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The development of contemporary American music is clearly reflected in the integration of black composers, performers, and their songs into mainstream popular record charts. Between 1953 and 1978 a fascinating role reversal occurred. During that quarter century black artists shifted from creators to revivalists. The same role reversal did not apply to white artists, who tended to evolve along a more consistent audienceacceptance continuum. How can this 25-year cycle of social change best be illustrated? What particular elements of black music dramatically entered the pop spectrum during the fifties, and later gained dominance by the end of the sixties? Why did black artists become more and more conservative during the late seventies? A careful examination of audio repetition - cover recordings and song revivals - offers a great deal of revealing information about changes in social, economic and artistic life in America after 1953. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines rhythm and repetition as possibilities for curricular wide-awakeness. When a rhythm is established, an expectation is established with it: patterned beats create momentum, so that subsequent beats arrive to a place that has been prepared by anticipation. But what happens when the rhythm stops? Grounded in the repetition of footsteps that constitute walking, this paper explores how rhythm offers pedagogical possibilities for curricular reconstruction, looking to the way that expectations for the future are informed by habits of listening to the present. It begins by framing the experience of monotony that can cloud sensitivity to daily life. Suggesting that "biographic situation" can be understood as beats in a historical phrase, the paper discusses polyrhythms as invitations to observe, reflect and participate in the making of (rhythmic) history. Drawing on Deleuze, Pinar and Butler, it emphasizes the productive precarity of rhythm that is imminently falling away into the past, clearing spaces for new possibilities for imagining how circumstances and reactions could be otherwise. It concludes with a call to recognize the complexity of breaking with pre-established patterns of expectation, using sonic experience as practice for the cultivation of historical agency and ontological self-awareness. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

В статье рассматривается остинато в музыке как жанровое явление. Автор обращается к группе произведений с названием остинато и пытается выявить их характерные жанровые признаки. В ходе анализа обозначается генетическая структура остинато, а также рассматривается его эволюция на современном этапе развития музыкального искусства. Миграция остинато в жанр рассматривается как тенденция современного искусства. В статье выделяются две группы произведений реализующих остинато в таком качестве. Первая основана на преломлении жанров академической традиции, а вторая связана с композицией статического типа, развивавшейся в минимализме. На примере анализа произведений М. Брауна и С. Тен-Холта автор показывает возможности конкретного художественного преломления указанного явления в разных стилевых условиях. Сделанные аналитические наблюдения позволяют констатировать развитие остинато в современном музыкальном искусстве как определенной жанровой модели, обобщающей смысловые горизонты целостной музыкальной композиции.

