Stop the thinking.
Just make the art.Just make the art. Just make the art. Just make the art. Just make the art. Just make the art. Just make the art. Just make the art. Just make the art. Just make the art. Just make the art. Just make the art. Just make the art. Just make the art. Just make the art. Just make the art. Just make the art. Just make the art. Just make the art. Just make the art. Just make the art. Just make the art. Just make the art. Just make the art. Just make the art. Just make the art. Just make the art. Just make the art. Just make the art. Just make the art. Just make the art. Just make the art. Just make the art. Just write the f***ing music.
( 10 minutes later on the same floor...)
Thinking I should write a piece for an ensemble. Mixed ensemble. Something unusual. Kind of like Messiaen's Quartet for the End of Time. Let me layout the orchestration for you:
1 piano
1 guitar
1 bass guitar
1 drum set
I might even add 1 solo voice.
"But that's a pop-ensemble bla bla bla." You say.
WRONG.
What makes a "pop song"? A variation of answers will be argued with people from different generations caused by it's super rapid change in the past decades. But one thing in common among all music classified under the vague and inaccurate category called "Pop Music" is that any kind of value it imparts is nothing new and pretentious. Pop songs in the last decade or even further, have been merely copying each other in an orgy of repeating chords, dizzying downbeat rhythms, and lyrics drenched in clichés. Another way to define it is anything that one listens for the sake of pleasure, and nothing more.
Now, in contemporary-classical music(modern music), one only has to remember the words; "An artist is always beginning" (Ezra Pound). In other words, Any work that refuses to be new is useless.
Imagine going to a modern music concert, for instance. You found your row in the concert hall, you got your seat, just about ready to sit down and listen to some classical music, and you've settle down at last only to find a pop group on stage (referring to the instruments I laid out above). And then you ask, "Where's the orchestra?" Or string quartet? or chamber ensemble perhaps? Upon seeing a band on the stage, naturally the pop association takes over your head.
But modern classical music doesn't have to be consorted with the traditional orchestra, or quartets. etc. in order to put it under "classical" distinction. Just as a popular instrumental combinations doesn't necessarily produce a pop song. And the pop ensemble is no less powerful than the loudest and most dramatic of orchestral passages. After all, these are just instruments.
Society and pop-culture had embedded our minds with such ideas from the moment we gain consciousness in this world. The trick is simple. Remove these ideas and association of things, and conceive the art in a fresh, new, and open perspective.