Over and Over: Exploring Repetition in Popular Music 9781501324888, 9781501324871, 9781501324895

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Over and Over

Over and Over Exploring Repetition in Popular Music Edited by Olivier Julien and Christophe Levaux

BLOOMSBURY ACADEMIC Bloomsbury Publishing Plc 50 Bedford Square, London, WC1B 3DP, UK 1385 Broadway, New York, NY 10018, USA BLOOMSBURY, BLOOMSBURY ACADEMIC and the Diana logo are trademarks of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc First published 2018 Paperback edition first published 2019 Copyright © Olivier Julien, Christophe Levaux, and contributors, 2018 Olivier Julien and Christophe Levaux has asserted their right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as Editors of this work. For legal purposes the Acknowledgements on p. x constitute an extension of this copyright page. Cover design: Holly Bell Cover image © Miakievy/Getty images All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc does not have any control over, or responsibility for, any third-party websites referred to or in this book. All internet addresses given in this book were correct at the time of going to press. The author and publisher regret any inconvenience caused if addresses have changed or sites have ceased to exist, but can accept no responsibility for any such changes. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Julien, Olivier, 1969– | Levaux, Christophe, 1982– Title: Over and over: exploring repetition in popular music / edited by Olivier Julien and Christophe Levaux. Description: New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2018. | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2017044825 (print) | LCCN 2017045128 (ebook) | ISBN 9781501324895 (ePDF) | ISBN 9781501324901 (ePub) | ISBN 9781501324888 (hardback: alk. paper) Subjects: LCSH: Repetition in music. | Popular music--Philosophy and aesthetics. Classification: LCC ML3877 (ebook) | LCC ML3877. O92 2018 (print) | DDC 781.64/124--dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017044825 ISBN: HB: 978-1-5013-2488-8 PB: 978-1-5013-5735-0 ePDF: 978-1-5013-2489-5 eBook: 978-1-5013-2490-1

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Contents List of Abbreviations and Contractions List of Musical Examples, Figures, and Tables Acknowledgments List of Contributors Preface  Antoine Hennion Introduction: Play It Again (and Again), Sam  Olivier Julien and Christophe Levaux Part One:  Repetition as an Aesthetic Disposition 1 2 3

vii viii x xi xiv

1 11

When the Music Stutters: Notes Toward A Symptomatology  Robert Fink

13

Time and Time Again: Repetition and Difference in Repetitive Music  Anne Danielsen

37

Toward an Alternative History of Repetitive Audio Technologies  Christophe Levaux

51

Part Two:  Issues of Perception

65

4

Loops, Memories, and Meanings  Chris Cutler

67

5

Machine Possession: Dancing to Repetitive Beats  Hillegonda C. Rietveld

75

Repetition and Musical Meaning: Anaphonic Perspective in Connection with the Sonic Experience of Everyday Life  Danick Trottier

89

6

Part Three:  Repetition as a Structuring Device 7

From “Sectional Refrains” to Repeated Verses: The Rise of the AABA Form  Olivier Julien

105

107

Contents

vi

8

9

Standard Jazz Harmony and the Constraints of Hypermeter: Some Thoughts on Regular and Irregular Repetition  Keith Salley and Daniel T. Shanahan

123

A Psychological Perspective on Repetition in Popular Music  Trevor de Clercq and Elizabeth Hellmuth Margulis

147

References Index

163 183

List of Abbreviations and Contractions a.k.a.

also known as

BC

Before Christ

bpm

beats per minute

CJA

British Criminal Justice and Public Order Act

DAW Digital Audio Workstation DSP

Digital Signal Processing

EDM electronic dance music GRM Groupe de Recherches Musicales HC

hypermetric constraint

m.

measure

MIDI Musical Instrument Digital Interface mm.

measures

No

numero, number

orig.

original

ORTF Office de Radiodiffusion-Télévision Française TAZ

Temporary Autonomous Zone(s)

w/

with

List of Musical Examples, Figures, and Tables Examples 7.1 8.1a 8.1b 8.2a 8.2b 8.2c 8.2d 8.3a 8.3b 8.3c 8.4 8.5 8.6 8.7 8.8 8.9 8.10 8.11 8.12

“I Cover the Waterfront”’s “sectional refrain” Normative two-­bar cycle Normative four-­bar cycle Common variations on the cycle: embellishment of a tonic’s sounding space Common variations on the cycle: overlap of a two-­bar cycle upon a purported four-­bar cycle Common variations on the cycle: extended tonic space in a two-­bar cycle Common variations on the cycle: interruption of a purported four-­bar cycle by a two-­bar cycle Likely and unlikely settings of cycles: two-­bar cycles and four-­bar hypermeasures Likely and unlikely settings of cycles: four-­beat cycles and two-­bar hypermeasures Likely and unlikely settings of cycles: four-­bar cycles and eight-­bar hypermeasures “Among My Souvenirs” (Horatio Nicholls/Al Dubin-Edgar Leslie), mm. 1–17 “I’m in the Mood for Love” (Jimmy McHugh/Dorothy Fields), mm. 1–16 “Stardust” (Hoagy Carmichael), mm. 5–12 “All the Things You Are” (Jerome Kern/Oscar Hammerstein II), mm. 1–8 “Fly Me to the Moon” (Bart Howard), mm. 1–8 “Bouncin’ with Bud” (Bud Powell), mm. 33–40 “It’s Only a Paper Moon” (Harold Arlen), mm. 1–16 “Nature Boy” (eden abhez), mm. 5–12 “Moonlight Becomes You” (Jimmy Van Heusen/Johnny Burke), mm. 21–28

115 124 125 125 125 125 125 127 127 128 130 130 131 131 132 132 133 134 134

List of Musical Examples, Figures, and Tables

8.13 8.14 8.15 8.16

“You’d Be So Nice to Come Home To” (Cole Porter), mm. 25–32 “Just You, Just Me” (Jesse Greer), mm. 21–28 “The Boy Next Door” (Hugh Martin/Ralph Blaine), mm, 5–12 “Just Friends” (John Klenner/Sam Lewis), mm. 1–32

ix

135 136 136 139

Figures 1.1a Sheehan’s 1946 transcription of stuttering behavior: “January” (after Sheehan 1974: 206) 20 1.1b Sheehan’s 1946 transcription of stuttering behavior: “Rushville” (after Sheehan 1974: 206) 20 1.2 Description of tempo-­independent MIDI “flam” stutter effect (“Variations of Writing Rhythm Patterns” 1983: 26) 24 1.3 The Mighty Paris demonstrates live MPC performance techniques. His right-­hand thumb activates the note repeat function, while his left hand holds down multiple touch pads to retrigger several samples at once (video still from “MPC Studio 16 Levels with Note Repeat”) 26 1.4 Brian Transeau, Richard Boulanger and Taemin Cho’s proposed interface for Stutter Edit live performance software (after US patent application 20090281793 A1, filed 12.XI.2009) 30 1.5 iZotope Stutter Edit™ plugin 30 2.1 Waveform of beginning (0:50–0:60) and end (6:18–6:28) of “The Payback” 41 2.2 Four-­against-three figure (left) and on-­and-off figure (right) 44 2.3 Reversed bass and kick drum from Rihanna’s “Needed Me” (2016) 46 9.1 Inverted-U relationship between preference and familiarity 154 9.2 Billboard Hot 100 chart history for “Smells like Teen Spirit” (Nirvana) 155

Tables 7.1 8.1 9.1

Formal scheme of “I Cover the Waterfront” as recorded in 1945 by Billie Holiday Weak and strong cycles at two- and four-­bar levels Form chart for “You Belong with Me” by Taylor Swift (2008)

109 126 159

Acknowledgments Given this book’s title, our first thanks go to our colleagues from the Francophone and Benelux branches of the International Association for the Study of Popular Music—in particular Christophe Pirenne, Kristin McGee, Koos Zwaan, and Hillegonda Rietveld—who helped us put together the eponymous conference that was held in Liège in June 2015. We are also grateful to the contributors whose work appears in the following pages, and indebted to Leah BabbRosenfeld, Susan Krogulski and everyone at Bloomsbury for their early enthusiasm, understanding, and unyielding support. Finally, our thanks are due to Mark Delaere and the New Music Research Group at KU Leuven, Marc Antoine Gavray, Igor Krtolica and Antoine Janvier, Juliana Pimentel, Philippe Fourquet, Cécile Davy-Rigaud, Gilles Demonet, Habiba Berkoun and the Institut de Recherche en Musicologie (IReMus) in Paris. Olivier Julien and Christophe Levaux

List of Contributors Chris Cutler has worked with dance, film, hoerspiel, symphony orchestras, theater, and radio, toured the world as a soloist with his extended electrified kit and appeared in countless contexts as a member of the international improvising community. After ten years in the British experimental group Henry Cow, he founded or co-­founded a series of mixed national groups: Art Bears, News from Babel, Cassiber, The (ec) Nudes, p 53, and The Science Group, and was a permanent member of American bands Pere Ubu, Hail, and The Wooden Birds. In 2003–2004 he ran a daily year-­long soundscape project for Resonance FM. Otherwise he started and runs the independent label ReR Megacorp and the art distribution service Gallery and Academic. He edited the Re Records Quarterly and authored the theoretical collection File under Popular—as well as numerous articles and papers, published in sixteen languages. He was on faculty for a while at the Museum School in Boston and lectures irregularly on theoretical and music- related topics worldwide. He is currently producing a series of monthly radio lectures for the Museum of Modern Art, Barcelona. Anne Danielsen is Professor of Musicology at the University of Oslo. She has published numerous articles, book chapters, and books on rhythm and aesthetics in post-­war African-American popular music. She is the author of Presence and Pleasure: The Funk Grooves of James Brown and Parliament (Wesleyan, 2006), editor of Musical Rhythm in the Age of Digital Reproduction (Ashgate/Routledge, 2010), and co-­author of Digital Signatures. The Impact of Digitization on Popular Music Sound (MIT Press, 2016). Trevor de Clercq is Assistant Professor in the Department of Recording Industry at Middle Tennessee State University, where he coordinates the musicianship curriculum and teaches coursework in audio theory and music technology. His research explores the ways in which contemporary popular music departs from traditional theoretical frameworks developed primarily within the context of common-­practice-era music, especially as shown through corpus studies. His Nashville Number System Fake Book (Hal Leonard), which includes charts for 200 acclaimed country songs, was published in 2015.

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List of Contributors

Robert Fink is a past chair of the UCLA Musicology department, and currently Chair of the UCLA Herb Alpert School of Music’s Minor in the Music Industry. He also currently serves as President of the US Branch of the International Association for the Study of Popular Music (IASPM-US). His research focus is on music and culture after 1950, with special interests in the history and analysis of African-American popular music and the politics of contemporary art music. His book, Repeating Ourselves, a study of American minimal music as a cultural practice, was published in 2005 by the University of California Press. More recent published work appears in the Journal of the American Musicological Society (an essay on analyzing Motown’s rhythms, which was honored by the Popular Music Interest Group of the Society for Music Theory), The Oxford Handbook of Opera, and the Cambridge Opera Journal. Olivier Julien lectures the history and musicology of popular music at ParisSorbonne University. A member of Volume! La revue des musiques populaires, Audio/Visual: Journal of Cultural Media Studies, and Vox Popular’s editorial and advisory boards, he is the editor of Sgt. Pepper and the Beatles: It Was Forty Years Ago Today (Ashgate, 2009 ARSC Award for Best Research in Recorded Rock and Popular Music). Christophe Levaux is a Belgian musicologist. Inspired by the work of Antoine Hennion, his research basically consists in confronting twentieth-­century American music with Actor-Network Theory. He is the editor of Boucle et Répétition (Presses Universitaires de Liège, 2015) and the author of numerous articles published in Tacet, Volume!, Revue et Corrigée, and Rock Music Studies. Elizabeth Hellmuth Margulis is Professor in the Department of Music at the University of Arkansas, where she directs the Music Cognition Lab. Her research combines music theory and cognitive science, and she has published in a wide variety of outlets ranging from the Journal of Music Theory to the Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience. Her book On Repeat: How Music Plays the Mind (Oxford University Press, 2014) won the Wallace Berry Award from the Society for Music Theory and the Deems Taylor/Virgil Thomson Award from the American Society for Composers, Authors, and Publishers. Hillegonda C. Rietveld is Professor of Sonic Culture at London South Bank University, and is editor of IASPM Journal, the journal of the International

List of Contributors

xiii

Association for the Study of Popular Music. In addition to publication work on electronic music by artists such as Kraftwerk and Brian Eno, as well as on game music with a co-­edited special issue on the subject for GAME: The Italian Journal of Game Studies (2017), she has published extensively on electronic dance music cultures, including a co-­edited special issue, “Echoes of the Dubdiaspora,” for Dancecult: Journal of Electronic Dance Music Culture (2015); the co-­edited collection DJ Culture in the Mix: Power, Technology, and Social Change in Electronic Dance Music (2013); and the monograph This is Our House: House Music, Cultural Spaces and Technologies (1998). Keith Salley is Associate Professor of music at the Shenandoah Conservatory in Winchester, VA. He is the author of numerous studies and publications on jazz, pop music, and concert music of the twentieth century. He has taught jazz guitar at the University of Memphis and Tulane University. Daniel T. Shanahan is Assistant Professor of music at Louisiana State University, where he focuses on corpus methods, jazz analysis, and music cognition. He has a PhD from Trinity College, Dublin and has previously held positions at Ohio State University and the University of Virginia. Danick Trottier is Professor of Musicology in the Music Department at Université du Québec à Montréal (UQAM). He holds a doctorate in musicology from Université de Montréal in collaboration with École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales (EHESS) in Paris. From 2008 to 2010, he completed postdoctoral research at Harvard University. He has published articles in journals such as Argument, Circuit, Dissonance, Filigrane, Intersections, Kinephanos, Les Cahiers Debussy, Les Cahiers de la SQRM, Perspectives of New Music, Speculum Musicae, and Volume! La revue des musiques populaires.

