In his defense of concatenationism (more thoroughly discussed in Chapter 7), Levinson examines what it takes for a piece to make sense to a listener—for a listener to have a sense that he or she “gets it.” He proposes that to have this impression, a listener must be able to feel and inhabit the musical progression, to embody it to some extent: evidence, Levinson claims, for the primacy of moment-to-moment experiences in musical listening. What might constitute proof that a listener had grasped the music in this way? “One of the clearest indi-cations that one has understood a piece of music at a basic level is one’s ability to reproduce parts of it in some manner—by playing, singing, humming, or whis-tling it” (Levinson, 1997). Since this kind of understanding not only doesn’t rely on conscious articulation but is also potentially not even susceptible to it, the ability to repeat the musical progression becomes the best proving ground for communication and shared sensibility.
In a study of training habits among professional popular musicians, Green (2002) found that almost all of them had begun by trying to copy their favor-ite recordings by ear. Suzuki students the world over are taught to listen and repeat the sounds on a CD sent home with the parents. And how many music lessons involve some variation on this scenario? Th e student plays a passage.
“No, like this ,” says the teacher, performing it subtly diff erently—with some diffi cult-to-articulate but perceptually distinct adjustment to pace, voicing, and articulation. Th e student replays the passage, trying to match the teacher’s style, and looks up quizzically. “Almost, but more like this ,” says the teacher, playing it again, perhaps with a bit of additional emphasis on the dimension the student’s performance continues to lack. “Oh, like this ,” replies the student, successfully echoing the essence of the teacher’s performance. “Yes!” says the teacher excit-edly, even before the passage is complete, once the expressive match is clear.
Episodes like this, played out from studio to studio and conservatory to conservatory all over the world, demonstrate that the ability to repeat another person’s musical utt erance lies at the heart of what we understand as musical communication. Th ere’s no more endearing image, perhaps, of a truly eff ective episode of musical communication than a person playing full-thrott led air guitar.
A short-lived reality TV show on VH1 called Motormouth chronicled particu-larly egregious instances of that other signature index of positive musical experi-ences: the in-car radio sing-along. Successful musical communication feels like a scooping up of the listener into the music, a process of bringing the listener
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along. Th is can take the form of imagined co-participation, in which the listener follows the musical logic so intensely that it comes to feel as if he’s executing it.
But it can also take the form of overt participation: singing along, or carefully reproducing the demonstration of a teacher, providing evidence that the student understood the teacher’s point even though no words were exchanged.
It’s ironic, perhaps, that I entered music cognition in frustration with pre-cisely this kind of incident. As a pianist studying at the Peabody Conservatory of Music, I encountered so many situations in which repetition of this sort consti-tuted the primary pedagogical technique that I became convinced the enterprise of music simply didn’t understand itself. Taking the resistance to verbal articula-tion of principles as a discipline-wide failure to apply intellect to the domain of music performance, I started (against the advice of my teacher, which added a motivating layer of illicitness) taking the bus up to the Homewood Campus of Johns Hopkins University for a class in cognitive science.
At that time, the discipline was still very much in the thralls of the prospect of artifi cial intelligence, and it seemed plausible that things we didn’t seem to understand at all, like music performance, might yield to some kind of compu-tational account. Th is was precisely the time when psychologists had begun to record performances on specially equipped pianos that kept a precise trace of the timing and acceleration of every key press, allowing for new insight into the relationship between structural features of music, such as cadences, and expres-sive choices by performers.
Over the past decade of thinking about these questions, however, I’ve become convinced that the failure lies not in the practice of communicating musical insights through repetition, but in the refusal to accept this kind of exchange as a form of human communication with similar value to a verbal one. Th e failure, in other words, lay in my own perspective! But I believe this personal trajectory is representative of a larger one within cognitive science, a trajectory from view-ing the brain as a sort of abstract computational device, with a certain account of language serving as the canonic domain of thought and communication, to viewing the brain as inextricably embodied, with more implicit, intuitive behav-iors serving as more representative of its essential capacities (Gibbs, Jr., 2005).
Along with this shift has come a recasting of language as a very diff erent, and more music-like, phenomenon than previously postulated (Brandt, Gebrian &
Slevc, 2012; Mithen, 2006). Seen through this lens, the communicative act of musical repetition simply underscores the social, participatory nature of human cognition.
Performers not only experience repetition as a central practice in pedagogical contexts, they also experience it on a relentless basis in the process of learning and perfecting a piece. Piano students love to play “the coin game.” Th ey put a stack of fi ve coins on the left side of the music stand, and play through a tough
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passage. Every time they get it exactly right, they take one coin off the existing stack and move it over to a new stack on the right side of the music stand. If they make even one mistake, however, they have to move everything back to the left side and start again. Th e object is to play the passage fi ve times in a row without an error—a feat represented in the end by the successful transfer of the entire stack of coins.
In addition to being fun, the coin game is eff ective because almost no child has the patience or dedication to repeat a passage the number of times neces-sary to achieve real improvement. Even if the student knows intellectually the particular notes involved in a challenging leap, if she hasn’t created the appropri-ate motor routine, the performance won’t be clean. Sometimes a student will be suffi ciently ambitious to repeat the passage a few times, but usually only every other repetition is actually correct. Even more typically, a student will try a pas-sage once, get it wrong, try it again, get it wrong again, and when she eventually gets it right, feel great and move on. But this kind of session, rife with repetition, has in eff ect drilled the erroneous version into her fi ngers.
Th e coin game helps students make sure they are working until they have repeated the correct version enough times to train it into their muscles. Th e criti-cal notion here is that it takes consistent repetition to train the motor sequences necessary for executing skilled performance. Since, except in rare circumstances (computer music, etc.), producing music requires executing motor sequences, intense repetition is an important component of building a successful perfor-mance. Repetition lurks behind every recital, and expressive moments, no mat-ter how spontaneous, depend on the accumulation of hours of practice room repetition.
In the same way that years and years of fl owing water ultimately carved out the permanent-appearing landscape of the Grand Canyon, hours and hours of repetitive practice carve out a stable patt ern of movements that are inextricably linked together, such that the whole sequence can unfold without much execu-tive oversight. Th is process represents an actual physical instantiation of what repetitive listening only mirrors—an overlearned sequence in which individual time-slices are bound tightly, one to the next. Just as a performer can easily vertently learn an error by repeating it too oft en in practice, a listener can inad-vertently learn an error by hearing it too many times on recording. Mark Katz (2004) recalls how obsessive relistening to a Heifi tz recording that contained an accidental pluck of the open E string yielded persistent expectations for that
“wrong note” despite knowledge of its status as an error. In other words, despite knowing intellectually that the sound was inadvertent, he continued to feel an expectation for it. Th e E had been tightly woven into the learned sequence of notes such that its sounding was implied by the sequence, even when he knew it shouldn’t be. Th is tight coupling from one sound to the next, so fundamental to
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the experience of music listening, is even more fundamental to the act of music performance, which harnesses repetition to train motor sequences into muscles such that a pianist might fi nd his mind wandering to the evening’s dinner plans while midway through the development in a Chopin Sonata. Repetition works to automatize, both a boon and a danger for the instrumentalist and the morn-ing commuter. Th eir responses to this phenomenon shed an interestingly diff er-ent, and as yet insuffi ciently explored light on the cognitive science of musical repetition.
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