Musical repetition, then, far from a topic that should embarrass music scholars, constitutes an essential core practice in performance and listening that is illumi-native of what is special about this fundamentally human mode of att ending. Art music in the twentieth century can be understood as having followed two diver-gent paths in reaction to discomfort with repetition as a communicative strat-egy; one path, best represented by composers labeled as minimalist, entailed the stubborn placement of repetition at the very center of stylistic practice, and the other, best represented by serialism and some aleatoric musics, entailed the equally stubborn, at-all-costs avoidance of repetition. It’s hard not to speculate about what the course of musical history might have looked like for the past hundred years had repetition not been such a fl ashpoint.
Embracing characteristics that are particular to music, such as repetition, can also help us derive new insights into other domains, such as language, which have
oxfordhb-9780199990825.indd 179
oxfordhb-9780199990825.indd 179 10/11/2013 3:06:19 PM10/11/2013 3:06:19 PM
tended primarily to contribute models to music scholars rather than to receive ideas and frameworks from them. An example of the gradually changing tide on this issue is the Brandt, Gebrian & Slevc (2012) paper that recasts language as dependent on music-like processing of auditory input in infancy. However, infl uence needn’t entail the repositioning of music as somehow prior or more central to another domain, but might simply help draw att ention to some pro-cess or mechanism that previously fell to the side of conventional models.
What’s happening in music is indeed sometimes language-like or dance-like—but sometimes what’s happening in music is simply music-like.
Repetition seems to me such an element. Although repetition can characterize other relevant domains, it is most essentially connected with the functions and practice of music. Musical repetition cannot be understood simply as an artifact of domain-independent hedonism; if I like a particular dish, I might return to a restaurant again and again to order it. However, beyond a gradual assimilation of this practice into my daily life, the potential acquisition of a sort of nostalgia for the experience in between visits, and a possible improvement in my abil-ity to identify subtle changes in the preparation from evening to evening, these repeated encounters are unlikely to materially transform what it is essentially like to eat this dish. But repeated encounters with a particular music can alter what it is to listen to that piece, choreographing a diff erent sense of subjectivity, facilitating an engagement with structural features at a diff erent level than those initially apprehended, and assimilating the external sounds into a broadened sense of self. Repetition draws us into music, and repetition draws music into us. It represents a starting point for confronting some of music’s most elusive and defi ning qualities. Since human beings are fundamentally musical, when we understand more about the musical capacity, we understand more about our-selves. In this way, something as simple as putt ing a track on repeat can serve as a window into who we are.
oxfordhb-9780199990825.indd 180
oxfordhb-9780199990825.indd 180 10/11/2013 3:06:19 PM10/11/2013 3:06:19 PM
181 Abbate , C. ( 2004 ). Music: Drastic or gnostic? Critical Inquiry , 30 , 505–536 .
Adorno , T. W. ( 2009 ). Night music: Essays on music 1928–1962 (W. Hoban, Trans.).
London : Seagull Books . (Original work published 2003).
Agawu , V. K. ( 1991 ). Playing with signs: A semiotic interpretation of classic music . Princeton, NJ : Princeton University Press .
Arewa , O. B. ( 2006 ). From J.C. Bach to hip hop: Musical borrowing, copyright and cultural con-text. North Carolina Law Review , 84 , 547–645 .
Ashley , R. ( 2004 ). All his yesterdays: Expressive vocal techniques in Paul McCartney’s recordings . Unpublished manuscript.
Att ali , J. , Massumi , B. , Jameson , F. , & McClary , S. ( 1985 ). Noise: Th e political economy of music . Minneapolis, MN : University of Minnesota Press .
Auner , J. ( 2003 ). “Sing it for me”: Posthuman ventriloquism in recent popular music. Journal of the Royal Musical Association , 128 , 98–122 .
Bailes , F. ( 2007 ). Th e prevalence and nature of imagined music in the everyday lives of music students. Psychology of Music , 35 , 555–570 .
Bain , B. ( 2011 ). Top 5 dramatic readings of pop songs, from “Baby” to “Poker Face.” Retrieved from htt p://idolator.com/5771261/top-5-dramatic-readings-of-pop-songs-from-baby-to- poker-face.
Barnes , S. J. , Hua , J. M. , Pinel , J. P. J. , Takahashi , A. , & Wig , G. S. ( 2005 ). Conditioned eff ects of kindling three diff erent sites in the hippocampal complex of the rat. Behavioral Neuroscience , 119 , 1572–1579 .
Beaman , C. P. , & Williams , T. I. ( 2010 ). Earworms (“stuck song syndrome”): Towards a natural history of intrusive thoughts. British Journal of Psychology , 101 , 637–653 .
Beauvois , M. W. ( 2007 ). Quantifying aesthetic preference and perceived complexity for fractal melodies. Music Perception , 24 , 247–264 .
Becker , J. ( 2004 ). Deep listeners: Music, emotion, and trancing . Bloomington : Indiana University Press .
