Dealing with almost-repetitive stuff

[Evan Driscoll]

How do you deal with music where there is a lot of repetition of a group
of measures, but where the dynamics or other instructions (e.g.
pizz/arco) differs between repetitions?

For instance, take Holst's Mars (*cough*). The LilyPond docs have a nice
snippet for being able to generate the "bah-bah-bah dum dum bah-bah dum"
rhythm at different notes;
http://lilypond.org/doc/v2.16/Documentation/snippets/pitches#pitches-creating-a-sequence-of-notes-on-various-pitches.

But what if I need to be able to attach a dynamic to the first note, or
add a crescendo? Is there a way I can do that without foregoing the
\rhythm command entirely?

Does anyone encounter situations like this? How do you deal with it?

Evan