyes, thinking “whatever”. On this occasion, it was genuinely true.

Perhaps give it a listen, and I’ll go on to explain some more about the finer details of the music, the sound design, the field recordings and the purpose of the piece of music…

(please don’t share this video directly)

After the gentle, opening piano ballad (recorded on my piano after returning home), you’ll hear me expanding into some of the more experimental music-making and sound creation/design I have put my hand to.

All the musical sounds you hear after this point (6 minutes, 10 seconds - not including the field recordings) were generated and manipulated from sample recordings of the most incredibly cute art deco-style Morley piano which was in situ (pictured below).

The really quite unique design (like a baby grand piano, but upright) encouraged me and made it easier to explore prepared piano techniques such as deadening strings with my hand, to the extent that the final repeated musical motif/ostinato is the sound of the in-house piano referencing the bold, loud and insistently rhythmical call of the herons taking up residence on the nearby shore and in the forest behind the property.

This four-note rhythmical motif acted as the most lovely and natural repetitive rhythmical phrase during my time at The Lengths, performed by the local residents who have likely been there the longest of anyone…

I loved being able to use a range of sounds generated by the instrument which lives there into a piece of music, with the aim of turning the gaze back to the locality in which this amazing structure - which has been so sympathetically renovated and unobtrusively (re)positioned in the landscape in an act of true sustainability - sits and takes on a new role for a different era.

I was so grateful to have this time and space gifted to me by Susie and Ziggy, and o spend time chatting about creativity, nature, art, music, architecture and renovation.

They rent out part of the space where I was staying and working, and by way of saying thanks, I created this piece as a gift for them. Each of their guests receive a Bandcamp download code to the piece as well, to act as an audio reminder/aide-memoire of their stay at The Lengths. If you’re looking for somewhere to stay whilst up in the north-west of Scotland, I highly recommend it.

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It won’t be lost on you, I’m sure, that this post is rather on the long side! Imagine, the incongruity of writing about long-form work in anything other than an exceedingly long article!

To get to both Suffolk and Loch Eil, where some of the musical works above were born and inspired by the landscape which surrounded me, both took a very long time to get there. In both cases, it was absolutely worth it.

Committing to creating longer-form content - whether for online purposes or gritting your teeth as someone instantly commodifies your work, is difficult. It goes against the prevailing winds we are always encouraged (or worse) to follow.

Fundamentally, using communication apps at surface level naturally serves to embed ourselves in ever-more narrowly-focused echo chambers.

Perhaps in future weeks, we should all attempt to be more long-form in our approach to everything, and seeing where we end up.

If it takes a longer period of time for something good to happen, perhaps it might just end up being better that way. The “it takes as long as it takes” principle might not, in fact, be the worst idea ever, although it can be a hard sell for sure.

Take the scenic route. Limit your speed. Follow your nose and sense of direction, rather than Google Maps. Don’t use motorways. Be risky (just a little bit). Go on a residency in a cool place. Get to know people more than others will. Be brave and consciously take longer to do or make something.

It might just be ok, you know.

When it comes down to it, the fundamental message rings true: tell the whole story and nothing but the whole story.