Preface The issue of repetition is one of infinite richness as regards music, and more particularly popular music. As is the case with relative subordinate clauses, there are actually two ways to address this intricate relationship between music and repetition. One is to stress the differences between types of music (repetitive or non-­repetitive, or even more or less repetitive): to paraphrase grammarians, this is the “determinative” (or restrictive) approach. The other—“non-­restrictive,” or explanatory approach—aims to reveal how all types of music rely on repetition. While both options overlap, they nonetheless induce discussions that follow very divergent paths. The first of these two paths is the one most frequently taken. It opens the debate at either end of the musical spectrum: at the art music end, on self-­ proclaimed repetitive and mostly American music (Steve Reich, Philip Glass, etc.); at the popular music end, on disco and dance music. The former process tends toward a stripping of the musical flow, as repetition triggers a feeling of stopping time and smoothing the contrasts that make up its very substance. The latter process has more of a tendency toward the physical overload of acoustic vibrations—whose impact is accentuated by the even scansion of percussion— insomuch that they are felt by the whole body, rather than perceived as a signal that is meant to be recoded. In both cases—that of intentional minimalism and a certain sonic neutrality, and that of a physical shock made more intense by the steadiness of an electronic beat—exaggerating the repetitive nature of music brings it to the limit of a threshold. Moreover, despite the lack of an obvious resemblance between both styles, debates revolve around closely related issues: forces verging on hypnosis or trance rather than music; lively rhythm brought down to a mechanical regularity; or priority given to the body and materiality of sound over the meaning and intentionality of a language. Not to mention, in more blunt terms, a feeling of musical and aesthetic impoverishment. In the first case, this impoverishment has been asserted as a reaction to the intellectualism of serialism, sometimes even interpreted as pure provocation, in the spirit of John Cage’s silent piece 4′33″ (1952) or Kazimir Malevich’s White on White (1918); more often, though, it has been condemned, in particular by genres closely related to dance music, and yet eager to extricate themselves from an

Preface

xv

overly “simplistic” type of dance music by claiming, in an analogous—but reversed—vocabulary, greater richness or sophistication (in terms of acoustic material, structure, variations, etc.). In sum, these debates by far exceed such attempts of demarcation. They may be more or less explicit depending on the views expressed, but the fundamental conflicts they bring into play concern any type of music. In music theory textbooks, for instance, it is the difference between rhythm and measure. This distinction between a vital impulse and the tick-­tock of the metronome is a didactic formulation, but the tensions it codifies for music students have been elaborated throughout the history of music, amidst anthropological and philosophical considerations. Emerging from behind this contrast between the lively beat—full of tiny impulses and shifts that make it flexible and dynamic— and the graphic notation of a fixed framework, is the conflict between man and machine, or, to give it a Bergsonian or phenomenological overtone, between the flow of life and objective reality. In the world as perceived by the senses, time lies at the heart of the matter: “heart” is indeed the word, with its vital beating symbolizing both the regularity of an external flow and all possible feelings, from the most physical to the most emotional. At this point, any accusations of simplicity have long fallen by the wayside. What is at stake here is no less than the conflict between man and machine, the living and the lifeless (or the mechanical). I mentioned philosophers, but, from this more accurate perspective, the case has also inspired an abundant mythical production, closely linked to the double contradictory status of repetition as an essential scansion, or a mechanical reproduction. What Jacques Offenbach and his clever librettists Jules Barbier and Michel Carré brought to the stage with Olympia—the singing doll which poor Hoffmann falls in love with, forever distracted by his dreams—is also the dramatic impulse of Fritz Lang’s Metropolis (1927) or the Tramp in Chaplin’s Modern Times (1936). All these works reveal the potential horror of a world of soulless robots, of automatons that have turned into monsters, or working on an assembly line: as soon as repetition becomes mechanical, it calls into question the highly sensitive boundary between man and machine. The frightening future that artists expose to our easily satisfied fascination is dramatized by this highly expressive contrast. The unpredictable, fallible—thus creative—human gesture is threatened by implacable, cold and determined technique. Are we in the process of reducing the organic to the mechanical, experience to the objective, meaning to substance, the body to the machine, life to death?

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Preface

By assuming a somewhat ironic tone I, too, am dramatizing this narrative. By stressing its prophetic nature, I am beginning to question it. Far from relativizing an approach to repetition based on the contrast between different types of music, it is clear that the mythical tale that fuels discussions only distances us from the excessive condemnation of a cheerful four-­on-the-­floor to radicalize even further the latent dualism of this long list of marked oppositions, always open to further generality. In an endeavor to avoid this pitfall, I would like to stress the fact that there is another possible “non-­restrictive” line of analysis. The term may not be so alluring, but the idea is powerful. To paraphrase Michel de Certeau, I see this as a sort of “inversion of what can be thought” ([1975] 1988: 125–46):1 it is not repetition that helps to understand music, it is music that helps to feel repetition—both in its fixity and its experienced form, since the two should in fact be linked together. Through its invention, its production, and its reception, music draws out and makes us feel the very notion of repetition by giving it body and shape, thereby setting it free from the imperceptible evolution of things. As ethnomethodologists would say, it all comes down to making repetition the “topic,” the subject of the analysis, rather than a resource with which to assess various types of music or even expose the course of the world. Repetition is not an external threat, a mechanistic vanishing point threatening music, and against which, fortunately, critical thinkers warn us. Nothing defines the musical quest better than considering repetition as a methodical range of solutions that have been found to tackle and shift this flat dualism which separates the living rhythm on the one hand, and the rigor of a mechanical beat on the other. Each needs the other to exist. The free-­flowing prelude is followed by a minuet with an implacable beat. The romantic rubato can only be felt because it stands out from a consistent speed it took our ears three centuries to become accustomed to. The wonderful double meaning of the word “répétition” in French (meaning both repetition and rehearsal) says it all: the unexpected, the new, and the movement itself result from repeating the “same” thing over and over again, which is sufficient to create something different each time. More radically still, it is the condition that allows us to perceive differences that would otherwise be diluted in an indistinct flow. We must remember that rhythm is in no way peculiar to music. If a light flashes on and off, or a stick moves up and down at a particular frequency, then you have a rhythm. Conversely, rhythm always seems to convey meaning and intention. If I drum my fingers on the table, it may be accidental. If I do it twice, it catches your attention. If I do it once again or if I start inserting rests between these taps, my finger-­drumming becomes a signal, even if it does not mean

Preface

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anything. Music—the art of time, as the ancients called it—embodies this basic organization of time; it has made it possible to seize, manipulate, and to memorize it. In short, it has given substance to repetition. This is why it is somewhat absurd to contrast mechanical repetition with repetition that is experienced or the succession of fixed units with the fluidity of intermingling moments—it would be a matter of confusing the effect with the cause. This very contrast has only become noticeable in the wake of the work that has allowed us to grasp the passing of time, largely through music, in the diversity of its genres, and in each of its isolated pieces as well. In short, to put it pompously, music is not derived from repetition: it is music that has provided us with a sense of repetition. I believe the interest of the following chapters is precisely that they look at things from the other side: they start off from what the various types of music do to deal with the tension between the fixed and the mobile, between sound and meaning, and they address the overall effect. Music and repetition: what better path to follow, rather than artificially piling one notion on top of the other? Antoine Hennion

Note 1 It is also what is expressed in radical terms by Gilles Deleuze in Difference and Repetition ([1968] 1994).

Introduction

Play It Again (and Again), Sam Olivier Julien and Christophe Levaux

In 1983, Richard Middleton published his first essay in the journal he had co-­founded two years earlier with David Horn, Popular Music. Entitled “ ‘Play It Again Sam’: Some notes on the productivity of repetition in popular music,” this essay was obviously not his first attempt at the serious study of popular music. Back in the 1960s, he had already completed a doctoral dissertation on the relationship between pop music and the blues under the supervision of Wilfrid Mellers (Middleton 1970), whom many regard as “a pioneer in the [field]—particularly within the musicological community” (Middleton 1994: v). As he would later confess, Mellers’s “perspective . . . transformed [his] outlook” (ibid.). As early as the Spring of 1971 (just a few months before the publication of his PhD thesis—1972), he made clear his ambition to draw on his mentor’s “refusal to follow orthodox divisions of the musical field, and . . . willingness to identify musical interest and value anywhere” (1994: v). To quote the first lines of a short text he wrote at the time for the inaugural issue of Contact (a journal “devoted to the discussion of twentieth century music of all kinds; pop, jazz and folk as well as ‘serious’ music”—Potter and Villars 1971: 1), triviality in music, as many PhDs bear witness, is not necessarily a barrier to analysis. Commercialism simply necessitates of the intrepid student rather more fortitude than usual . . . pop, like Everest and the moon, is there. Until the metamorphosis of the musician into an ostrich is completed, there seems no reason to neglect what is staring us in the ears. (Middleton 1971: 10)

“Triviality,” “commercialism”: writing these words, Middleton was obviously aware of the obstacles to the legitimation of popular music within the academy. However, he had also learned from Mellers that “music wasn’t just a matter of technical procedures and formal analysis”; it “contained social meaning” (1994: v), and, to address such “extra-­musical complication,” the musician had no choice

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Olivier Julien and Christophe Levaux

but to “emerge from his splendid isolation” and follow “the lead of the ethnomu­ sicologist,” enlisting “the aid of sociology, psychology and anthropology” (1971: 10). Moreover, to go beyond “ ‘popular common-­sense’ definitions, and criticism . . . filtered down from the discussions of mass culture theorists” (1983: 235), that same musician needed to overcome “theories . . . such as Adorno’s, which see repetition in popular music as a practical and ideological function of a specific mode of production and its associated social relation” (240). To summarize, Adorno’s “judgment concerning the relation of serious music to popular music” relies on a “strict attention to the fundamental characteristic of popular music: standardization” (Adorno with Simpson 1941: 17). This “extends from the most general features to the most specific ones,” the “best known [being] the rule that the chorus consists of thirty-­two bars and that the range is limited to one octave and one note” (18). As for the raison d’être of the latter standardization, Adorno explains it in the following terms: popular music and its plugging are focused on . . . habituation. The basic principle behind it is that one need only repeat something until it is recognized in order to make it accepted. This applies to the standardization of the material as well as to its plugging. What is necessary in order to understand the reasons for the popularity of the current type of hit music is a theoretical analysis of the processes involved in the transformation of repetition into recognition and of recognition into acceptance. (32)

In other words, repetition lies at the heart of what Adorno identifies as the manipulation of audiences by the cultural industry.1 It is present in so-­called “plugging,” (i.e., the “ceaseless repetition of one particular hit to make it ‘successful’ ”—27) and in the “material” too, not least the “custom built” lyrics, formal schemes, and harmonic design, “the beginning and the end of each part . . . beat[ing] out the [same] standard scheme,” so that each “hit will lead back to the same familiar experience” (17–18). In sum, “repetition gives [the average popular song] a psychological importance which it could otherwise never have” (27), thereby confirming that listening to popular music is manipulated not only by its promoters, but . . . by the inherent nature of this music itself, into a system of response-­mechanisms wholly antagonistic to the ideal of individuality in a free, liberal society. (21–2)

In his review of the 1973 English translation of Adorno’s Philosophy of Modern Music, Middleton exposes, for the first time, “a blind spot” in this “totally

Play It Again (and Again), Sam

3

dismissive attitude to popular music, including jazz” (1974: 223). On the one hand, he admits that “familiarity with [Adorno’s] ideas is without doubt vital for any understanding of modern music” (220); on the other hand, he deplores the fact that “Adorno himself, as well as his book, is fixed in time and place” (222). As he would put it years later in his classic textbook, Studying Popular Music, Anyone wanting to argue the importance of studying popular music has to absorb Adorno in order to go beyond him. In doing so, it is useful to bear in mind the historical location of [his] writings on popular music. His approach, in its essentials, was formed by the early 1930s, and he extends it during the 1940s only in the direction of even greater pessimism: cultural “totalitarism” becomes absolute. (1990: 35)