The production of speech and music are two human behaviors that involve complex hierarchical structures with implications for timing. Timing constraints may arise from a human proclivity to form 'self-organized' metrical structures for perceived and produced event sequences, especially those that involve repetition. To test whether the propensity to organize events in time arises even for simple motor behaviors, we developed a novel experimental tapping paradigm investigating whether participants use the beat structure of a tapped pattern to determine the interval between repetitions. Participants listened to target patterns of 3, 4, or 5 events, occurring at one of four periodic rates, and tapped out the pattern 11 times, creating 10 inter-pattern intervals (IPIs), which participants chose freely. The ratio between mean IPI and mean inter-tap interval (ITI) was used to measure the beat-relatedness of the overall timing pattern; the closer this ratio is to an integer, the more likely the participant was timing the IPI to match a multiple of the target pattern beat. Results show that a beat-based strategy contributes prominently, although not universally, to IPI duration. Moreover, participants preferred interval cycles with even numbers of beats, especially cycles with four beats. Finally, the IPI/ITI ratio was affected by rate, with more beats of silence for the IPI at faster rates. These findings support the idea that people can generate a larger global timing structure when engaging in the repetition of simple periodic motor patterns, and use that structure to govern the timing of those motor events. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Art of the 20th century is characterized by the rise of the mythical thought and transformation of the myth into an artistic creativity. In music we can encounter manifestations of conscious and unconscious neo-mythologism in various forms. The methodological foundations of our text are concepts by Claude Lévi-Strauss, Carl Gustav Jung, Gilles Deleuze or Victoria Adamenko. The text focuses on the basic identification of the repetition as a mythological sign and its manifestation in the music of the 20th century (Arnold Schoenberg, George Crumb, minimal music etc.). Constitutive principle of repetition in music is connected with categories such as musical space and time, contrast, difference, musical thought. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Relatively little scholarly attention has been paid to the performance and reception history of Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg during the Weimar Republic (1919-33), but as this article will demonstrate, the opera played an indispensable role in the repertories of Weimarera opera houses. Despite an evident desire on the part of some Weimar Republic directors and designers of Die Meistersinger to draw on staging innovations of the time, productions of the work from this period are characterised by scenic conservatism and repetition of familiar naturalistic imagery. This was not coincidental, I will argue, since Die Meistersinger served as a comforting rite for many opera-going members of the Weimar-era middle classes, at least some of whom felt economically or socially beleaguered in the aftermath of World War I. But no matter how secure the conservative theatrical conventions surrounding the Weimar Republic Meistersinger appeared, the repressed turmoil of the period seeped into ideas about the work, haunting the performance and reception of constructed German stability. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The music of John Adams has grown far away from its roots in Minimalism, but even in complex works like American Berserk (2001) and the Saxophone Concerto (2013) one can detect the working of a compositional mind conditioned by procedures relating back to earlier periods of the composer's output. A feature of Adams recent work is a continuing concern with various repetition strategies but in a far more veiled and multilayered manner. Another feature of both works is the deployment of 'pushing up' and 'pushing down' material manipulated rhythmically and raised to a structural level. Two strategies are adopted and adapted to investigate these features. The first, is from Rebecca Leydon's 'Towards a Typology of Minimalist Tropes', which considers the qualities of repetition in Minimal music, and the second is an idea borrowed from David Osmond Smith's monograph on Berio's Sinfonia, Playing on Words, where he considers 'levels of obliteration' of an underlying text (Mahler 2 Scherzo 'In Ruhig Fliessender Bewegung') in the third movement of the Sinfonia. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

THIS STUDY INVESTIGATED THE ROLE OF REPETITION on listener response. It tested the hypothesis that repetition, in the form of looping during an exposure phase, would make random sequences of tones sound more musical when rated later during a test phase. In Experiment 1, participants without special music training rated the musicality of random sequences of tones on a Likert-like scale from 1 to 7. Experiment 2 used the highest and lowest rated sequences as stimuli. In an initial exposure phase, participants heard half these sequences presented six times in a loop, and half of them presented only once. In a subsequent test phase, they rated the musicality of each sequence. Sequences that had been repeated were rated as more musical, regardless of whether they had received a high or low musicality rating in Experiment 1, but the effect size was small. These results, although limited in some respects, support a large body of literature pointing to the importance of repetition in aesthetic experiences of music. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

REPETITION AND NOVELTY ARE ESSENTIAL COMPONENTS of tonal music. Previous research suggests that the degree of repetitiveness of a line can determine its relative melodicity within a musical texture. Concordantly, musical accompaniments tend to be highly repetitive, probably facilitating listeners' tendency to focus on and follow the melodic lines they support. With the aim of contributing to the unexplored area of the relationship between repetition and attention in polyphonic music listening, this paper presents an empirical investigation of the way listeners attend to exact and immediate reiterations of musical fragments in two-part contrapuntal textures. Participants heard original excerpts composed of a repetitive and a nonrepetitive part, continuously rating the relative prominence of the two voices. The results indicate that the line that consists of immediate and exact repetitions of a short musical fragment tends to perceptually decrease in salience for the listener. This suggests that musical repetition plays a significant role in dynamically shaping listeners' perceptions of musical texture by affecting the relative perceived importance of simultaneous parts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses the repetitive skill development and student motivation. Topics discussed include information on the traditional education system; importance of music Rehearsals along with the information on the need of understanding and intellectual and physical fluency; and the music performance assessment and the development of music skill.

The article discusses the quartet composition created by classical composer Luigi Boccherini for Crown Prince Friedrich Wilhelm II of Prussia, Germany. Topics discussed include the decline of publication of the works of Boccherini after his appointment as composer to Friedrich Wilhelm, the use of repetition in his quartets, and the minuet and trio structures of his compositional works.

