Produced music is kind of like motion picture. Whereas music perfomed life, is more like theater. I hate theater, but I love live music. For each its own. Repetition hardly ever happens in live performance.
He forgot to say that elegant repetition always comes as some kind of variation. The lack of this crucial bit of information makes his advice wrong as stated. Maybe he agrees and just never thought to say it. Because his examples do have variation. For instance, Hey Jude has lots of repetition but they are improvising screams or scat or whatever on top of the final chorus, and one can not remove that layer without making the repetition totally senseless. Rossini has a thing where he repeats a phrase 3 times, but the whole thing is always a crescendo, and it’s an orchestrated crescendo. Even Debussy repeats things (never more than twice) but it’s ALWAYS a variation. This generation was brought up on videogames, which invariably have a very low ratio of music content to playing time, meaning there’s loads of literal repetition. Doing the music in layers is a completely inappropriate remedy. If you tell this generation that repetition in music is good, they get the wrong idea. You have to say variation is good, repetition is bad. There’s a business of selling “music loops” and I am seeing video editors repeating those loops for 20 minutes. Their videos are unwatchable. Someone needs to tell them. Not even Bach can have a semiphrase repeated like that without becoming torture. So the phrase “repetition is not annoying” is exactly wrong. Repetition is so annoying that no musical material is safe. Only variation is possible, not literal repetition. In short, repetition is essential to the understanding of any discourse. But in music literal repetition is meaningless, hypnotic, and a form of torture. In music repetition can only be done through variation. And this is why every composition teacher always says, don’t repeat yourself.
He has got a wonderful talent for explaining things. Thanks for the videos!
💣
This guy is amazing. I actually get it now. Do what works. Force yourself to use repetition.
This is gold!
Very helpful! This is a real talk! Thank you!
It’s weird because sometimes my first listen I will hate a song then hear it a month later and it’s the best song I’ve heard
well said
Produced music is kind of like motion picture. Whereas music perfomed life, is more like theater. I hate theater, but I love live music. For each its own. Repetition hardly ever happens in live performance.
Interesting.. 💭 Yeah, live music is usually fire.. 🔥
Testicular fortitude!
He forgot to say that elegant repetition always comes as some kind of variation. The lack of this crucial bit of information makes his advice wrong as stated. Maybe he agrees and just never thought to say it. Because his examples do have variation. For instance, Hey Jude has lots of repetition but they are improvising screams or scat or whatever on top of the final chorus, and one can not remove that layer without making the repetition totally senseless. Rossini has a thing where he repeats a phrase 3 times, but the whole thing is always a crescendo, and it’s an orchestrated crescendo. Even Debussy repeats things (never more than twice) but it’s ALWAYS a variation.
This generation was brought up on videogames, which invariably have a very low ratio of music content to playing time, meaning there’s loads of literal repetition. Doing the music in layers is a completely inappropriate remedy. If you tell this generation that repetition in music is good, they get the wrong idea. You have to say variation is good, repetition is bad.
There’s a business of selling “music loops” and I am seeing video editors repeating those loops for 20 minutes. Their videos are unwatchable. Someone needs to tell them. Not even Bach can have a semiphrase repeated like that without becoming torture. So the phrase “repetition is not annoying” is exactly wrong. Repetition is so annoying that no musical material is safe. Only variation is possible, not literal repetition.
In short, repetition is essential to the understanding of any discourse. But in music literal repetition is meaningless, hypnotic, and a form of torture. In music repetition can only be done through variation. And this is why every composition teacher always says, don’t repeat yourself.
like
Somebody actually said they wanted to sing songs nobody else could sing?