“Why do listeners find interest and pleasure in hearing the same thing over and over again?” In “Play It Again Sam,” Middleton takes the opposite view to “the historically specific Adornian notions of repetition as a function of social control.” Taking over the work of the French (post-)structuralists, he undertakes to “rescue repetition both from the abstracted, intra-­linguistic readings of formalists and from those cultural theorists who would reduce it to a mere correlate of the social relations of monopoly capitalism” (1983: 262). To account for “the variety of ways in which repetition can be used,” he differentiates between what he calls “musematic and discursive repetition” (238). He also turns the perspective upside down, so to speak, and asks a question “which has troubled not only mass cultural theory but also traditional philosophical aesthetics, as well as more recent approaches such as . . . information theory,” namely: “Why do listeners find interest and pleasure in hearing the same thing over again?” (235) To answer this question, one must delve into repetition’s rich psychoanalytic content, which has to do with pleasure, unpleasure, and, more generally, desire and enjoyment (262). To the extent that repetition is defined . . . as carrying predictability to the limit . . . it becomes possible to link repetition not (not only?) with the plaisir of signification (the most obvious extrapolation from Barthes) but (also?) with the possibility of jouissance. (264)

Repetition indeed relates to Barthesian jouissance (267), but it also “represents a drive ‘more primitive, more elementary, more instinctual than the pleasure

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principle which it overrides’ . . . and whose nature is an ‘expression of the inertia inherent in [all] organic life,’ [which Freud] christened the death instinct” (265 —quoting Freud 1955: 23, 36). Needless to say, this perspective puts a whole new complexion on the very function of repetition. “At its simplest,” it becomes the minimum step into the game of language and culture. What this conception opens up for us is a space within which specific manifestations of repetition-­ practice in popular music can be located as manifestations of a complex cultural game, into which play a variety of social and psychic forces. (266)

During the following decades, Middleton would return to the concepts of musematic and discursive repetition in a number of book chapters, essays, encyclopedia entries, and monographs, refining and further exploring their connections with pleasure, and going deeper into their articulation with issues of genre, race, formal design, orality, and literacy, not to mention a variety of social and psychic forces (1990: 267–92; 1999; 2003c; 2003d; 2006a; 2006b: 137–97). Concurrently, these concepts would begin to find their way into the pages of publications addressing the predictability of rhythm and harmony in British Dance Band Music of the 1920s and 1930s (Scott 1994: 305–6), the influence of music hall on English popular music of the late twentieth century (Laing 2010), or the meaning of renditions of the Tin Pan Alley standard “Try a Little Tenderness” by Bing Crosby, Sam Cooke, Otis Redding, and Aretha Franklin (Bowman 2003).2 Finally, by the 2000s, the terms “musematic” and “discursive repetition” would spread beyond the realm of popular music studies, as attested by Tristian Evans and Pwyll ap Siôn’s contributions to The Ashgate Research Companion to Minimalist and Postminimalist Music (Evans 2013; ap Siön 2013), Rebecca Leydon’s typology of tropes in minimal music (2002), Lisa Coulthard’s study of Quentin Tarantino’s “sonic style” (2012), or Nicolai Graakjær’s study of the function of music in stores such as Abercrombie & Fitch (2012). In fact, during the thirty-­five years following Middleton’s groundbreaking work, repetition emerged as a worthy field of research in the study of popular music, and, through the latter, the study of film scores and background or minimal music. It even provided Robert Fink with the central argument of Repeating Ourselves, his 2005 book-­length exploration of “the relation between American minimal music and the techniques of marketing employed within advanced capitalism” (Skipp 2007: 109). In 2013, it also inspired Elizabeth Margulis’s more psychologically inclined On Repeat, hailed by Joshua Albrecht as “a significant advance in our understanding of the deep questions behind the

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variegated phenomena of musical repetition, while also leaving the door open for much exciting further work in the field” (2014). We hope, naturally, that the following pages will meet Albrecht’s expectations.

A tripartite approach to repetition in popular music As explained above, Middleton’s 1983 essay notoriously distinguishes between “musematic” and “discursive” repetition, that is, “the repetition of short units” whose “most immediately familiar examples—riffs—are found in Afro-American music and in rock,” as opposed to the repetition of longer units, at the level of the phrase (defined as a unit roughly equivalent to a verbal clause or short sentence, not too long to be apprehended ‘in the present’ . . .), the sentence or even the complete section. (238)

But it also mentions, hidden in a footnote, “the practice of repetition for ‘aesthetic’ reasons (for instance, to represent ‘monotony’),” which “raises a whole extra level of problems, not considered” in the article (253). This practice is at the core of Part One of the book, which gathers chapters by Robert Fink, Anne Danielsen, and Christophe Levaux.

Repetition as an aesthetic disposition Introducting this part, Robert Fink’s “When the music stutters: notes toward a symptomatology” begins with a reference to Elizabeth Margulis, who notes, in On Repeat, that there is a “stubborn repeatability to music” which sets it apart from language and the other arts (2013: 4). In this respect, the taste for repetition may be identified with a “musical universal” in the sense of Fred Lerdahl and Ray Jackendoff (i.e., “a preference rule [that] is always available to musical intuition . . . [and] which appear[s] to be essentially universal across musical idioms”—1983: 96). At the same time, European culture has always aimed to avoid excessive repetition, especially at the boundary between art and popular music. To be sure, minimal music aside, art music has shown a tendency to disguise the repetitive process that underpins all musical forms with what Fink calls the “tricks of variation and development.” Conversely, extreme levels of repetition have long turned into a marker of popular music. Yet, as these transitory overloads of repetition known as “stutter effects” demonstrate, even such a redundant music as

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contemporary electronic dance music may be perceived, at least for a moment, as too repetitious. Analyzing the use of “musical stuttering” from the “turntable stutters” of “beat juggling” through the elaborated “stutter edits” achieved in the digital era, Fink concludes that finding fluency in this “disfluency” has been the characteristic mode of “Afro-­diasporic musical resistance.” In the following chapter (“Time and time again: repetition and difference in repetitive music”), Anne Danielsen addresses a somewhat complementary issue. Building on Gilles Deleuze’s distinction between static and dynamic repetition ([1968] 1994), she argues that repetition is, in the first place, production. She also notes that an important aesthetic orientation in African-American culture is to “repeat with a difference” (Gates 1988: xxii–iii), which makes repetitive structures a vehicle for performative qualities, and then she applies this conceptual framework to various musical examples of groove-­based music from the 1960s onwards. Here too, the advent of digital technology appears to have played a crucial role—as Danielsen observes, “contemporary R&B-based pop music” relies on looped “computer-­based” grooves, in which each repeated unit is at once performed and exactly identical to the previous one. After the on-­the-grid aesthetic characteristic of early electronic dance music, the digital audio workstation thus made it possible to reconnect repetition with the idea of “a changing same.” The relationship between sound recording and musical genres relying on repetition is also at the root of Christophe Levaux’s proposal for “an alternative history of repetitive audio technologies,” which brings Part One of the book to a close. As hinted in the title, this chapter reassesses the influence of Pierre Schaeffer’s experiments on electronic minimal music, and then on both late-­ twentieth-century dance music and hip-­hop. Shedding light on the little-­known history of repetitive audio technologies prior to the Studio d’Essai, the author discusses the inventions that pioneered the mechanical looping of sound since the ninth century. These inventions go back to the early days of musical automation, and they evolved in a variety of contexts, including fire-­engine sirens, cinematic tracks or prototype synthesizers. As for the modern era, it appears that tape loops were already being used in the field of telephony some twenty years before Schaeffer transferred the idea of the closed groove to magnetic tape. In the end, the contribution of postwar experimental studios to the subsequent development of repetitive trends in art and popular music is far more nuanced than generally believed, even though this was certainly where the use of repetition as an aesthetic disposition began.

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Issues of perception If one were to connect Part Two with Richard Middleton’s typology, then it would be the part dealing with musematic repetition. More exactly, the three chapters it brings together explore, in their own different ways, how loops, drones, riffs, and other repeated sounds affect perception in terms of musical meaning or even space and time. As an example, Chris Cutler’s “Loops, memories and meanings” examines the connections between the loops that came to dominate dance music from the late 1970s and “the wider social phenomenon of an accelerating loss of presence.” To put it simply, his point is that “riffs and repetitions of traditional music” are processes of “creative reconstruction”—they rely on re-­performance, thus on human memory. In contrast, a loop is “a mindless, mechanical reiteration” disconnected from the flow of time—“an artifact rather than an action.” Of course, it is tempting to draw a parallel with Anne Danielsen’s appropriating the concept of “a changing same” (Jones 1971) in Chapter 2, except that the change here neither originates in performance nor in human memory: it is repetition that ends up changing the perception of what is being repeated. Seen from this perspective, loops, as “an inhuman form” of memory relying on technology, “close our sense of time.” Hillegonda Rietveld makes a rather similar point in Chapter  5, where she addresses what she describes as a form of “machine possession” induced by dancing to repetitive beats in raves and other DJ-led dance rituals. As she suggests, in such events, beats of 130 bpm and faster, played for several hours, encourage dancers to reach “a mental state in which conscious awareness of the past and the future disappears.” Combined with intoxicating chemical enhancement and repetitive phrases accelerating to sometimes beyond-­human speeds, these repetitive beats eventually alter the perception of space and time, as they create a sense of inertia, giving dancers the feeling that they are moving within the space of a textured drone without beginning or end. In keeping with Benjamin Noys (2014; 2017) and Gilbert Rouget’s reading of Aristotle’s catharsis (Rouget [1980] 1985), Rietveld posits that such “trance experiences” exorcize dancers from overwhelming daily experiences of inhuman machine speeds, inoculating them against the bewildering machine-driven pulses of contemporary technoculture and the assault of accelerated information overload within the latter. Finally, Danick Trottier’s “Repetition and musical meaning” complements Cutler’s and Rietveld’s chapters by exploring the way popular musicians use repetition to create meaning in an “anaphonic” perspective. Drawing on Philip

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Tagg’s semiotic of music (1992) and Jean-Jacques Nattiez’s concepts of “extrinsic” and “intrinsic referring” ([1987] 1990: 117), this chapter raises questions as to the imitation of train sounds, gunshots and explosions through repeated riffs, guitar lines, onomatopoeias, even stresses and rests—whose inclusion has more to do with “the isochronal shape of the same sound” obtained by bombs and machine guns. In all the songs comprising Trottier’s corpus, the evocation of train travel and war experiences resorts to musematic repetition. However, these sonic anaphones are often combined with kinetic anaphones engaged with discursive repetition (e.g., riffs used as “episodic markers”), which paves the way for the next set of chapters focusing on repetition as a structuring device.

Repetition as a structuring device In “Play It Again Sam,” Richard Middleton mentions “the AABA structure of the classic Tin Pan Alley ballad form” as one of the most common instances of “Tin Pan Alley songs retain[ing] the use of discursive techniques” (1983: 238, 252). This formal type is precisely what provides Olivier Julien with the theme of Chapter 7, “From ‘sectional refrains’ to repeated verses,” which introduces Part Three of the book. Using Middleton’s later work, in which the concepts of musematic and discursive repetition are articulated with “the tension . . . between form-­as-mold and form-­as-process” (2003d: 513), the author examines the shift from an aaba phrase structure to an AABA sectional form between the two world wars. In the wake of Franco Fabbri’s exploration of song form ([1996] 2008a; 1999; 2003; 2008b; 2009; 2012), he also wonders about the most appropriate nomenclature for song sections when confronted with a formal type alternating between a repeating section and a contrasting section designed to renew the listener’s attention, hence allowing for even more repetitions of the main section. Addressing a closely-related period and repertoire, Keith Salley and Daniel Shanahan are interested in “regular and irregular repetition” with regard to “jazz harmony and the constraints of hypermeter.” Their study considers repetition along two domains: the first involves meter and hypermeter—as they argue, “the basic thirty-­two-­bar jazz standard with four eight-­bar sections” induces, in most cases, both periodicity at the level of regularly alternating strong and weak beats and hyperbeats—even hypermeasures—themselves alternating strong and weak hyperbeats consisting of a measure apiece. As for the second domain, it relates to harmony, and more particularly to the recurrent yet irregular II–V–I progressions that sound throughout standards at various levels of transposition. Ultimately, it

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appears that hypermeter (which Salley and Shanahan identify as the most repetitive parameter in their corpus) exerts a controlling influence both at the macro level—determining the duration of formal units—and the micro level, at least if one considers the constraints that standard jazz repertoire’s rigid metric structure places on harmonic organization. After Julien’s and Salley and Shanahan’s forays into “historical” and “systematic musicology” (Mugglestone and Adler 1981), Trevor de Clercq and Helen Hellmuth Margulis conclude both this part and the book by providing “a psychological perspective on repetition in popular music.” Despite a much broader scope than the two preceding chapters, their approach is nonetheless focused on repetition as a structuring device, be it in terms of its shaping formal designs through the widely employed “AAB(X) organizational scheme,” or its organizing music consumption and listening habits through repeated hearings. At this point, de Clercq and Margulis’s reference to the “mere exposure effect” (Zajonc 1968) brings the reader back to the first pages of this introduction and Adorno’s attacks on song “plugging,” which he saw as “the inevitable complement of standardization,” aiming “to break down the resistance to the musically ever-­ equal or identical by . . . closing the avenues of escape from the ever-­equal,” and ultimately depriving listeners “of the freedom of rejection which [they] might still be capable of maintaining toward [an] individual song” (Adorno with Simpson 1941: 27, 43). Echoing the way Middleton relied on psychoanalysis to rescue repetition from the philosopher’s abstracted, formalist readings of the “musical material,” de Clercq and Margulis reassess the idea of repetition as a means of achieving social control and address it from the other end—that of listeners’ expectations—through the prism of music cognition. All things considered, one can only agree with their final remark that “musicologists who specialize in popular music might benefit from thinking more about psychological perspectives on how repetition functions.”