This article argues for understanding popular songs and songwriting through the metaphor of architecture, an idea we draw from vernacular terms used by songwriters when comprehending and explaining their own creative practice, and which we deploy in response to those who have called for writing about music to use a non-technical vocabulary and make greater use of metaphor. By architecture we mean those recognisable characteristics of songs that exist as enduring qualities regardless of a specific performance, recording or sheet music score. We use this analogy not as a systematic model, but as a device for exploring the intricate ways in which words and music are combined and pointing to similarities in the composition of poetry and the writing of song lyrics. The art of repetition and play with ambiguity are integral to popular song architectures that endure regardless of the modifications introduced by performers who temporarily inhabit a particular song. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Musical discourse, and all its important events (thematism, repetitions, interior articulation, elements of diversification and motivic development etc), must be conceived at the moment of creation within the time frame in which they will take place when the piece is interpreted, in other words, the composer must be capable of imagining a realistic positioning of his work in the time that takes music in its flow. The composer must have a special sense of time, he/she must surpass the reality of the composing time (a much extended reality) and position himself/herself at every moment in the time of the interpretation of his/her work. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The main thesis in this work is that minimalism produces neutral sensory perception and is thereby complicit not only in the production of the body qua organism, but also in the wider socio-politico-economic environment that such a conception of the body entails. Minimalism produces neutral sensory perception by insisting on "bare repetition", the literal, direct, and immediate materiality of the work of art; in other words, it insists on a specific ontological relation between difference and the same, whereby the same, singular, and identical, predicated on representational thought, replace the different, which is expressed in becoming. Minimalism, neutral perception, the relative immanence of capitalism, and the body qua organism constitute a sort of chain, which should be subjected to critical analysis and a critique based on the concepts of difference, event, and encounter. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Canonic techniques in the Trecento caccia reveal a wide spectrum of ostinato procedures ranging from brief cadence patterns to large-scale harmonic and/or melodic repetition schemes. The ostinato phenomenon is thus an important structural component of canonic technique in the caccia. This article examines these ostinato patterns in terms of a putative historical and structural transformation of the genre at the intersection of unwritten and written practices. Special emphasis is placed on the definition of the caccia from the anonymous Trecento treatise, Capitulum de vocibus applicatis verbis, and its correlation with the early layer of the caccia repertoire. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A corpus analysis of common-practice themes shows that, when an intervallic pattern is repeated with one changed interval, the changed interval tends to be larger in the second instance of the pattern than in the first; the analysis also shows that the second instance of an intervallic pattern tends to contain more chromaticism than the first. An explanation is offered for these phenomena, using the theory of uniform information density. This theory states that communication is optimal when the density of information (the negative log of probability) maintains a consistent, moderate level. The repetition of a pattern of intervals is (in some circumstances, at least) highly probable; in some cases, the information density of such repetitions may be undesirably low. The composer can balance this low information by injecting a high-information (i.e., low-probability) element into the repetition such as a large interval or a chromatic note. A perceptual model is proposed, showing how the probabilities of intervals, scale degrees, and repetition might be calculated and combined. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article looks into the habituation-fluency theory of repetition in music. Topics include an examination of the exact and inexact patterns of repetition of music, the phenomenon of processing fluency, and the concept of habituation in relation to repetition. It also examines the repetition pattern known as the variation strategy, the shorter repetition sequences of the rondo strategy, and stimulus predictability.

Schoenberg's ideas about ‘Brahms the progressive’ involve the close study of the composer's use of ‘developing variation’ technique, yet Brahms's music also contains a high incidence of repetition. In 1843, the Danish philosopher Søren Kierkegaard published a book called Repetition under the pseudonym, ‘Constantin Constantius’. As an encryption of his underlying philosophy, this pseudonym encapsulates both the constant nature of repetition – and its more subtle element of change. Thus stasis and dynamism, similarity and difference, are equally (and visibly) represented here. Kierkegaard's ideas find resonance within the late Brahms piano miniatures (for instance in the Drei Intermezzi, op. 117) where highly compressed formal structures exhibit differing kinds of repetitive processes. The temporal quality of repetition – the fact that experiencing the ‘same’ thing can only occur later on in time – makes this device more dynamic than it may at first appear. Such a view of repetition sits alongside Schoenberg's notion of ‘developing variation’ – the endless reshaping of a basic shape – but although they may have underlying connections, each is articulated in a different way. Studies of developing variation in Brahms are confined to pitch structures, interval patterns and rhythmic shapes, whereas considerations of repetition need to embrace issues of temporality, narrative and motion. Drawing upon Kierkegaard's philosophical distinction between re-experiencing something, rather than experiencing it again, allows repetition to become a catalyst for change. It may help to explain the expressive expansiveness of Brahms's structurally controlled late piano works. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Listeners who lacked special expertise in contemporary art music were presented with 1-minute excerpts of music by Luciano Berio and Elliott Carter in either their original, unaltered versions or in modified versions such that segments within the excerpt repeated immediately or after a delay. They were asked to rate each excerpt's enjoyability, interest, and artistry on 7-point Likert-like scales. Listeners rated the excerpts in both repetition conditions as more enjoyable, interesting, and artistic than the original, unaltered versions, suggesting that repetitiveness is an important factor in aesthetic responses to unfamiliar styles. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

