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1 Introduction

One concludes that humans are similarity automatons regardless of domain, level, or operation. Such cognitive dependence of so much on so little stems directly from evolution, where the ubiquitous complexity found in life is comprehensible only because the high-level abstract rules governing our unconscious processing are so very simple and for that reason so very powerful.1

The field of music theory which, for the last 100 years or so has principally concerned itself with discovering, demonstrating and explaining how sound is structured in musical contexts is, arguably, at least as diverse as music itself. In the twentieth century, for example, music-theoretical concepts were formulated ranging from the Grundgestalt of Arnold Schoenberg to Heinrich Schenkers Ursatz, from the implication-realization model of Eugene Narmour to JeanJacques Nattiezs semiological approach, and from the generative theory of Fred Lerdahl and Ray Jackendoff to David Lewins notion of generalized musical intervals and transformations.2 In part, musictheoretical diversity is an inevitable consequence of the variety of ways in which composers have sought to organize sounds. Hence the theoretical constructs underpinning the concept of figured bass would do little to elucidate the atonal works of the so-called Second Viennese School, for instance, any more than set theory would do much to assist our understanding of the Baroque basso continuo. However, the richness and complexity of the musical fabric have meant that even the simplest piece or excerpt may appropriately be viewed from a number of different perspectives, which may well be interdisciplinary in nature. For example, in recent times, the approaches adopted by some in the music-theoretical community have increasingly been cross-fertilized with, informed by, or purposely published alongside the thinking and empirical findings of cognitive scientists working in the field of music resulting in an epistemological
1 Eugene Narmour, Music Expectations by Cognitive Rule-Mapping, Music Perception, 17 (2000), 32998 (p. 395). 2 Arnold Schoenberg, Fundamentals of Musical Composition (London, 1967). Heinrich Schenker, Free Composition (Vienna, 1935; rev. edn, ed. Oswald Jonas, 1956; English edn, trans. and ed. Ernst Oster, New York, 1979). Eugene Narmour, The Analysis and Cognition of Basic Melodic Structures (Chicago, 1990); idem, The Analysis and Cognition of Melodic Complexity (Chicago, 1992). Jean-Jacques Nattiez, Music and Discourse: Toward a Semiology of Music, trans. Carolyn Abbate (Princeton, 1990). Fred Lerdahl and Ray Jackendoff, A Generative Theory of Tonal Music (Cambridge, MA, 1983). Lewin, Generalized Musical Intervals.

