A
bald-faced lie. (Although I don't know why
lies would be any worse for
lacking hair on their
faces, but that's
beside the point.)
(Some) people will claim that electronic music is a creative dead-end. They say that electronic music is by-and-large creatively bankrupt and that all that has come out of it is boring minimalism and crappy dance music. Even if we assume they are correct, this does not prove that nothing new will be done.
In theory, electronic music is capable of generating any sound or sequence of sounds. At it's most extreme, then, a claim that electronic music is worn out is a claim that we have generated every sound and sequence of interest. If that's true, then all music has done everything it can do, and there's no point in singling out electronic music.
Others will come back against this point and say "but it's precisely this lack of constraints that makes electronic music so boring. True creativity requires you to overcome the constraints of your medium. In a medium with no constraints, creativity is doomed."
This is, in the words of Colonel Sherman T. Potter, a load of horse hockey. Constraints lead to creative solutions, but not necessarily creative art. If this were true, then less constrained art forms, like the novel, should generate less artful pieces. But as a whole, are novels less artful than sonnets? I think not.
Now, our hostile straw man responds that while it is true that one can do a great deal with electronic instruments, that is not what is meant by "electronic music" per se, and that "electronic music" refers to boring minimalism, stupid electronic new age music, and crappy dance music. This person is still wrong. I will prove this simply by example. Several electronic musicians have recently done phenomenally interesting things, among them Moby and Evolution Control Committee.
An unofficial Nodeshell Resuce
Addendum in response to
ferrouslepidoptera:
I don't think anything you said contradicts my general point, but I (and a lot of other electronic musicians) understand exactly what you mean.
Using my preferred music software, which happens to be Cakewalk, I can get a lot of control over a sound. I can get very fine grained control of pitch and modulation, for example. So, by using this piece of software, I can overcome the ham-handedness problem with pitch and modulation wheels.
Unfortunately, it would take me hours to recreate something vaguely like what I could do with my guitar in ten seconds. This sucks.
As I was driving today, before I read your writeup, I was fantasizing about having a violin which would record not only where my finger was on the string but information like how hard and how fast I was bowing, when I change bow direction, and what kind of vibrato and other wacky touch stuff I was doing. Of course, then I'd have to learn to play the violin, but maybe then I could get some of the expressivity I really want.