When is a repeat not a repeat? This article examines two areas in which repeats, notated by Classical period composers, are commonly held to be optional, and consequently in practice ignored. In particular, Beethoven’s five-part scherzos often appear in modern editions as scherzo–trio–scherzo with a da capo indicated that may appear optional. In this article all the sources, both manuscript and printed, of all Beethoven’s five-part scherzos, are examined, and the conclusion reached that Beethoven would have assumed that the movement would be written out in full showing clearly and unambiguously its five-part form.The wider picture of minuets and scherzos is then examined, and a similar conclusion shows that the custom nowadays of omitting repeats on the da capo, after the Trio, has no foundation in Classical period performance practice. On the contrary, in all music up to about 1830 it was invariably assumed, and accepted, that after the trio the minuet was played exactly as before, with both its repeats. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The article explores the contribution of composer, music theorist and teacher Milton Babbitt to U.S. music. It recognizes the extent of Babbitt's achievement and influence in U.S. music. It discusses the affinity of the composer with logical positivism based on his compositions. The article criticizes the music of Babbitt for its lack of literal repetition.

ALTHOUGH MUSIC'S REPETITIVENESS HAS BEEN A PERENNIAL topic of theoretical and philosophical interest, we know surprisingly little about the psychological processes underlying it. As one step in the larger enterprise of examining the psychology of musical repetition, a preliminary question addresses repetition detection: Which repetitions are listeners able to identify as such, and how does this ability change across repeated exposures of the same work? In this study, participants with minimal formal training heard short excerpts and were instructed to press a button whenever they heard something from earlier in the piece repeat. Additional exposures facilitated repetition detection for long units, but impaired repetition detection for short ones, exposing an attentional shift toward larger temporal spans across multiple hearings. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article we bring together historical research and the experience of performance to untangle problems regarding text underlay in the period around 1500. Although much has been written on the subject of underlay, the principal criterion we use for making decisions has not been discussed. We rely on internal musical evidence, principally motivic repetition. Our case study is Pierre de la Rue’s Salve Regina II, performed by Peter Schubert’s choir VivaVoce on their 2007 Naxos recording. We discuss how particular decisions about text underlay were taken, and their consequences. The new imitative style that developed in the late 15th century is characterized by an emphasis on obvious, literal repetition of musical material. Many pieces with relatively little text for extended sections of music feature extensive repetition of musical motifs after the opening of the point of imitation. In later sources we would expect to find these motifs texted. Based on comparison of sources and a study of developments in musical style, we propose that around 1500 singers were already repeating words and phrases of text in order to bring out the repetition of musical motifs--that, seeing musical repetition, they improvised an appropriate underlay ‘on the fly’. Our approach to text underlay reveals the connection between imitative style c.1500 and the expanded points of imitation with multiple entries of the soggetto typical of mid- and late 16th-century music. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper introduces the ‘Bayes transform’, a mathematical procedure for putting data into a hierarchical representation. Applicable to any type of data, the procedure yields interesting results when applied to sequences. In this case, the representation obtained implicitly models the repetition hierarchy of the source. There are then natural applications to music. Derivation of Bayes transforms can be the means of determining the repetition hierarchy of note sequences (melodies) in an empirical and domain-general way. The paper investigates application of this approach to Folk Song, examining the results that can be obtained by treating such transforms as generative models. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]