Notes 1 On this point, see, amongst others, Adorno 1938; [1942] 1991. 2 In a similar vein, see Abel 2011; Björnberg 1994; Bowman 2010; Brackett [1995] 2000 (109–19); Drabløs 2015; Stone 2016; or Toynbee 2000.

Part One

Repetition as an Aesthetic Disposition

1

When the Music Stutters Notes Toward A Symptomatology Robert Fink

A culture of repetition arises when the extremely high level of repetitive structuring necessary to sustain capitalist modernity becomes salient in its own right, experienced directly as constituent of subjectivity. Robert Fink, Repeating Ourselves (2005: 4) It is no longer the character who stutters in speech; it is the writer who becomes a stutterer in language. He makes the language as such stutter: an affective and intensive language, and no longer an affectation of the one who speaks. Gilles Deleuze, “He Stuttered” ([1993] 1997: 107) As Elizabeth Margulis notes in On Repeat, her wide-­ranging study of musical repetition, there is a “stubborn repeatability” to music which sets it apart from language and the other arts (2013: 4). A taste for repetition seems to be one of the few genuine musical universals, according to a small but growing number of cross-­cultural empirical studies (see Ollen and Huron 2003). Margulis observes that “musical repetitiveness is so common as to be almost invisible”; the very fact that a stream of sound can be parsed into repeating units effectively musicalizes it, marking out the boundary between intelligibility and noise (1).1 Thus it is striking how ambivalent the post-Enlightenment tradition in the West has been about the subject. While even the most austere modernists have accepted, if grudgingly, the link between repetition and intelligibility (as Arnold Schoenberg puts it, “intelligibility in music seems to be impossible without repetition” (1967: 20), one of the defining characteristics of European musical culture has been a pervasive anxiety about the effects of “too much” repetition, especially at the increasingly porous boundary between art and popular music.2

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The case of so-­called “minimal” music is instructive. Minimalism in the visual arts was genuinely reductionist but the music that caught people’s attention, of course, was not; 1960s pulse-­pattern composers used just as many notes as their predecessors and contemporaries. What they reduced was the amount of difference in their music. From this angle, “repetitive music”—used by composers such as Steve Reich and Philip Glass—is also a misnomer. This music is no more repetitive than any other: it simply refuses to disguise the incessant repetition that underpins all musical forms with the usual composing tricks of variation and development. Refusing to paper over the essential repetitiveness of our shared musical experiences, 1960s minimal music resembles nothing so much as contemporaneous Pop, the art most open to serial repetition and mechanical reproduction. Suzi Gablik once praised Andy Warhol and Roy Lichtenstein for having used chance operations and found images to “avoid tasteful choices,” which allowed them to achieve a “tougher” art (Russell and Gablik 1969: 18). Minimalist repetition in music has this tough-­minded quality, which Gablik raises to the level of a moral strategy: it reflects back to us the staggering levels of repetition (musical and otherwise) in our daily world, without the usual comforting veneer of artistic decoration. In this way, fully developed industrial modernity gives rise to a characteristic structure of feeling which one might call a “culture of repetition” (Fink 2005: 3–4) within which works of art engage in “excessive” repetition to aestheticize the massive doses of experiential repetition which necessarily constitute subjectivity in an advanced consumer society. But the resulting relationship between repetition and teleology in music is never simply adversarial: it might be more productive to consider such excess of repetition as a breeding ground for exotic “recombinant teleologies,” that is, for new, deliberately manufactured configurations of sound, repetition, time, and human desire.3

Don’t stop ’til you get enough As soon as one attempts to define an “excess” of repetition, especially in popular music, an epistemological roadblock arises. It was clear that minimalism in art music was a textbook culture of repetition, because “too much repetition” basically defined the style, especially when contrasted with the maximally non-­redundant music which dominated imaginations in the avant-­garde of that historical moment. But groove-­based popular music is already—has always already been—highly redundant. In fact, no one who actually likes a particular style of electronic dance

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music (EDM) worries simultaneously that it is “too repetitive.” How does one even talk about a musical culture of repetition when, to take the most obvious example, the once-­extreme levels of repetition pioneered by minimalism and techno have long since turned into a marker of the familiar, as normalized in contemporary pop music as guitar distortion in rock or saxophone screams in modern jazz?4 Is it possible to identify a repetitive musical gesture which resists normalization, which intrinsically signifies a culturally significant “excess” of repetition? I do believe such a gesture exists. Even in the most slowly evolving, cyclically repetitive musical environments, one finds arresting moments when the groove’s ongoing orbital progression through time gets audibly “stuck,” enacting, through irregular complex sub­­metrical repetitions of recorded slices, what producers and listeners call a “stutter edit”—or, simply, “a stutter.” My claim is that when we hear music metaphorically “stuttering,” whether or not the moment actually involves the slicing and rearranging of vocal samples, we invoke a particular, highly charged instance of communicative neurodiversity—disfluent speech rhythm—precisely as a sign of excessive repetition. However repetitious a given musical situation may be, a perceptual stutter makes it more repetitious—makes it, at least for a moment, too repetitious. Musical repetition and stuttering have long been linked; delving into the medical literature, as we will do in some detail below, reveals that the repetitive structures of music have often been prescribed as an antidote for a wide range of speech disfluencies. They have also been used as a framework within which to understand the specifically temporal set of speech disfluencies researchers group together as stuttering. Turning speech into music is also one of the most effective ways to erase a vocal stutter. But—and this is the real point of the comparison— stutter edits in contemporary electronic popular music become a clear sign that music itself can also stutter, analogous in that moment to overloads of repetitions and blockages in poetic speech that trigger transcendent breakthroughs into the pure intensity of performative affect that Gilles Deleuze, perhaps the most consequential philosopher of “excessive” repetition, has influentially called out as making “language as such stutter” ([1993] 1997: 107—my emphasis).

Two “moments of stuttering” I will begin by calling up two characteristic moments of musical stuttering; this chapter will then proceed as a provisional attempt to explore the aesthetic space

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between them. In 1969, Alvin Lucier created the elegant and simple piece of minimalist process music, I Am Sitting in a Room. The work proceeds by subjecting recorded speech to audio feedback over and over—a repetitive process in which, as the composer notes, “the resonant frequencies of the room reinforce themselves so that any semblance of speech . . . is destroyed” (1995: 322). Over the course of forty minutes, looped repetition performs its “magic,” musicalizing a bald statement of the composer’s process and goals into a haunting, fragile structure of extended tones. One of those goals is self-­directed, because the person sitting in the room different than the one we are in now is, of course, the composer himself; as he notes in the text, and as is obvious from early recordings of his recitation, his speech displays striking moments of temporal dysfluency (they cluster around his attempts to pronounce the postalveolar approximant [ɹ] at the beginning of words like “resonant” and “rhythm”), and the repetition process is meant to deal, acoustically, with that fact. I am sitting in a room different from the one you are in now. I am recording the sound of my speaking voice and I am going to play it back into the room again and again until the resonant frequencies of the room reinforce themselves so that any semblance of my speech, with perhaps the exception of rhythm, is destroyed. What you will hear, then, are the natural resonant frequencies of the room articulated by speech. I regard this activity not so much as a demonstration of a physical fact, but more as a way to smooth out any irregularities my speech might have. (Lucier, quoted in Collins 1990—my emphasis)

Let us take Lucier at his word: I Am Sitting in a Room was at least partially designed to enact a therapeutic musicalization of the stutter through repetitive process. In fact, as we will see, the controlled use of audio feedback is congruent with recognized therapies that aim to eliminate stuttering. But, paradoxically, most critics hear the temporal irregularities, the “syncopations” of Lucier’s stutter, as the generative “auditory figure” at the very heart of the work, the sonic seed out of which the piece blossoms into sound, achieving a rhythmic density that seems to transmit something like pure, negative desire: In this way, how could the stutter ever truly disappear? It pulls us in, as a personal effect whispered to us, confessed in the desire or possibility of being eliminated. The stutter is the very heart of the work. The stutter drives the work, as original motivation, as lingering sonic, as auditory figure haunting the work—over the

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course of listening, we inadvertently listen for the work’s fulfillment to eliminate its own stutter, anticipating its appearance and disappearance, its erasure, thereby always somehow finding it. (Labelle 2006: 126)

Let us juxtapose to this austere example a contemporary, slightly more carnivalesque moment when a small rhythmic stutter, a moment of repetition, similarly swells to fill an entire auditory scene. A popular video disseminated over the Internet shows Lucas Cornelis van Scheppingen, who produces and DJs under the name Laidback Luke, tormenting his Pioneer CDJs while working the huge crowd at the 2011 Tomorrowland electronic music festival in Boom, Belgium.5 He isolates a single bar of techno on the decks, then loops it at geometrically shorter and shorter intervals. Past a certain point—as Henry Cowell theorized (1996: 50–1) and Karlheinz Stockhausen realized ([1972] 1989: 91–3)—faster and faster retriggering of a sound’s attack gives rise to a sensation of discrete pitch. A stutter in live performance is isolated, multiplied, and, just as in I Am Sitting in a Room, transformed into musical sound. As the skipping CD player begins to sing, disfluency, through a sublime excess of repetition, engenders new fluency. This kind of “voluntary” or “fluent” stuttering was once a real and recognized therapeutic treatment for those disabled by rhythmic irregularity of speech; here it becomes the basis for a moment of musical call and response. Everyone in the audience already knows the tune vocalized on the stuttering decks: they recognize, roaring with pleasure, that Luke is playing them a “live” version of the buzzy intro riff of the 2010 Swedish House Mafia feat. Pharrell floor-­filler, “One (Your Name),” directly into which he proceeds to mix. The aural pun is arcane, but technically decodable by anyone in the audience who saw the official video for “One,” featuring the coveted Teenage Engineering OP-1 digital workstation. In it, viewers were shown, step-­by-step, using close-­up shots of buttons and waveforms, how the basic melodic riff of the track could be assembled in real time on the OP-1 from the sped-­up stutter of a single endlessly retriggered kick drum sample, using the very same varying-­loop-retrigger-­interval-equals-­ pitch-up-­or-down trick that Luke is now deploying so fluently onstage.6 Sitting in a room, or strutting on a stage, contemporary artists seem to court these moments when the music stutters, harnessing intense flurries of analog or digital repetition to blur or fracture the ongoing stream of tonal information. In the process, sonic grammars can be remapped, sonic imaginaries expanded and, sometimes, new kinds of musical fluencies explored and consolidated. What I want to define (or at least make a start of it) here is a symptomatology of musical

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stutters like these. In this I follow Gilles Deleuze, who, in his earliest work, on masochism, declared himself uninterested in where mental diseases and disorders come from: “Etiology, which is the scientific or experimental side of medicine, must be subordinated to symptomatology, which is its literary, artistic aspect” ([1967] 1989: 133). In what follows I will not take up the still unresolved question of what causes stuttering, nor will I engage with the many elaborate (and mostly discredited) theories about the personality problems of people who stutter, or consider “stuttering as metaphor,” in the way that Susan Sontag investigated the social stigma attached to diseases like cancer and AIDS (1988).7 In fact, the “pure” symptomatology of stuttering is extensive, complicated, and fascinating enough, especially for a musicologist. The symptomatological practice of speech pathology has an irreducibly musical aspect, being composed of equal parts sympathetic listening, careful transcription, and close temporal analysis of real-­time sonic performances. To understand the stutter as a symptom is to encounter the myriad ways in which the desire to speak fluently can be blocked, diverted into circumlocution and repetition, and then finally released in a melismatic torrent of words. When we identify certain repetitive musical gestures as “stuttering,” we appeal to an embodied schema based on the coordinative challenges we all face in producing fluent speech. The symptomatology of speech disfluencies, the most persistent and excessive of which have been called “stuttering,” can, I believe, provide us with a ready-­tohand phenomenology of “excessive” repetition in human utterance.8

A symptomatology of stuttering Let us begin with the basics. There is a telos in human speech which scientists call “communicative pressure” (Bloodstein and Bernstein Ratner 2008: 59).9 Since speech happens in real time, its teleological pressure manifests temporally, as the obligation to maintain a steady, fluent progress when speaking. Textbook discussions of speech disorders often use the word “rhythm” as shorthand for “fluency of speech” (1); to take a bureaucratic, but consequential example, the World Health Organization’s 1977 International Classification of Diseases defines stuttering simply as a “disorder of the rhythm of speech” (202). The symptomatological view of stuttering breaks down this rhythmic disorder into a characteristic set of behaviors. There are two such behaviors that listeners identify as the pathology they call “stuttering,” over and above the many

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micro-­disfluencies that happen in ordinary speech. One is “prolongation,” or failed articulation, in which the speech mechanism freezes or “blocks” in silence; the other, perhaps the more distinctive, is uncontrolled re-­articulation of the same sound, usually the initial consonant of a word. Most speech researchers understand this “part-­word repetition” as fragmentation of grammatical units caused by “self-­editing” in the midst of speech: the person who stutters is not saying the same thing over and over, but slicing through the flow of a vocal utterance at the same place over and over again in a vain attempt to “cut it down to size.” As the definitive handbook of stuttering research puts it, “repetitions are not so much repeated utterances as repeated stoppages” (Bloodstein and Bernstein Ratner 2008: 335).