Bennett , A. ( 2007 ). Th e uncommon reader: A novella . New York : Farrar, Straus, and Giroux . Bennett , S. ( 2002 ). Musical Imagery Repetition (MIR) . (M. Phil. dissertation). University of
Cambridge , Cambridge, UK .
Berliner , P. ( 1994 ). Th inking in jazz: Th e infi nite art of improvisation . Chicago, IL : University of Chicago Press .
Berlyne , D. E. ( 1971 ). Aesthetics and psychobiology . New York, NY : Appleton-Century-Croft s . Berlyne , D. E. ( 1974 ). Studies in the new experimental aesthetics . Washington, DC : Hemisphere . Bharucha , J. J. ( 1987 ). Music cognition and perceptual facilitation: A connectionist framework.
Music Perception , 5 , 1–30 .
oxfordhb-9780199990825.indd 181
oxfordhb-9780199990825.indd 181 10/11/2013 3:06:19 PM10/11/2013 3:06:19 PM
Bigand , E. ( 2003 ). More about the musical expertise of musically untrained listeners. In G. supplementary motor area and the basal ganglia in motor sequence control: Investigations with H 2 15 O PET. Journal of Neurophysiology , 79 , 1070–1080 .
Borges , J. L. ( 1962 ). Ficciones (A. Kerrigan, Trans.). New York, NY : Grove Press .
Bornstein , R. F. ( 1989 ). Exposure and aff ect: Overview and meta-analysis of research, 1968–
1987. Psychological Bulletin , 106 , 265–289 .
Bornstein , R. F. ( 1992 ). Subliminal mere exposure eff ects. In R. F. Bornstein & T. S. Pitt man (Eds.), Perception without awareness: Cognitive, clinical, and social perspectives (pp. 191–210 ).
New York, NY : Guilford Press .
Bornstein , R. F. , & D’Agostino , P. R. ( 1994 ). Th e att ribution and discounting of perceptual fl u-ency: Preliminary tests of a perceptual fl uency/att ributional model of the mere exposure eff ect. Social Cognition , 12 , 103–128 .
Bornstein, R. F., & D'Agostino, P. R. (1992). Stimulus recognition and the mere exposure eff ect.
Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 63 , 545-552
Boulez , P.. ( 1984 , 28 June). On new music. Th e New York Review of Books , pp. 14–15 .
Boyer , P. , & Liénard , P. ( 2006 ). Why ritualized behavior? Precaution systems and action parsing in developmental, pathological and cultural rituals . Behavioral and Brain Sciences , 29 , 595–613 . Brainard , M. S. , & Doupe , A. J. ( 2002 ). What songbirds teach us about learning. Nature , Stereotypic animal behavior: Fundamentals and applications to welfare (pp. 119–145 ).
Wallingford, UK : CAB International .
Calabrese , O. ( 1992 ). Neo-baroque: A sign of the times (C. Lambert, Trans.). Princeton, NJ : Princeton University Press .
Calvert , S. L. ( 1991 ). Impact of singing on students’ verbatim recall and learning . Paper presented at the Annual Meeting of the American Psychological Association, San Francisco, CA . Calvert , S. L. ( 2001 ). Impact of televised songs on children’s and young adults’ memory of
educa-tional content. Media Psychology , 3 , 325–342 .
Calvert , S. L. , & Tart , M. ( 1993 ). Song versus verbal forms for very-long-term, long-term, and short-term verbatim recall. Journal of Applied Developmental Psychology , 14 , 245–260 .
oxfordhb-9780199990825.indd 182
oxfordhb-9780199990825.indd 182 10/11/2013 3:06:19 PM10/11/2013 3:06:19 PM
Calvo-Merino , B. , Glaser , D. E. , Grèzes , J. , Passingham , R. E. , & Haggard , P. ( 2005 ). Action observation and acquired motor skills: An fMRI study with expert dancers. Cerebral Cortex , 15 , 1243–1249 . Cambouropoulos , E. ( 2006 ). Musical parallelism and melodic segmentation: A computational
approach. Music Perception , 23 , 249–267 .
Caplin , W. E. ( 1998 ). Classical Form: A Th eory of Formal Functions for the Instrumental Music of Haydn, Mozart, and Beethoven . New York, NY : Oxford University Press .
Chen , J. L. , Penhune , V. B. , & Zatorre , R. J. ( 2008 ). Moving on time: Brain network for auditory-motor synchronization is modulated by rhythm complexity and musical training.
Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience , 20 , 226–239 .
Chernoff , J. ( 1979 ). Afr ican rhythm and Afr ican sensibility: Aesthetics and social action in Afr ican musical idioms . Chicago : University of Chicago Press .
Clarke , E. F. ( 2011 ). Music perception and musical consciousness. In D. Clarke & E. Clarke (Eds.), Music and Consciousness: Philosophical, Psychological, and Cultural Perspectives (pp.
193–213 ). New York, NY : Oxford University Press .
Clarke, E.F. (2007). Th e impact of recording on listening. Twentieth-Century Music, 4 , 47-70.
