Doug's musings
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Tuesday, 23 December 2003

Repetition ::

Around 1 am I finished a rough arrangement of the first two minutes of the improvisation I’ve been composing over. I liked the way I’d repeated and varied just a couple of themes. But listening back, it struck me that it was jumping too quickly from one thing to the next. The introduction/main theme and some other connecting passages felt like they only wanted to happen once. But several other times, when reaching a section where I’d composed 1-3 more layers on top, it felt like it arrived too suddenly and left too quickly. My child has attention deficit disorder! I experimented with Logic’s looping mode and muting/unmuting parts and discovered four or five segments that could stand repetition, where omitting some of the additional parts the first time, adding more during repetitions worked well. Slow down, let it unfold. I remembered examples from Bach to Joplin of pieces where every single section happens exactly twice. And cool, the repetitions don’t have to be exactly the same, in a couple of particularly rhythmically quirky and free-flowing spots, I can use the quirky version once and add a new, straighter version.

Tue, 23 Dec 2003, 06:45 PST

References:
Finishing II ( 4 January 2004)
Burst ( 9 March 2004)

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