Repetition in Music

hybridization of varying fruitfulness.3 One volume of Music Perception, for example, examines the first movement of Mozarts Piano Sonata K.282 from several standpoints: Eugene Narmour undertakes a brief formal analysis (top down), measures perceptual content (bottom up), and then synthesizes the two through a theory of parametric analogues; Fred Lerdahl uses the piece to exemplify a model of tonal tension; Robert Gjerdingen focuses on several musical behaviours that would have been obvious to courtiers in Mozarts time and relates his presentation of them in K.282 to courtly norms; Jamshed Bharucha takes the opportunity to discuss the cognitive mechanisms underlying the phenomenon of melodic anchoring; Carol Krumhansl offers a perceptual analysis in terms of segmentation, tension and musical ideas; and, in relation to K.282, Caroline Palmer considers sources of musical expression in performance.4 Similarly, a special issue of Musicae scientiae presents five different approaches to the cor anglais solo from Tristan und Isolde: Schenkerian (Allen Forte), generative (Fred Lerdahl), semiological (Jean-Jacques Nattiez), perceptual (Irne Delige) and psychoanalytical (Michel Imberty).5 Yet, despite its diversity, and in so far as it exists as a distinct category of human endeavour, all music shares certain characteristics. John Sloboda, for instance, looks for cognitive universals in the processing of sound, and discusses their transcultural impact on musical structure: the need for a framework of discrete and reidentifiable locations in pitch and time, for example, to enable the dialectics of tension/resolution and motion/rest to flourish;6 and the fundamental requirement for sounds to stand in significant relation to one another, rather than in isolation, to permit music perception to get off the ground.7 In the context of ethnomusicology, Bruno Nettl finds features common to all musical dialects, including the prevalence of
3 An issue explored in some depth by Ian Cross, Music Analysis and Music Perception, Music Analysis, 17 (1998), 320; and Robert O. Gjerdingen, An Experimental Music Theory?, Rethinking Music, ed. Nicholas Cook and Mark Everist (Oxford, 1999), 16170. 4 Eugene Narmour, Analyzing Form and Measuring Perceptual Content in Mozarts Sonata K.282: A New Theory of Parametric Analogues, Music Perception, 13 (1996), 265318; Fred Lerdahl, Calculating Tonal Tension, ibid., 31963; Robert O. Gjerdingen, Courtly Behaviors, ibid., 36582 (p. 365); Jamshed J. Bharucha, Melodic Anchoring, ibid., 383400; Carol L. Krumhansl, A Perceptual Analysis of Mozarts Piano Sonata K.282: Segmentation, Tension, and Musical Ideas, ibid., 40132; Caroline Palmer, Anatomy of a Performance: Sources of Musical Expression, ibid., 43353. 5 Allen Forte, A Schenkerian Reading of an Excerpt from Tristan und Isolde, Musicae scientiae, Special Issue (1998), 1526; Fred Lerdahl, Prolongational Structure and Schematic Form in Tristans Alte Weise, ibid., 2741; Jean-Jacques Nattiez, Le solo de cor anglais de Tristan und Isolde: Essai danalyse smiologique tripartite, ibid., 4362; Irne Delige, Wagner Alte Weise: Une approche perceptive, ibid., 6390; Michel Imberty, Du vide linfini: Homologies structurales repres dans Tristan partir du solo de cor anglais du III acte, ibid., 91116. 6 John A. Sloboda, The Musical Mind: The Cognitive Psychology of Music (Oxford, 1985), 259. 7 Ibid., 154.

Introduction

melodic intervals around a major second, the tendency of musical utterances to conclude by descending, and the fact that material is habitually repeated or varied.8 Indeed, the ubiquity of repetition is widely recognized. Basil de Selincourt, for example, notes that the foundation of musical expression is repetition. [It] begins in the bar, and continues in the melody and in every phrase or item into which we can resolve it.9 Similarly, Victor Zuckerkandl writes: Music can never have enough of saying over again what has already been said, not once or twice, but dozens of times; hardly does a section, which consists largely of repetitions, come to an end, before the whole story is happily told all over again.10 Composers themselves have expressed the same view: Igor Stravinsky, for instance, observes that we instinctively prefer coherence and its quiet strength to the restless powers of dispersion that is, we prefer the realm of order to the realm of dissimilarity; according to Carlos Chvez, repetition has been the decisive factor in giving shape to music . . . the various devices used to integrate form are, again and again, nothing but methods of repetition; while Arnold Schoenberg is characteristically unequivocal: Intelligibility in music seems to be impossible without repetition.11 The fact that music does appear to have certain universal attributes raises the question whether different theories pertaining to music (and the analyses that accrue from them) share common features or are based on common premisses too; and, further to this, whether any pervasive aspects of music theory that do exist are ultimately a reflection of musical universals, or stem from theory itself, or arise from both. For it seems reasonable to assume, given the variety of music-theoretical perspectives in existence, that discovering, demonstrating and explaining their shared characteristics by adopting a metatheoretical stance could be a profitable avenue of enquiry. Again, it is repetition that features most widely in theoretical and analytical work, its presence and functions acknowledged, if not explicitly, then by implication. Consider, for example, the traditional notion of form, as espoused by writers ranging from Stewart Macpherson to Wallace Berry.12 Here, the concept of stereotyped structures such as AAAA . . . (characteristic of variation sets), ABA (ternary form) and ABACA . . . (the rondo) implicates repetition both within pieces and between them. Then,
Bruno Nettl, The Study of Ethnomusicology (Urbana, 1983), 3940. Basil de Selincourt, Music and Duration, Music and Letters, 1 (1920), 28693; repr. in Reflections on Art, ed. Susanne K. Langer (London, 1958), 15260. 10 Victor Zuckerkandl, Sound and Symbol: Music and the External World (New York, 1956), 213. 11 Igor Stravinsky, Poetics of Music (Cambridge, 1942), 6970. Carlos Chvez, Musical Thought (Cambridge, MA, 1961), 38, 41. Schoenberg, Fundamentals of Musical Composition, 20. It is also instructive to read Karl Eschmans critique of Alois Hba, who claimed to have written melodies in a style devoid of repetition, in his Changing Forms in Modern Music (2nd edn, Boston, MA, 1968), 19ff. 12 Stewart Macpherson, Form in Music (London, 1915). Wallace Berry, Form in Music (2nd edn, Englewood Cliffs, 1986).
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Repetition in Music