Stuttering as repetition These days researchers can work directly with spectrograms of recorded speech; but in the heyday of stuttering’s symptomatology, phonetic transcription followed by statistical analysis was the first order of business. In 1946, Joseph Sheehan transcribed and analyzed 500 separate instances of stuttering from 25 different speakers at speech clinics in Michigan (Sheehan 1974). He verified that prolongation and repetition were the defining characteristics of the stutter; that the average duration of a stuttering event was about one and one-­half seconds; that four out of five repetitions were part-­repetitions and that 96 percent of them occurred on initial sounds. He found that stuttering behaviors were not random misfires, but “aligned into a definite sequence,” which he called a “stuttering pattern.” The essence of such patterns, he noted, was a short cascade of part-­repetitions which either “accelerated or decelerated” (193). Figure 1.1 gives a sense of the complexity of these accelerating and decelerating patterns of repetition. It shows a pair of Sheehan’s transcriptions, which use punctuation and the International Phonetic Alphabet to capture speech tonality and (especially) rhythm almost as precisely as if he had notated them musically. The second example, an attempt to say the single word “Rushville,” presents a particularly complex stuttering pattern, with two prolongations and at least five repetitions before the second syllable rushes out in what speech researchers tend to call, inadvertently echoing songwriter’s vernacular, “the release.” In fact, Sheehan thought stuttering was a “disorder of release,” in which the problem was not beginning a sound, but letting it go. The part-­repetitions of stuttering patterns, then, display a kind of recombinant speech teleology, a set

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Figure 1.1a  Sheehan’s 1946 transcription of stuttering behavior: “January” (after Sheehan 1974: 206).

Figure 1.1b  Sheehan’s 1946 transcription of stuttering behavior: “Rushville” (after Sheehan 1974: 206).

of individual temporal compromises between the desire to reach the next conversational downbeat and the self-­fulfilling fear of not finishing the next word “in time.”10 According to Oliver Bloodstein and Nan Bernstein Ratner, people who stutter thus report a distinctive three-­part negotiation with time and communicative pressure. First, a forward-­looking anticipatory anxiety about a stutter: “Prior to the block, there is often an apprehension of impending difficulty, varying in intensity from mild uneasiness to extreme panic, which is well known as anticipation or expectancy gives way to the blockage itself ” (2008: 21). At the moment of stuttering, a suspended moment of confusion, during which time appears to stop: “During the stuttering block, the affective reactions, especially in severe stuttering, tend to be reported predominantly as confusion or mental ‘blankness’ ”; “stuttering tends to impair the ability to estimate the passage of time” (ibid.: 21–2). Finally, a strong feeling of retrospective relief at achieving release: “There may also be some measure of relief or tension reduction immediately after a block” (ibid.: 22). As we will see, musical stutter effects in EDM can reproduce this recombinant teleology, especially that suspended moment of repetitive blankness and confusion, quite precisely.

Excursus: Musicalizing the stutter There is more than enough here to provide a suggestive framework within which to survey stutter effects in electronic popular music. But before we do, let me pave the way by considering briefly how the inherent “musicality” of speech is understood within the symptomatology of stuttering as surveyed by Bloodstein and Bernstein Ratner’s Handbook. On the one hand, the phenomenal changes enforced on speech by the person who stutters have been thought to reduce its

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musicality: although stuttering disrupts rhythm, it can, paradoxically, work to simplify and regularize other quasi-­musical aspects of speech, such as vocal stress and vowel shifting, that are hard to master during language acquisition. Children seem to repeat words and syllables when they cannot manage the “musical” task of finding the grammatical downbeats in a sentence (2008: 53). The musical pitch of part-­repetitions all tend toward the same low neutral “uh,” no matter where the following vowel is placed (e.g., “buh-­buh-buh bad to the buh-­bone”) which makes transitions simpler at the cost of flattening the formant structure of speech (15). A stutter is thus a kind of filter, a point to remember when we discuss advanced stutter editing in EDM. On the other hand, increasing the perceived musicality of speech can inhibit stuttering, at least temporarily. People who stutter can be taught to borrow music’s rhythmic beat by speaking to a metronome’s click (303) or to imitate its melodic control of pitch and stress by stretching their spoken vowels into a sing-­song (268). Speaking along with others, or “choral speech,” will work, as will speaking along with one’s own pre-­recorded voice (263). Most strikingly, the experience of hearing an electronically delayed version of one’s own voice, known to clinicians as delayed auditory feedback (DAF), while it completely flummoxes fluent speakers (readers may have experienced this interference themselves during an echo-­y cell phone call), can almost magically eliminate even the worst stutter (68). Alvin Lucier’s expectation that the gradual build-­up of auditory feedback in I Am Sitting in a Room could “smooth out” the irregularities of his stutter turns out to have a sound clinical basis. Performing the piece live would be recognizable to speech pathologists as an idiosyncratic attempt at treatment through the closely related modality of frequency altered feedback (FAF), a form of electronic therapy for stutterers whose popularity peaked in the 1990s (300–1). Indeed, reports are that, as of 2014, after a lifetime of auditory feedback, Lucier no longer stutters when reciting the text of his most famous piece.11

A brief history of the EDM “stutter” Let us now turn to a brief overview of more-­or-less-­mimetic stutter effects in the history of groove-­based electronic music. How closely do developments in pop art track the phenomenology of actual stuttering? For clarity, we can break up the narrative into three technological moments: the early analog world of turntable stutters (beat juggling); a first wave of digital MIDI stutters (triggering

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drum machines and samplers); and, finally, the use of unlimited digital signal processing power to execute elaborate DSP stutters (slicing up and filtering waveforms). Again, symptomatology provides us with a useful framework. A developmental view of stuttering postulates that the disorder arises from the natural, unconscious tendency of small children to repeat words and phrases when learning to speak. This primary stuttering only becomes a problem for some, who go through stages of more complex and effortful repetition, until they develop the full-­ blown set of symptoms known as a secondary stutter. [Van Riper] proposed that simple, effortless repetitions and prolongations at normal tempo (primary stuttering) are followed by a stage of faster, longer, and less regular repetitions and prolongations with occasional reactions of surprise, then by struggle reactions accompanied by feelings of frustration, and finally by secondary stuttering characterized by fear and avoidance. (Bloodstein and Bernstein Ratner 2008: 35—my emphases)

The following will show that across technological moments and in each technological moment the musical stutter develops and elaborates: beginning with regular, “effortless” reiterations that do not stretch or displace the rhythmic pulse, EDM stutter effects culminate as extended sequences of irregular part-­ repetitions and blockages that can suspend musical time, displace downbeats, and engender strong affective responses.

The turntable stutter Stutter effects in groove music begin as an outgrowth of “beat juggling”—using two platters to extend the break of a disco or funk record. In early examples from the late 1970s, one can hear what one might call a primary turntable stutter: the first generation of scratch DJs, like Grand Wizard Theodore and Grandmaster Flash, quickly learned how to catch and release a single beat without disrupting the basic flow. This trick does cause a short stutter (i.e., one or two part-­repetitions of the initial drum attack) but the basic effect remains effortless and smooth. Fifteen years later, though, in the hands of scratch revivalists like Jurassic 5’s Cut Chemist (Lucas McFadden), turntable stuttering had developed into a full-­ blown rhythmic disorder. An iconic scratch track like “Lesson 6: The Lecture,” from Jurassic 5’s eponymous 1997 debut EP, puts the mimetic connection between beat juggling and speech disfluency front and center. This is one of

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those classic moments of hip-­hop sampling as organically arising social critique, where, after a cascade of cutting and scratching that completely fragments both rhythm and timbre, a series of “white” recorded studio voices (sampled largely from 1950s high-­fidelity promotional discs) fights for control of the flow with an angry voice that reads very street and very black: [Studio voice 1] [Studio voice 2]

Ladies and gentlemen this is a test . . .

[Crab scratching] [“Street” voice, reverb] [Studio voice 3]

Bullshit! [. . .]  OK. LET’S BEGIN.

One might, following Freudian approach–avoidance theories that dominated early research into stuttering, see the momentary disintegration of rhythm (the ellipsis in the transcription above) as a return of the racial repressed, an angry voice from the African diaspora unconscious disrupting the practiced fluency of the White Authority Voice by quite literally “calling bullshit” on it.12 But Deleuzian symptomatology also cues us in to the self-­consciousness of this secondary turntable stutter, the ironic “let’s begin” at the end pointing to an elaborately simulated failure of speech teleology (“this is a test”) under a torrent of imaginary communicative pressure. Note that none of the voices is made to stutter here; as Deleuze would predict, it is the triplet part-­repetitions of the scratch, the place where the music stutters, that signals the breakthrough (“Bullshit!”) of racialized affect.

The MIDI stutter In the same year that Cut Chemist released “The Lecture,” Norman Cook, a.k.a. Fatboy Slim, had a hit with “The Rockafeller Skank.” Like most of his dancefloor fillers, the track culminates by building tension through an elaborate set of repetitions that recombine musical teleology in a characteristically florid way. Cook was working with very primitive equipment for his time—an Akai S–950 sampler driven by the software sequencer running on his Atari ST personal computer—and he had no easy way to edit waveforms. Thus the breakdown that occurs around four minutes into the track is all the more impressive: at 3:45, a pair of short vocal phrases (“right about now, the funk soul brother”) is isolated and looped; while repeating, they also decelerate and seem to disintegrate, as uncontrolled phasing and flanging overwhelm the audio surface [4:00]; next, the

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resulting oscillation becomes so slow that one hears nothing but stuttering artifacts, which are then made to accelerate until they fuse into a single horn-­like pitch and soar into the stratosphere [4:15]; finally, a single sampled word is isolated, looped, dropped into the mix under tempo, and gradually accelerated until it produces, once again, a continuously phasing stutter. The effect is eerily reminiscent of the eightfold overdubbed climax of Steve Reich’s Come Out (1966), which, as is well-­known, was achieved by looping and rerecording a single word’s worth of the auditory feedback patterns produced by the interaction of two tape loops moving slowly out of sync (Gopinath 2009: 129). All of Cook’s work, however, was done through the MIDI interface. The accelerating and decelerating stutter effect was created by, first, time-­stretching the vocal sample beyond the capability of the Akai’s 12-bit resolution until it splintered—a kind of sonic “blockage” due to inadequate processing bandwidth that some cognitive speech researchers have posited as part of the mechanism of stuttering13—then sending repeated MIDI messages to the sampler to retrigger the attack over and over at increasing tempos, until the repetitions freeze into a single sustained pitch, only to collapse and start again. (The genealogy of Laidback Luke’s loop-­pitch trick now becomes apparent.) Symptomatologically, the single word repeated—“right about now . . . now . . . now . . . now”—points to the subjective freezing of phenomenological time reported by patients during the “blank” moment of a stuttering attack. Cook owned another relic from the 1980s that could execute “stutters” all by itself: a Roland TR-909 drum machine, whose “flam” setting enabled a quick, out-­of-tempo repeat of any note attack (see Figure 1.2). It was designed to imitate a two-­handed drummer’s accent (ba-dat), but the rococo demonstration song hardwired into the 909’s RAM shows off the inherent tendency of sequenced flamming to pile up robotic cascades of paired “note repeats.” Since this instantaneous retriggering does not follow the tempo of the groove, it has the

Figure 1.2  Description of tempo-­independent MIDI “flam” stutter effect (“Variations of Writing Rhythm Patterns” 1983: 26).

