When Beethoven uses “da-da-da dah……” in the first movement of his Symphony No. If the repetition is pleasing the mind says, “I like this. The experience for the performer and listener is not one of us playing the music, but instead, of us being played by the music. We are better able to recognize, anticipate, and hear the nuances of the sequence of sounds. It carves out a familiar, rewarding path in our minds, allowing us at once to anticipate and participate in each phrase as we listen. We return again and again to our favorite songs, listening over and over to the same musical riffs, which themselves repeat over and over inside the music. Ninety percent of the music we listen to is music we've heard before. Repetitiveness actually gives rise to the kind of listening that we think of as musical. Music didn’t acquire the property of repetitiveness because it’s less sophisticated than speech, and the 347 times that iTunes says you have listened to your favorite album isn’t evidence of some pathological compulsion – it’s just a crucial part of how music works its magic. The stunning prevalence of repetition in music all over the world is no accident. In art-music (classical music), the repetition is often varied and transformed. In popular music and children's songs, the repetition is often very literal and direct, making the music more immediately accessible. Music relies primarily on repetition to help it make sense to the listener. Not only does every known human culture make music, but also, every known human culture makes music in which repetition is a defining element. Musical repetitiveness isn't really an idiosyncratic feature of music that's arisen over the past few hundred years in the West. So how about it? Why do composers put all those repeats in their music? Do we need to observe them?Ĭonsider these points made by Elizabeth Hellmuth Margulis, director of the music cognition lab at the University of Arkansas, a trained concert pianist, and the author of On Repeat: How Music Plays the Mind (2013). He said he had gotten into the habit of not playing the repeats because he thought it sounded boring. This article may be reprinted, but please be considerate and give credit to Douglas Niedt.Ī subscriber emailed me a question about playing the written repeats in the music he was playing.
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