repetition is central to the various motivic-cum-thematic theories that have been propounded, in whose development the music and writings of Schoenberg have proved seminal. His ideas are taken to their logical extreme by a one-time pupil, Rudolph Rti, who demonstrates, to his own satisfaction at least, that many works from the Western classical repertory are each built on a single theme, surface contrasts notwithstanding.13 Alan Walker, working in the same tradition, states: The whole point of an inspired composition is that it diversifies a unity. On the other hand, the whole point about musical analysis is that it seeks to show the unity behind the diversity.14 Although his approach is quite different, Schenker too acknowledges the part played by repetition, both at the level of motives and in the construction of large-scale forms, in his early treatise on harmony.15 This recognition carries over into the sophisticated models of musical structure that followed; in Free Composition the question of repetition at deeper structural levels is aired in some detail.16 But of greater significance is the fact that repetition underpins the symmetries within the Ursatz, the harmonic-melodic framework which Schenker considered to lie in the background of all tonal masterpieces. Leonard Meyers evolving reflections on musical patterning variously involve repetition,17 most overtly in his notion of conformant relationships, in which one (more or less) identifiable, discrete musical event is related to another such event by similarity.18 Although it is not stated openly, the concept is no less important, however, in the first chapter of Music, the Arts, and Ideas, where the authors previously developed model of musical meaning is reviewed in the light of information theory.19 Meyers thesis is this: for experienced listeners, an incomplete portion of music implies certain continuations, which vary in probability according to the frequency of past occurrence (hence the significance of repetition). It is, Meyer asserts, deviations from the expected course of events that give rise to musical meaning. Moreover, Meyer identifies a number of different basic melodic structures (subsequently termed processes),20 including conjunct, disjunct and symmetrical patterns, whose internal regularity and use as stylistic archetypes imply repetition within and between works.21
Rudolph Rti, The Thematic Process in Music (Connecticut, 1951). Alan Walker, A Study in Musical Analysis (London, 1962). 15 Heinrich Schenker, Harmony, trans. Elisabeth M. Borgese, ed. Oswald Jonas (Chicago, 1954). 16 Schenker, Free Composition, trans. and ed. Oster, 99ff. 17 See, for example, Leonard B. Meyer, Emotion and Meaning in Music (Chicago, 1956); Music, the Arts, and Ideas (Chicago, 1967); Explaining Music (Chicago, 1973). 18 Meyer, Explaining Music, 44. 19 See, for example, Joel E. Cohen, Information Theory and Music, Behavioral Science, 7 (1962), 13763. 20 Burton S. Rosner and Leonard B. Meyer, The Perceptual Roles of Melodic Process, Contour and Form, Music Perception, 4 (1986), 140. 21 See Robert O. Gjerdingen, A Classic Turn of Phrase: Music and the Psychology of Convention (Philadelphia, 1988).
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Introduction

