Music purists will tell you that electronic notation in general, and copy-paste in particular, is the scourge of music. Hit the Cntrl-C / Cntrl-V combinations (or their Mac equivalents) and you’ve increased the length of your piece at no extra cost. Most people would probably want to hear that riff again, anyway.
Composers of old didn’t have software to facilitate it, so perhaps they had to invest more thought into repetition; but they could equally well pencil in the double bar lines with bracketed ends, likewise at little cost and to the same effect: play that bit again (I think it’s cool).
Everybody has done it, from Bach (whatever his variant of ‘cool’ was) to Burt Bacharach. Used by master and novice alike, repetition is not necessarily a reflection of competence; indeed, repetition is a nearly inescapable component of music. Like most of music, though, it is incredibly difficult to do right and at the right time.
Context is a key component in any decision to utilise repetition: a Scottish reel is impossibly dull to listen to, but dancing to a symphony never made it big as a pastime. A listener’s mood is the other component. Some evenings I can listen to Underworld in their pomp (Second Toughest in the Infants) and really delve into their soundscapes, enjoying the timelessness of each piece. At other times, I’m scrambling for alternatives within seconds.
There are some very frustrating examples of repetition. The album “Rhythm” from Like Vibert has some great and rather inventive riffs that break the mould in terms of electronic / dance music. But he overuses them each and every time. Most annoying for me is his use of the frog trombones sample from the The Mole / Der kleine Maulwurf / Krteček in the episode with the transistor radio. This is a brilliant little effect that deserves many listens… But… 15 times in one piece is both excessive and leads to depreciation. The album is strewn with excessive repetitions.
I cannot do repetition. When creating my electronic pieces, copy-paste is the foundation of their construction. However, I quickly feel the need for development - however small - in order to maintain my own interest; variations on a theme. I also tend to generate larger leaps in each piece that then try to find their way back home.
There is always an element of musical development (exposition - transition - development - retransition - recapitulation) in my pieces, even as I stray from whatever theory or initial idea I had during the actual creation process.
Electronic notation opens up composing to dilettantes like me who cannot quite envision or 'hear' the music that they want to create before it is played. This is a great thing for hobbyists the world over. Whilst it may open up the composing game to a greater number of players, the sheer fact and necessity of quality rising to the top still applies. Let me and my ilk paddle about in our pools; let's see which great monsters of composition today inhabit the oceans now.