Clarke, E. F. (2005). Creativity in performance. Musicae Scientiae, 19 , 157–182.
Clayton , M. , Sager , R. , & Will , U. ( 2004 ). In time with the music: Th e concept of entrainment and nonformulaic language by native and nonnative speakers? Applied Linguistics , 29 , 72–89 . Cook , N. ( 1987 ). Th e perception of large-scale tonal closure. Music Perception , 5 , 197–206 . Cooke , M. ( 2008 ). A History of Film Music . Cambridge, UK : Cambridge University Press . Cooper , S. J. , & Dourish , C. T. ( 1990 ). Neurobiology of Stereotyped Behaviour . New York,
NY : Clarendon Press/Oxford University Press .
Cox, Arnie. (2011). Embodying music: Principles of the mimetic hypothesis. Music Th eory Online, 17 (2). Retrieved from htt p://www.mtosmt.org/issues/mto.11.17.2/mto.11.17.2.cox.html.
Crawley , A. M. , Anderson , D. R. , Wilder , A. , Williams , M. , & Santomero , A. ( 1999 ). Eff ects of repeated exposures to a single episode of the television program Blue’s Clues on the viewing behaviors and comprehension of preschool children . Journal of Educational Psychology , 91 , 630–637 .
Issue: Narrative in music and interaction , 147–167 .
Cross , I. ( 2009 ). Th e nature of music and its evolution. In S. Hallam , I. Cross , & M. Th aut
oxfordhb-9780199990825.indd 183 10/11/2013 3:06:20 PM10/11/2013 3:06:20 PM
Crystal , D. ( 2000 ). Language death . Cambridge, UK : Cambridge University Press .
Csikszentmihalyi , M. ( 1997 ). Creativity: Flow and the psychology of discovery andinvention . New York, NY : HarperCollins Publishers .
Cumming, N. (2001). Th e sonic self: Musical subjectivity and signifi cation . Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press.
DeBellis , M. ( 1995 ). Music and conceptualization . Cambridge, UK : Cambridge University Press . Deleuze, G. (1988). Le Plio . Paris: Editions de Minuit.
Deleuze , G. ( 2004 ). Diff erence and repetition (P. Patt on, Trans.). New York, NY : Columbia investi-gation. Psychology of Music . doi: 10.1177/0305735611415144.
Dissanayake , E. ( 2006 ). Ritual and ritualization: Musical means of conveying and shaping emotion
(Ed.), Repetition in discourse: Interdisciplinary perspectives (Vol. 1, pp. 86–97 ). Norwood, NJ : Ablex Publishing Corporation .
Eilam , D. , Zor , R. , Szechtman , H. , & Hermesh , H. ( 2006 ). Rituals, stereotypy and compulsive perfection-ism: Th e prevalence and development of compulsive-like behavior in normal young chil-dren. Child Development , 68 , 58–68 .
Evans , D. W. , & Maliken , A. ( 2011 ). Cortical activity and children’s rituals, habits and other repeti-tive behavior: A visual P300 study. Behavioural Brain Research , 224 , 174–179 .
Feld , M. ( 2005 ). Temporal orientation in sonata-form fi rst groups: With special reference to the work of A. B. Marx. (Ph.D. dissertation). Columbia University , New York, NY .
Feld , S. , & Keil , C. ( 1994 ). Music Grooves: Essays and Dialogues . Chicago, IL : University of Chicago Press .
oxfordhb-9780199990825.indd 184
oxfordhb-9780199990825.indd 184 10/11/2013 3:06:20 PM10/11/2013 3:06:20 PM
Fernald , A. , & Morikawa , H. ( 1993 ). Common themes and cultural variations in Japanese and American mothers’ speech to infants. Child Development , 64 , 637–656 .
Fernald , A. , & O’Neill , D. K. ( 1993 ). Peekaboo across cultures: How mothers and infants play with voices, faces, and expectations. In K. MacDonald (Ed.), Parent–child play: Descriptions and implications (pp. 259–285 ). Albany, NY : State University of New York Press . CA : University of California Press .
Finney , S. A. , & Palmer , C. ( 2003 ). Auditory feedback and memory for music performance: Sound striatum and frontal cortex as monkeys perform sequential-saccade tasks. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences , 102 ( 25 ), 9032–9037 .
Gabrielsson , A. ( 1987 ). Once again: Th e theme fr om Mozart’s Piano Sonata in A Major (K. 331), a comparison of fi ve performances . Paper presented at Action and Perception in Rhythm and Music, Stockholm, Sweden.
Gabrielsson , A. ( 2011 ). Strong experiences with music: Music is much more than just music (R.
Bradbury, Trans.). New York, NY : Oxford University Press .
Gabrielsson , A. , & Wik , S. L. ( 2003 ). Strong experiences related to music: A descriptive system.
New York, NY : Oxford University Press .
Gould , G. ( 1966 ). Th e prospects of recording. High Fidelity , 16 , 46–63 .
oxfordhb-9780199990825.indd 185 10/11/2013 3:06:20 PM10/11/2013 3:06:20 PM