Other models of musical structure, reflecting a range of approaches, variously involve repetition too: take, for example, Herbert Simon and Richard Sumners system of encoding patterns parsimoniously using preordained alphabets and the operators same and next;22 settheoretical analysis, which entails abstracting groups of pitch classes and tracing similarities between them;23 and semiological analysis, to which motivic similarities are fundamental at the paradigmatic stage.24 As Nicolas Ruwet says:
I shall start from the empirical appreciation of the enormous role played in music, at all levels, by repetition, and I shall try to develop an idea proposed by Gilbert Rouget: . . . certain fragments are repeated, others are not; it is on repetition or absence of repetition that our segmentation is based.25

Finally, consider that repetition (parallelism) accounts for four of the five preference rules underlying Fred Lerdahl and Ray Jackendoffs A Generative Theory of Tonal Music (GPR 6, MPR 1, TSRPR 4 and PRPR 5), as well as being implicit in a number of others, such as GPR 5 (symmetry), for example. As the authors state: The importance of parallelism in musical structure cannot be overestimated. The more parallelism one can detect, the more internally coherent an analysis becomes, and the less independent information must be processed and retained in hearing and remembering a piece.26 In relation to music analysis the application of theory to a particular piece or group of pieces Ian Bent and William Drabkin provide a useful summary:
Analysis is the means of answering directly the question How does it work? Its central activity is comparison. By comparison it determines the structural elements and discovers the functions of those elements . . . comparison of unit with unit, whether within a single work, or between two works, or between the work and an abstract model . . . The central analytical act is thus the test for identity.27

In order to compare the role of repetition in different theories of music, whatever their conceptual basis, a new framework is required,
Herbert A. Simon and Richard K. Sumner, Pattern in Music, Formal Representation of Human Judgement, ed. Benjamin Kleinmuntz (New York, 1968), 21950. See also Diana Deutsch and John Feroe, The Internal Representation of Pitch Sequences in Tonal Music, Psychological Review, 88 (1981), 50322. 23 See, for example, Forte, The Structure of Atonal Music; idem, Pitch-Class Set Analysis Today, Music Analysis, 4 (1985), 2958; John Rahn, Basic Atonal Theory (New York, 1980); Lewin, Generalized Musical Intervals; Eric J. Isaacson, Similarity of Interval-Class Content; Steven Block and Jack Douthett, Vector Products and Intervallic Weighting, Journal of Music Theory, 38 (1994), 2141; Robert D. Morris, Equivalence and Similarity in Pitch and their Interaction with Pcset Theory, Journal of Music Theory, 39 (1995), 20743. 24 See, for instance, Nattiez, Le solo de cor anglais de Tristan und Isolde. 25 Nicolas Ruwet, Methods of Analysis in Musicology, trans. Mark Everist, Music Analysis, 6 (1987), 336. 26 Lerdahl and Jackendoff, A Generative Theory of Tonal Music, 52. 27 Ian Bent and William Drabkin, Analysis (London, 1987), 5. See also Dora A. Hanninen, A Theory of Recontextualization in Music: Analyzing Phenomenal Transformations of Repetition, Music Theory Spectrum, 25 (2003), 5997.
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Repetition in Music

capable of functioning metatheoretically. The zygonic theory that I have developed over the last decade or so, which hypothesizes that the creation and cognition of musical structure derive from imitation (and therefore repetition), offers such a paradigm.28 In epistemological terms, zygonic theory is a hybrid of the type alluded to above, in which the individual musical intuitions that typify approaches to music theory and analysis are informed by relevant thinking and findings appropriated from the domain of cognitive psychology. This interdisciplinary approach will be evident from the outset: the summary of zygonic theory that follows is contextualized through reference both to David Lewins mathematically based theory of musical intervals and transformations and to Gilles Fauconniers concept of mental spaces, which was formulated in the context of cognitive science.29

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See above, Preface, note 1. Lewin, Generalized Musical Intervals; Fauconnier, Mental Spaces.

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