The new music composed for piano. For sleeping or for being awake?

In my musical research and in conversations with colleagues and artists, including some of great renown, I have noticed an increasingly marked trend: the proliferation of “ambient” or “atmospheric” piano music.

This movement has generated an endless literature of dedicated playlists, music for studying, for sleeping, for focusing, which now dominate digital platforms and seem, for many, to define what it means today to compose for the piano.

Let me clarify that this is a personal observation, fully aware that musical beauty responds to subjective tastes.
However, I believe it is necessary to raise a few questions that concern not only aesthetics, but also the function of music and the development of contemporary piano language.

This ambient production certainly responds to a real need: we live in an age of constant overstimulation, and many seek refuge in sounds that demand no active attention, that soothe rather than stimulate.
The issue arises when this becomes the only direction perceived as commercially or artistically viable for contemporary piano music.

I wonder: wouldn’t it be just as valuable to compose piano music that keeps people awake? Music that offers a positive stimulus, that injects vitality into someone’s day?
Music does not have to be only a sedative or a neutral backdrop, it can be energy, friction, dialogue, surprise.

There is also a technical and linguistic aspect we cannot ignore. This “ambient” aesthetic often leads to an oversimplification of piano language. Elementary harmonic progressions, ultra-minimal textures stripped to the bone, the absence of thematic development—elements which, from a pianistic-technical point of view, frequently correspond to a first-year level of study.

To be clear: simplicity can be a profound artistic choice when it is conscious and motivated. But when simplicity becomes a repeated formula, when a single manner of playing is presented as if it encompassed the entire possible pianistic universe, then we are drastically limiting the instrument’s potential.

The piano is an instrument of immense expressive and technical richness, with a vast history of rhythmic, timbral, and melodic exploration.

This is not about criticizing ambient music, it too has dignity and purpose. Rather, it is about reclaiming space for other voices, for a piano that can still be complex, virtuosic, irregular, even uncomfortable.
A piano that engages in dialogue with the listener instead of merely accompanying them discreetly.

As composers and pianists, we still bear the responsibility to explore the full expressive spectrum of our instrument, and not allow ourselves to be seduced solely by the algorithmic logic of playlists that reward repeatability and non-invasiveness.
Perhaps it is time to compose not only to make people sleep, but also to keep them awake, or perhaps, to make them dream, but with their eyes opened.