When composing music, there’s a constant tension between familiarity and novelty - repetition and change. Pure repetition is boring. Pure change is confusing.

I quite like Rush, and they’ve managed to produce music which is ambitious and full of variety and change, but also easy to follow. Transitions makes sense. One thing lead into to another. Things never seem haphazard or chaotic. There’s almost always a steady groove one can tap one’s foot to, even if it’s in an odd time signature.

On the other hand, much prog rock and classical music is very confusing (especially to the untrained ear). Things lack a steady pulse, speed up and slow down, change rhythms continually, take long pauses and restart unpredictably.

Whether one is creating melodies or drum parts, one can make things easy to follow by limiting major changes to those between sections (and by doing work on either side of section transitions to make them ‘make sense’). Within a section, one can explore a variety of ideas in the form of variations of a core idea. In this way, one introduces novelty and surprise in the details, but maintains a predictable overall structure.

Incidentally, it’s not only easier to listen to. It’s easier to compose variations than entirely new ideas.