Pat Metheny on the Short Short Form

Here's a tidbit from an article in the March 2005 JazzTimes on Pat Metheny's latest release, which consists of one 68-minute-long composition.

"The new form is ring-tones!" Metheny says, all but agape. "It went from a symphony to an album, then to singles, then edit your single, then four-bar loops, and now it's down to one or two seconds." The Way Up, he continues, "is a reaction to a world where things are getting shorter, dumber, less interesting, less detailed, more predictable."

Here's Lyle Mays, Metheny's pianist and cowriter, on the same topic:

"I'm hyperaware of what I consider the artificial lack of time that's been imposed on life. You turn on the TV and within a few seconds you're going to hear, 'Well, that's all the time we have.' I don't know why time is in such short supply. Where did it go? Who's keeping all the time from us?"

That reminds me of a great essay I found on living in the now rather than past or future as it relates to music (can't remember if I've mentioned this before--too busy living in the moment?):

"We do not live in time, time lives in us. We create time with the mind. We might say time is the way the mind organizes experience. Whether you believe it or not, it is true. As Einstein proved, time is a relative phenomenon, and it is relative to motion. Truly understanding this, and developing the capacity to function on the basis of this understanding, (at least some of the "time") will not only enrich your life, but is one of the vital attributes of a true artist, and necessary to the creation of true art."