Pop Music in a simple way...

After playing quite a couple of Pop Music (mostly Chinese) works like pieces from JJ Lin, Stephanie Sun, Tanya Chua and Guang Liang (just to name a few). I notice the style of these music usually similar, with the melody being played with the right hand and the chords with the left hand.

Also all the Pop Music which I played have similar dynamics structure. The music will start with a simple introduction (usually with some traces of the chorus) which would be softer, and then slowly growing louder and being the loudest at the chorus. And most of the time, there would be a change in modulation, either by a semitone or a tone upwards in the last part of the chorus which marks the end of the song, with the last few bars at a slowly pace compared to the whole song and of coz back to "pp".

This is the reason why usually pop music can be accompanied by either a guitar or a keyboard and sometimes piano. The popular way to play a guitar is by playing the chords and the whole song can be completed by just changing from chords to chords. Many of the times, pop songs follows a chord progression patterns which is repeated over and over again throughout the whole song. The only variation from piece to piece is how you change the way you play the chords on the keyboard, which can help to spice up the song further.

Many of the times, you will hear some pianist telling you that they feel that Pop Music lack the creativity that Classical Music has. I heard that many times and I used to wonder why they say that. I guess it is mainly due to the fact that Pop Music usually follow a fixed kind of structure in terms of composing which in the end, kills the creativity. And hence the comments of Pop Music are boring.

But for me, I enjoy Pop Music and want to learn other forms of music as well to understand the differences and similarity and eventually to be able to compose different types of music.