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spasmodic intensity—often imitated, never quite captured—that comes from slight, but pervasive, rhythmic disfluency.14 By 1998, Akai had long since moved on from rack-­mounted samplers like the S–950; as the millennium passed, its flagship model was the MPC (MIDI Production Center) 2000XL, which fused sampling and drum programming into one workflow. The MPC2000XL had a dedicated “Note Repeat” button, linked dynamically to its main MIDI clock. As beat makers soon realized, any sound assigned to a pad on the MPC could thus be retriggered faster than human fingers could tap, and it was easy, by changing the subdivision setting, to speed up or slow down the note repetitions independently of the actual tempo. Any MPC-like device—and there are many now—can natively execute this primary MIDI stutter with blinding, effortless fluency. It is one of groove-­based music’s most influential gestures, and is so essential to creating dancefloor tension “on the fly” that the computerized DJ controllers which have replaced turntables as the primary way to manipulate records are typically equipped with a whole cascade of MIDI note repeat triggers, one for each common subdivision of the beat (1, 1/2, 1/4, etc.). Secondary, discursive stuttering quickly developed within this pad-­based musical world as well.A culture of live MPC performance— which was not part of the original design brief—has sprung up, in which sophisticated manipulation of the note repeat button and the tempo wheel are as crucial as finger drumming skills. Derrick Paris, a skateboard entrepreneur and long-­time denizen of the Los Angeles instrumental hip-­hop scene, has uploaded, as The Mighty Paris, dozens of beats, tracks, and—most usefully for the musicologist—instructional videos on how to use the MPC’s MIDI touch pads and note repeat function to isolate, prolong, and repeat tiny fragments of groove. In one such video, with the utilitarian title “MPC STUDIO 16 LEVELS WITH NOTE REPEAT,” Paris shows how a producer can transform, step by step, the built-­in MIDI stutter of the MPC into complex formal sequences of part-­repetitions, blockages, and releases. The camera shows nothing but a close-­up view of the controller’s front panel, with its buttons, jog wheel, and four-­by-four matrix of spring-­loaded touch pads. Paris has loaded kick, snare, and hi-­hat samples into the bottom row, and he begins with a straightforward beat, each sample triggered with a single finger punch, analogous to the way a drummer would lay down a groove on a physical kit. After about ten seconds, he activates the note repeat button (see Figure 1.3), and adjusts the tempo (approximately 92 bpm) and subdivision settings (1/16) so that any sample he triggers will retrigger six times per second for as long as his

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Figure 1.3  The Mighty Paris demonstrates live MPC performance techniques. His right-­hand thumb activates the note repeat function, while his left hand holds down multiple touch pads to retrigger several samples at once (video still from “MPC STUDIO 16 LEVELS WITH NOTE REPEAT”).15

finger is on the pad. Immediately, the keyboard sample he has assigned to the upper rows of the matrix springs to life; holding down various combinations of pads, he creates an ever-­evolving, pulsating melody line, under which each finger punch in the bottom row can now trigger complicated, irregular clusters of drum samples. The primary stutter of the TR-909 flam effect has metastasized into something secondary, self-­conscious, and funky. Retriggering the groove has become the groove; the music itself has begun to stutter.

The DSP stutter About thirty seconds before the end of the aforementioned video, Paris doubles the MPC’s subdivision speed. Now the pads repeat thirty-­two times per beat, which works out, at a tempo of 92 bpm, to a sample trigger every eighty milliseconds. At this speed, the incessant retriggering begins to blur, à la Cowell and Stockhausen, into a sustained, almost trance-­like oscillation; repetition has become prolongation, a musicalizing process that becomes explicit when Paris abruptly abandons note repeat and allows the heavily phased Fender Rhodes keyboard sample he is working with to expand to its full length and trace out its soulful little cadence. The idea of combining the mechanical grind of stuttered repetition with lush, soulful melodic material is not the exclusive province of instrumental hip-­hop avant-­gardists: it is a central conceit of the massively popular lineage of “epic” dance music that reaches back through

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genres like UK garage, trance, and house to disco and orchestral soul. The recipe has been so consistently popular that a distinct subgenre of trance has arisen which combines fizzy note repetitions and fuzzy time-­stretched vocals with the swooning romanticism and elaborate builds of the festival stage. If the digital signal processing (DSP) stutter has become a cliché in this kind of dance music —and it has—then Brian Transeau (who works under his own initials, BT) is one of the primary causes, both for his immense success as a trance DJ-producer and for the elaborate software techniques he has taken from the world of experi­ mental electronic music and put in the hands of producers less talented and patient than he. BT’s fascination with stutter effects long ago transcended what could be achieved by MIDI triggering alone. Along with a number of “nervous” house producers in the 1990s (Mark “MK” Minchen, Todd Edwards), he became expert at using DSP plugins like Recycle inside a digital audio workstation to painstakingly slice, stretch, and rearrange pieces of a vocal track into complex repetitive assemblages that unfolded over jazz-­inflected four-­on-the-­floor beats. His earlier work thus exhibits what speech researchers might identify as a transitional kind of secondary stuttering, still reasonably easy and rhythmically fluent, but where “faster, longer, and less regular repetitions and prolongations” will sometimes produce “occasional reactions of surprise” (Van Riper 1963: 374). By the early 2000s, BT was interested in pushing this technique to its theoretical limits, pulverizing audio down into what he called the “unreal” note values—unreal, in this case, signifying subdivisions of the basic beat smaller than a 64th-­note triplet, the smallest subdivision available under the MIDI protocol’s original hardware standard of twenty-­four pulses per quarter note.16 Playing in this sub-­metrical realm, he quickly recapitulated Cowell and Stockhausen’s discovery of the reciprocal relationship between rhythm and pitch: When you go into unreal note values, anything smaller than 64th-­notes, your brain stops telling you that what you’re hearing is a repeated slice of sound. It starts telling you that it’s a tone . . . So if you have a jumbled mass of 128th-­notes, it just sounds like some splurchy, organic sound. (BT, quoted in Preve 2006: 112)

Transeau began using Kyma sound design software to slice sounds according to temporal grids that subdivide the beat into as many as 2048 parts, then spacing the tiny grains exponentially or logarithmically, to give the mathematical effect of acceleration or deceleration:

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Robert Fink Some of the grids I’ve made for this go to 2,048th-­notes. The hi-­hat patterns use a new thing I call exponential and logarithmic triplets. It’s taking unreal note values and putting non-­linear spacing between them. I’ll do a “gesture” of, say, 512th-­notes slowing down to eighths, but up on the fast end, the rests between all the micro-­edits get progressively longer according to a mathematical curve. (BT, quoted in Fortner 2005)

These exponential gestures, with their mathematically accelerating and decelerating patterns of repetition, take us right back to the empirical symptomatology of Sheehan’s painstakingly transcribed “stuttering patterns”— words and phrases sliced up by part-­repetition and strung together in patterns that accelerate and decelerate are the defining speech characteristics of people who are debilitated by stuttering. In an influential track like “The Emergency,” from These Hopeful Machines (2010),BT unleashes these stuttering exponential transformations of unreal note values on his own singing voice, turning the affectively charged phrase “I wanted things to get better, I was in pain” into a multi-­tracked stutterer’s chorus. In a virtuoso demonstration of DSP technique, the vocal sample is repeatedly chopped up, combined with other, unrelated phonemes plundered from other samples and then recombined with itself, five contrapuntal layers deep, just the way Sheehan, in his original clinical study (1974), noted that patients were inserting irrelevant vocables into the most elaborate of their stutter patterns. At the climactic moment of “The Emergency,” BT chooses the inability to get through the most basic unit of affective language in popular music (the phrase “I love you”) as the raw material for a sublime excess of repetition and blockage— blockage not of his musical language, but, in fact, as his musical language. Slicing about one second of audio into several thousand infinitesimal shards, he reassembles it into a two-bar “granular fill,” independently and simultaneously varying the stutter length, sample depth, and bit rate, while adding synchronized filter sweeps with quick stereo panning to set the whole complex of part-­ repetitions dancing across the audio field.17 Once again, we begin to approach the Deleuzian negative ideal of a modernist poetic language in which everything stutters. Deleuze champions this model, where stuttering is “an affect of language, and not an affectation of speech” ([1993] 1997: 110), in the essay which provides this chapter’s epigraph. The example he offers, from the Romanian modernist poet Gherasim Luca, seems preternaturally apropos, since it also stumbles over itself, accelerating and decelerating with manic precision, while attempting to articulate the same basic unit of affect in the French language, the clichéd avowal of love, “je t’aime passionnément”:

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passionné nez pasionném je je t’ai je t’aime je je je jet je t’ai jetez je t’aime passionném t’aime je t’aime je je jeu passion j’aime passionné éé ém émer . . . je je t’aime je t’aime je t’ai je t’aime aime aime je t’aime passionné é aime je t’aime passioném je t’aime passionnément aimante je t’aime je t’aime passionnément je t’ai je t’aime passionné né je t’aime passionné je t’aime passionnément je t’aime je t’aime passio passionnément (Luca 1973: 92)18

Conclusion: The redistribution of the sayable Ever-­finer control of mathematically controlled stutter patterns became so central to BT’s musical language that he eventually commissioned a technician to write software powerful enough to accomplish it in real time. He holds the patent (see Figure 1.4) on this digital performance tool, and by the 2010s the effect had become enough of a poetic cliché within EDM—that is to say, it was immediately legible as part of a new rhetorical language—that iZotope Software could successfully market a VST/AU plugin, with BT’s name emblazoned on it, as the “Stutter Edit™” (see Figure 1.5). The output of the Stutter Edit™ plugin is a complex sequence of blockages, part-­repetitions, and introjected phonemic noise guaranteed to derail the forward progress of any track you’re playing, over as many beats and/or fractions thereof as you dare. iZotope calls this a “Stutter Gesture,” an elegant turn of phrase that literally “embodies” linguistic disruption as a kind of physical movement, a dance of stuttering:

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Figure 1.4  Brian Transeau, Richard Boulanger and Taemin Cho’s proposed interface for Stutter Edit live performance software (after US patent application 20090281793 A1, filed 12.XI.2009).

Figure 1.5  iZotope Stutter Edit™ plugin.

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The key to unlocking Stutter Edit’s capabilities is the use of Gestures: a set of effects and their associated timelines that reside on a single MIDI note. The audible result of a Gesture can vary from simple to complex—a Stutter Gesture could simply repeat a small chunk of audio at an eighth-­note rhythmic rate, or it could trigger a run of raging glitches that get decimated by a bit crusher before being filtered into a wash of echoes.19

Stutter-­as-gesture is a notion by which BT’s software seems to respond (although it certainly did not) to the equally graceful language of theater studies scholar Christel Stalpaert, in her 2010 analysis of Flemish director Pieter De Buysser’s Stutter Opera (L’Opéra bègue/Stotteropera, 2004). This darkly comic theater piece plays with the approach-­avoidance structure built into its oxymoronic title: Iris is a young stutterer who discovers on the eve of her marriage that a tree is growing in her throat. Both the other characters and the audience must deal with her loss of the ability to speak, the choking off of vocal jouissance that silences the character and the artform simultaneously. But there is compensation. Stalpaert describes the liberating effect of Iris’s staged stutter on the work’s sensitivity to embodied gesture: “When language has its linguistic yoke removed,” she notes, “you have room to dance again” (82). She casts this stutter effect, in the manner of Jacques Rancière, as fundamentally political, as a redistribution of the sayable:20 Political speaking in the meaning of Rancière’s police is directed at a particular objective. It is the art of the discussable. Art on the other hand exercises the politics of the inexpressible. Art becomes politics by distancing itself from the rhetoric of the word. (91)

If stuttering—whether in speech or music—is indeed a kind of dance, then its resistance to power is not, as the old Freudian reading would have it, a passive-­ aggressive act of self-­repression. The stutter is a generative device, a strategic use of irrepressible repetition as way of both extending and remapping communicative teleology. In this context, stammering can also be understood as a movement of words falling forward, based on imbalance in the language. Stuttering can therefore be understood not as a cessation of speech, but as generating a constant becoming . . . It is not about damaging of language, but about creative progress(ion) having imbalance as its starting point. (Stalpaert 2010: 87)

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It is this generative aspect of stuttered repetition, the moment where imbalance finds a new balance, where the blockage itself becomes the flow, which sets contemporary pop music in distinctive motion. Finding fluency in disfluency has been the characteristic mode of Afro-­diasporic musical resistance: Deliberately “repetitive” in force, black musics (especially those associated with dance) use the “cut” to emphasize the repetitive nature of the music by “skipping back to another beginning which we have already heard,” making room for accidents and ruptures inside the music itself . . . Rap music relies on the loop, on the circularity of rhythm and on the “cut” or the “break beat” that systematically ruptures equilibrium. Yet, in rap, the “break beat” itself is looped—repositioned as repetition, as equilibrium inside the rupture.21 (Rose 1994: 70)

This is the promise of the musical stutter, the musicalized stutter, of the music itself when it stutters: that the composer, the authority figure who controls the normative flow of musical rhetoric and enforces the current distribution of what is sayable in music, the man (and, no disrespect to Alvin Lucier, but it’s always a man, always a white man) who is sitting in a room different than the one we are all in now, that white man will begin to stutter, and then w-­w-will, will, will, will just, will just get up, will just get up . . . and dance away. [Studio voice 1] [Studio voice 2]

Ladies and gentlemen this is a test. . .

