Repetition (music)
A literal repetition of a musical passage is often indicated by the use of a repeat sign, or the instructions da capo or dal segno.
This sort of repetition...helps to unify your melody; it's the melodic equivalent of a steady drumbeat, and serves as an identifying factor for listeners.
Those groups of tones—phrases—might come up later in the piece in a variation or transposition that tickles our memory system at the same time as it activates our emotional centers...(Levitin, 162–163)Theodor W. Adorno damned repetition and popular music as psychotic and infantile.
A museme is a minimal unit of meaning, analogous to a morpheme in linguistics, and musematic repetition is "at the level of the short figure, often used to generate an entire structural framework".
Schenker argued that musical technique's "most striking and distinctive characteristic" is repetition (Kivy, 327) while Boulez argues that a high level of interest in repetition and variation (analogy and difference, recognition and the unknown) is characteristic of all musicians, especially contemporary, and the dialectic between the two creates musical form (Campbell, 154).
Theodor W. Adorno[3] provides an example in his criticism of Igor Stravinsky, whose "rhythmic procedures ostinato closely resemble the schema of catatonic conditions.
In certain schizophrenics, the process by which the motor apparatus becomes independent leads to infinite repetition of gestures or words, following the decay of the ego."
David Schawrz (1992, p. 134) argues that the repetition in John Adams's Nixon in China is "trapping listeners in a narrow acoustic corridor of the Real" while Naomi Cumming (1997, p. 129–152) argues that the repetitive string ostinatos of Steve Reich's Different Trains are "prearticulate" pieces of the Real providing a refuge from the Holocaust and its "horror of identification".
While disco songs have some repetitive elements, such as a persistent throbbing beat, these are counterbalanced by the musical variety provided by orchestral arrangements and disco mixes that add different sound textures to the music, ranging from a full, orchestral sound to stripped-down break sections.
Extremely repetitive song structures are also used by some black metal bands like Burzum,[4] Darkthrone, Forgotten Woods, Lustre and Striborg.
