The perils of cut and paste

I've long admired composer Eric Whitacre for his great music and his embracing of the internet for a variety of purposes. He blogs, he does YouTube videos, and he even edits and updates his works.

In this blog post, Eric has words for young composers and I've been thinking a lot about what he said about the perils of cutting and pasting. He's calling it Advice for the Emerging Composer and here's what he said:

Cut and Paste. Finale or Sibelius have made it so easy to cut and paste that you don't even have to cut anymore, just highlight and drag. And I think that is a bad thing.

It's not just the obvious argument that the music suffers from exact copies of a musical motive all over the place, or that it breeds mindless, quasi-minimalistic ostinato patterns that don't develop and have no real destination.

The real problem is that it is easy to do, and it should not be easy.

When you are working with pencil and paper, and you have to copy and paste something, it is a major pain. You have to either literally 'copy and paste', with a copy machine, scissors, and tape, or you have to rewrite the same material over and over by hand. And when you are faced with that much work, you stop and think before you write something down. That is a good thing. That pause forces you to reflect on the worthiness of the material you've got, and makes you think about the larger structure of the piece before you forge ahead. It encourages reflection and introspection, and in my experience reflection and introspection are two of the best friends a composer can have.

Read the whole post here.