[Crab scratching] [“Street” voice, reverb] Bullshit! [. . .] [Studio voice 3] OK. LET’S BEGIN.

Notes 1 Elizabeth Margulis crafted an elegant empirical proof of this effect, using manipulated excerpts from “noisy” works by Luciano Berio and Elliott Carter. When she introduced extra repetition into the sound stream by cutting and pasting chunks of audio, average listeners were significantly more likely to identify the new stimulus as an “interesting” piece by a human artist, rather than as computer-­generated noise. Disconcertingly for those committed to high modernism, she was able to achieve similar results with an audience of professional music theorists, who presumably would be most sensitive to the evolving compositional structure of the original works (2013: 15–16).

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2 For some choice examples from Theodor W. Adorno synthesizing Arnold Schoenberg and Sigmund Freud, see the excellent literature review in Luis-Manuel Garcia’s “On and On: Repetition as Process and Pleasure in Electronic Dance Music” (2005). 3 This recombinant teleology, abandoning the naturalism of what one might call the classical teleology of the Western musical tradition, covers a vastly expanded phenomenological range (see Fink 2005: 42–7). 4 As Garcia notes in “On and On,” even ethnographic and Afro-­centric attempts to reclaim repetition as a positive value tend either to functionalize it (repetition is necessary to achieve some social goal) or redefine the repeating material in a favored repertoire as “not (really) the same” (2005). Love of literal repetition is rarely hailed by musical intellectuals. If one is familiar with the arguments in Repeating Ourselves about repetition, desire, and advertising (Fink 2005), it is not surprising to learn that some of the only verification that contemporary popular music is valued precisely insofar as it is exceptionally repetitious comes from professors of marketing, publishing in journals of consumer psychology (see Nunes, Ordanini, and Valsesia 2015). 5 See www.youtube.com/watch?v=Yk8Ur64uaVY (last accessed 22 April 2017). 6 See www.youtube.com/watch?v=PkQ5rEJaTmk (last accessed 22 April 2017). 7 This is not to say that the cultural history of stuttering as a metaphor is not a fascinating subject. I direct the interested reader to Chris Eagle, the author of a recent survey of the often stereotypical tropes and “coarse caricatures” under which speech disorders are represented in modern literature (2014: 158–9). 8 I thus applaud Eagle when he asks “whether it is possible to have a theoretical approach to disordered speech that is grounded in the more phenomenological aspects of language breakdown.” Even though he rejects Gilles Deleuze’s late philosophical interest in stuttering as a problematic kind of “glorification,” Eagle’s desire to turn “toward more clinical approaches” echoes the philosopher’s early work (see 2014: 159–62). 9 The following survey of symptomatology largely follows Bloodstein and Bernstein Ratner’s 2008 textbook survey of the clinical and research literature—further references will be noted in the text. Music theorist David Temperley has argued persuasively that communicative pressure generally determines key features of Afro-­ diasporic improvised music styles (see 2004: 313–37). 10 Trained as a psychologist, Sheehan developed his push-­pull phenomenology of speech rhythm into an “approach-­avoidance” theory of stuttering: “Whenever stutterers’ urge to speak was distinctly stronger than their desire to avoid speech, they spoke fluently. When avoidance of speaking was clearly the dominant drive, they were silent. But when their approach and avoidance drives were in relative equilibrium, so that the gradients crossed, they stuttered” (Sheehan, summarized in Bloodstein and Bernstein Ratner 2008: 62–3).

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11 See the account of a recent performance in Joseph 2015. 12 The very earliest “psychoneurotic” etiologies followed Freud and assimilated the stutter to other parapraxes of speech (slips of the tongue, forgetting of words) arising from internal conflict and repressed impulses (Bloodstein and Bernstein Ratner 2008: 333–5). Sheehan’s “approach-­avoidance” theory (1953) was a behaviorist rewriting of this trope. 13 The Handbook of Stuttering notes this hypothesis in its overview of cognitive approaches to stuttering; researchers have proceeded from the assumption that, “at some level, stuttering reflects a weakness in the speech/language system.” When stutterers are put under cognitive pressure by dual-­task experiments, “either the disfluency rate increases or linguistic productivity decreases” (Bloodstein and Bernstein Ratner 2008: 56, citing Bosshardt 2006). As with the Akai S–950, stutter-­like retriggering and dramatic slowing of tempo are, in this view, linked responses to processor overload. 14 The TR–909’s demonstration song can be accessed by holding down the “Track 1” and “Pattern 1” buttons while turning on the machine. A plethora of owners have uploaded their vintage machine’s performance of it to YouTube—see, for instance, www. youtube.com/watch?v=_zfcQaur7tY (last accessed 30 March 2017). 15 Available online at: www.youtube.com/watch?v=Av6JFa501mo (last accessed 31 March 2017). 16 The MIDI protocol for beat subdivision is actually much more flexible than BT’s somewhat old-­fashioned notion of “unreal” note values implies. The number of pulses per quarter note (ppqn) in MIDI is defined by a 16-bit word that uses two leading bits to define general parameters and the remaining fourteen to specify the subdivision. The smallest theoretical subdivision is thus 214=16,384 ppqn. Practically speaking, no MIDI device can respond that quickly, but most hardware sequencers today start at 96 ppqn, and many have a 10x setting that allows subdivisions at 960 ppqn, far above the threshold of human rhythmic discrimination. 17 In 2011, BT released a complete set of “stems” (the constituent elements of the song, ready for remixing) from “The Emergency” as The Emergency (Stems), Nettwerk 067003704755. The passage in question, entitled “2 Bar Granular Fill,” is track 45: it can be sampled and downloaded from www.beatport.com/release/the-­emergencystems/352121 (last accessed 1 April 2017). 18 It is worth noting that Luca’s poem is not designed, in the tradition of Mallarmé, as a purely visual struggle with the blankness of the page and the arbitrariness of the sign. This poem is designed to be read aloud, and a gripping performance by the author himself is featured in Raoul Sangla’s feature documentary Comment s’en sortir sans sortir (CDN, France 3, La Sept-Arte, 1989). 19 Description of Stutter Edit™ plugin from iZotope, Inc. website, see www.izotope.com/ en/products/create-­and-design/stutter-­edit/features.html (last accessed 1 April 2017).

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20 The coinage “a redistribution of the sayable” is my own rewriting of Jacques Rancière’s “redistribution of the sensible,” and Christel Stalpaert of course bears no responsibility for its ambitions to a wider critical synthesis than she expressed. 21 This passage quotes one of the seminal discussions of repetition in African-American music: James A. Snead’s “On Repetition in Black Culture” (1981).

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Time and Time Again Repetition and Difference in Repetitive Music Anne Danielsen

From the Baroque era to the present day, Western art music has often been experienced and described in terms of a teleological process. Music in this tradition seems to form large-scale curves of tension, often building up to a climax before reaching a conclusion that is felt to be well prepared and quite natural. However, this is only one way of shaping musical time. In fact, within larger historical and geographical contexts, repetitive or cyclical musical forms have tended to dominate, in part because repetition facilitates the memorization of musical material in oral musical traditions and helps the communication of the overall musical structure too. This chapter aims to shed light on the nature of repetition in music that relies on such repetitive or cyclical forms.1 I will begin with general considerations of the experience of time in music. Then I will discuss the relationship between repetition and variation, and the way in which invariant aspects of music form a background by virtue of which attention is drawn to those things that vary. The idea of repetition as production will also be developed, relying in particular on philosopher Gilles Deleuze’s discussion of repetition ([1968] 1994), and especially his distinction between static and dynamic repetition, after which I will apply this framework to various musical examples of groove-based music in the African-American tradition from the 1960s onward. I will also examine how new technological tools have made it possible to shape the crucial inner dynamics of the groove in completely new ways. Examples will be given of new rhythmic feels that derive from those tools’ capacity to take control of and manipulate events along the temporal axis. Finally, I will address the ways in which repetitive music is organized in time at the level of a whole track or a song—that is, as a musical form—and discuss the experience of such a form in different contexts.

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This will lead to a more general conclusion regarding repetition as a changing same, from both a cultural and a historical perspective.

Repetition versus repetition In The Time of Music, Jonathan Kramer attempts to systematize and analyze different types of musical time. His point of departure is a binary theoretical division between linearity and nonlinearity. Musical linearity is defined as “the determination of some characteristic(s) of music in accordance with implications that arise from earlier events of the piece,” while nonlinearity is “the determination of some characteristic(s) of music in accordance with implications that arise from principles or tendencies governing an entire piece or section” (1988: 20). Put another way, in a linear mode, musical meaning is developed through a teleological process and connected to preceding as well as succeeding events. On the other hand, in a nonlinear mode, musical meaning is simply uncovered. For Kramer, all music exhibits both linearity and nonlinearity. His categories of musical time are consequently developed as variations and combinations of these two modes. The first category is called “goal-directed linearity,” and addresses the classical tonal repertoire. Here too, however, Kramer calls attention to nonlinear aspects and their function as a backdrop against which the linear aspects of music come into focus: after a few bars of unchanging texture and surface rhythm, the expectation arises that the next measure will be similar in turn. This way, attention is directed toward those musical aspects where the linearity unfolds, such as melodic contour, harmony, the use of different registers, and, in some cases, the dynamics (42). Kramer’s analysis of tonal classical music demonstrates that repetition always goes hand-in-hand with variation, and, more importantly, that repetition tends to produce a certain kind of focus. Because the capacity of our short-term memory limits the amount of information that is available to conscious awareness at any given time (Snyder 2000: 51), our attention tends to be drawn to those things that vary, as opposed to the repeating, invariant aspects that instead come to form the background. Still, what constitutes such variation differs greatly with musical genre and depends, first and foremost, on what is regarded or experienced as repetition. There are different forms of repetition and different forms of difference. In the essay “Structure and function in musical repetition,” David Lidov identifies three types of repetition. The first type relates to the ways in which

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repetition contributes to segmentation and hierarchy in Western art music. When repetition works this way, he calls it formative, in the sense that it “defines units of a musical work, and establishes their position in a hierarchy of longer and shorter segments” (1979: 9). Formative repetition is conventional and necessary; it also attracts little attention as long as the repeated unit corresponds to the constructional units of the hierarchy—as Lidov puts it, “if the repetition is hierarchically conformal, its necessity and sufficiency neutralize its interest. Interest passes to the material” (6). In other words, formative repetition is an almost transparent aspect of musical structure; its absence is actually much more striking than its presence. In the case of formative repetition, two equal units follow one another in immediate succession; it is transparent but nonetheless fundamental to establishing the hierarchy of sequences in a standard pop tune, where one measure plus another makes a unit of two, two plus another two makes a unit of four, four plus four makes eight, and so on. Most often, those two equal units are not absolutely equal, but this does not alter the effect very much: “varied formative repetition” will, according to Lidov, merely tend to establish “equivalences and oppositions between different features of the material” (9), as, for example, when a phrase is answered by a similar, yet different phrase in a symmetrically organized structural form. In any case, it remains true that one’s focus tends to stay on the aspect that changes, not on the aspect that repeats (e.g. a rhythmic pattern), even when the latter may be described as forming the basic framework of the phrase. Generally speaking, Lidov analyzes the effects of repetition using the number of repetitions as his starting point. When the repeated units exceed two (i.e., the typical number for formative repetition), the mere fact that something is repeated will attract attention in itself. Lidov labels this second type of repetition “focal repetition” (15); he mentions the classical sequence as an example of a form of repetition that attracts attention as such, while being at the same time strongly progressive—in other words, such repetitive structures might give the impression of an accumulation of time, rather than the opposite. Finally, the third form of repetition that Lidov discusses is textural repetition, which “cancels out its own claim on our attention and, thereby, refers our focus elsewhere (to another voice or to a changing aspect” (21). He suggests that this might already happen by the fourth or fifth repetition. For Lidov, this kind of repetition directs one’s attention to a changing aspect, without the repetition losing its effect—“the figure maintains, nevertheless, a transcendental influence on our musical consciousness” (21). Steve Reich’s minimalist, repetitive music might serve as an example for the latter type of repetition.

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Richard Middleton also addresses different forms of repetition in music, but he only identifies two basic forms: “discursive” and “musematic” repetition (1983: 238; 1990: 269). Sequence, which “composes time (rather than marking time or obliterating it, as straight repetition, especially if musematic, seems to do),” is his primary example of discursive repetition (1990: 273–5). Focusing solely on the length of the repeated unit, he does not discuss the role of the musical context (e.g., the harmonic context or the number of repetitions). One objection is thus that he underestimates the role of other musical parameters in the effect of repetition. In a classical sequence, for example, the tonal and harmonic relationships between different repeated units are hugely important; the number of repetitions is almost predetermined—a sequence commonly stops after three repetitions or is considerably varied in the fourth. Combined with functional harmonic progressions, this produces the “composing of time” in tonal classical music. The effects of repetition and difference, then, are highly dependent on context and emerge in combination with other musical aspects. For example, it is neither variation per se that produces the goal-directedness of classical tonal music nor repetition per se that causes the different states of being commonly associated with repetitive music. Repetition is not automatically equal to nonhierarchical or nonlinear forms, or to different trancelike, meditative, or regressive conditions (depending upon one’s perspective); variation is not automatically equal to linear, discursive, or teleological forms. Instead, it is particular combinations of repetition and variation, and their interaction with other musical parameters, which produce such effects.

Repetition with a difference: Locking the rhythm of a groove Although repetition is encountered in all types of music, groove-based music may be said to rely on repetition to an extreme extent. As I will discuss toward the end of the present chapter, it also supplies the basic structuring principle for such music’s overall form. The question as to whether this repetitive structure is actually heard as repetition, however, depends on several factors. The first factor might be described as listeners’ “resolution” in the way they “process” the groove: if one’s resolution is high (i.e., if one is sufficiently attuned to details and other events at the microlevel of the groove) there will almost always be something new to attend to when a pattern is repeated. Conversely, a low-resolution,

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non-confident listener will probably tend to hear the “same thing,” despite considerable differences from one repetition to the next. The second factor is the extent to which one’s listening experience is directed toward difference rather than sameness. An important aesthetic orientation in African-American culture is to “repeat with a difference” (Gates 1988: xxii–iii), which means that the repetitive structure is a vehicle for performative qualities—repetition is there to make it possible to experience performative difference. Repetition in a groove that is performed may thus be characterized as a form of microlevel “signifyin(g),” to borrow a term from Henry Louis Gates, Jr: it is repetition and revision in one and the same maneuver. The aim, here, is twofold: on the one hand, it is important that the same repeats every time (i.e., the same should be recognized or categorized as such); on the other hand, it is equally important that this same is different. Yet this difference must not exhaust the category: instead, it should occur in the form of what might be described as “intracategorical variation”— the difference is a difference within the repeated. Even though extensive repetition may be found in groove-based music, the focus is on difference—not difference in itself, but difference stepping forward in relation to the same, to a figure, a formality or a convention, or perhaps even a tradition. (In practice, a tradition will also contain the expectation of difference.) A clear and sturdy structure allows the personal touch to come forward and directs attention toward performative qualities rather than compositional structure. Even a strictly repetitive tune such as, for example, “The Payback” (1974) by James Brown is a “changing same” (Jones 1971). If we compare the beginning with the end (see Figure 2.1), the groove has clearly changed. First of all, the

Figure 2.1  Waveform of beginning (0:50–0:60) and end (6:18–6:28) of “The Payback.”

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response guitar “develops” by gradually extending the funky wah-wah riff using more and bigger gestures that occupy more space and more time. The density of events is higher, and there is more energy overall in the groove toward the end. The tempo has also increased from approximately 97 to 100 bpm. We do not actually perceive this change as change, however, probably because it is the result of an ongoing act of producing the same. For this reason, it would be more appropriate to call it optimization than variation—an optimization of the different elements so that they become even more integrated and comfortable within the whole. This continuous optimization is often described as “locking” or “nailing the rhythm.” It is not a carefully considered process, and it never really ends; instead, it goes on automatically, continuously, manifesting in the form of better or worse periods of interaction. In better periods, the technical skills of musicians and dancers are completely absent. In fact, the only times when skills such as accurate articulation and precision in timing tend to be audible are when they are lacking—ideally, they attract no attention at all.

Repetition as production How can the repetitive optimization described above be understood from a phenomenological point of view? What is repetition when one is actually achieving it or experiencing it (i.e., when one is taking part not from a distance but from a position inside the process)? To put it differently: what is repetition when it is unfolding in time? One of Gilles Deleuze’s core insights is that each repetition is produced and thus is difference in the first place. In Chapter 2 of Difference and Repetition ([1968] 1994), he identifies three instances of repetition. He calls the first “repetition in itself,” but, as he points out, this leaves repetition unthinkable. Repetition has no “in itself ”: it cannot be attributed to the object repeated, but rather, according to David Hume, “change[s] something in the mind which contemplates it” (quoted in Deleuze [1968] 1994: 70). The second instance of repetition relates to this last effect of repetition and implies a “passive synthesis in time,” in Deleuze’s terms, which is not carried out by the mind but occurs in the mind as it contemplates, prior to all memory and all reflection. On this level, repetition occurs but is not recognized as such; it is still repetition for itself, or rather, repetition before the act of understanding repetition. As for the third instance of repetition, it is repetition constituted as such, as “repetition for us,”

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but this act of understanding is, as Deleuze points out, superimposed upon and supported by the two underlying levels (71). In line with Deleuze, we might say that when actually doing repetition (through, for example, playing or dancing), repetition remains “repetition for itself ” and never becomes “repetition for us.” This can be explained by the fact that repetition is production in the first place, and when one is in the process of creating a repetition, repetition cannot be explained by identity between different instances of repetition—doing so would require a position outside the process. Deleuze gives the following example: Consider . . . the repetition of a decorative motif: a figure is reproduced, while the concept remains absolutely identical . . . However, this is not how artists proceed in reality. They do not juxtapose instances of the figure, but rather each time combine an element of one instance with another element of a following instance. They introduce a disequilibrium into the dynamic process of construction, an instability, dissymmetry or gap of some kind which appears only in the overall effect. (19)

According to Deleuze, the process is fueled by a productive dissymmetry and the whole process is a sign of this force at work. At the same time, however, this force is not in the process, because the very goal of the process is to cancel it. Along these lines, Deleuze finds it necessary to distinguish between dynamic and static repetition (20), which correspond to repetition as experienced from a position inside and outside the process, respectively. The latter concerns only the overall static effect—it results from the work and refers back to a single concept. The former concerns the acting cause, the productive process, and is the repetition of an internal dynamics or difference within that which is repeated. According to this interior perspective, a repetition—the pattern or figure that is repeated—is not shaped at once but rather comes into being like the “evolution” of a bodily movement such as a gesture. Within a groove, repetition is production in the sense that one is continuously producing, or coproducing, rhythmic gestures in an ongoing process. In the groove mode, the entire rhythmic pattern is neither played nor experienced at once but over time. Every gesture has to be effected, and, in one sense, repetition is like a continual re-petition—a re-appeal or request requiring a follow-up. The request takes place every single time and it happens over and over again in the form of the same, but all the same new, (re)petition. It has to be done, and it has to be done in time, sequentially. Rather than repeating a prefabricated figure, one repeats an internal difference. One makes up one part and answers with another

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in an eternal rhythmic dialogue. Every time, the answer is the same, but this may only be because it is the right answer. The groove requires exactly that answer at that point; a different answer would take the whole process off course, and the entire fabric of rhythm might fall apart.

The inner dynamics of a groove Many features of James Brown’s funk grooves may be seen as contributing to a productive dissymmetry in the sense of Gilles Deleuze. One such feature is the structural tension between rhythm and counter-rhythm, the latter often tending toward cross-rhythm (i.e., when a pattern of four strokes is played against a threebeat pattern). This four against three pattern can be played by the guitar, the bass, the bass drum or a combination of several instruments (see Danielsen 2006b: 61–72). Another example of productive dissymmetry at the structural level is the on-and-off figure, which arises, for example, when strokes are first played on the beats and then off the beats (see Figure 2.2). This can be found in the famous bridge from James Brown’s “Sex Machine” (ibid.: 80–2). Both of these rhythmic figures (the four against three and the on-and-off) have a rhythmic structure that destabilizes a groove exactly when a possible synthesis in time could take place— namely at the end of every basic unit, when the metrical structure leads the pattern toward a mini-“closure.” Inducing such instability at the natural point of metric closure has a driving, dynamic effect and leads the process onward. The examples above are illustrations of structural dissymmetry. In played music it is commonly assumed that the timing inflections provided by musicians are likewise responsible for the drive of a groove.2 Two kinds of timing variations work this way. The first concerns variations from one basic unit to the next.3 The second is the so-called systematic variation that takes place within each unit

Figure 2.2  Four-against-three figure (left) and on-and-off figure (right).

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and is repeated from unit to unit (Bengtsson, Gabrielsson, and Thorsén 1969). The inner dynamic described above, whether produced by structural or microrhythmic instability, is of the latter kind and is inherent in the repeated structural or microrhythmic pattern. As a rule, it is this same pattern that is repeated each time the groove’s basic unit is repeated. The instability is, in a way, stable, and aesthetically satisfying. This condition becomes even more conspicuous when one approaches looped computer-based grooves (i.e., grooves where each basic unit, each repetition, is identical to the previous one). In such grooves, it is important to compose the basic unit in such a way that a compelling inner dynamic drives the groove forward. As with the performed grooves discussed above, this can be done either by combining different layers of rhythm at a structural level or by introducing microrhythmic tension. The former was the only option for sequencer-based grooves prior to the micromanipulation of rhythmic events enabled by the digital audio workstation (DAW) or its predecessors. Up to the mid-1980s, all sequencer-based grooves had to be on the grid, simply because there were no other options (this constraint for early sequencer-based grooves partly accounts for the on-the-grid aesthetics that is still governing electronic dance music [EDM] today). Driving such grooves forward could only be done through a structural tension between the basic rhythmic figures of the groove (e.g., by constructing a polyrhythmic fabric of rhythms and counter-rhythms). A common example would be the aforementioned four-against-three figure (see Figure 2.2). This can be heard in numerous EDM songs, where isochronous dotted eighth notes on a synth pad are typically juxtaposed against the beats of the four-on-the-floor basic pulse.4 The DAW clearly presented new opportunities for optimizing and experimenting with the microrhythmic design of grooves. New tools made it possible to shape the crucial inner dynamics of the groove in completely new ways by taking control of and manipulating events along the temporal axis. Such microrhythmic manipulation of grooves emerged around the turn of the millennium and has now become an almost standardized part of the groove repertoire in contemporary R&B-based pop music.5 One recent example is Rihanna’s “Needed Me” (the third single from her 2016 album Anti). A crucial aspect of this song’s inner dynamics derives from the manipulation of the sounds that constitute the groove foundation of the track (see Figure 2.3). A reversed synth pad accelerates toward the bass drum kick, turning around the dynamics of a traditional bass drum/bass layer, where the kick usually sparks off the more

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Figure 2.3  Reversed bass and kick drum from Rihanna’s “Needed Me” (2016).

extended sound of the bass. When this motion is reversed, it generates a peculiar rhythmic feel that surprises and engages in every repetition. In all these examples, it is not the difference between one repetition and the next that matters, but rather the productive dissymmetry that works from inside the repeated pattern and is experienced from inside the process. In music that is being performed, this is reflected in the fact that a musician has to produce every beat; from this perspective, every beat is actually new. In computer-based grooves, this is not the case, since the exact same sound is often used in every measure. And yet time is still new. When one is absorbed in the “now” of the experience, one will move together with the groove from one gesture to the next. This means that even though every new repetition no longer has to be performed by musicians, sounds still need to be perceived, time and again. From a phenomenological perspective, then, every repetition is brand new.

Repetition over time: The form of repetitive music In the end, we must step out of time and examine the form of repetitive music from a distance. Traditionally, repetitive music has been thought of as formless, because it does not allow for the development of a large-scale harmonic or dynamic structure. However, just as functional harmony goes with large-scale, organic musical form, groove tends to be paired with its own overall musical course. The dramaturgy of this groove-based form starts with a “consecration

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phase, to build up energy and prepare the listener for the groove itself. Once established, the groove may go on almost endlessly, but ultimately, of course, it reaches a point where the energy is on the decline, inducing a self-regulating “winding down.” In the words of Christopher Small: A performance may go on for several hours or all night, and will have no formal beginning or end; rather it will take some time to gather momentum and probably just fizzle out at the end when the musicians run out of energy or enthusiasm. There is no time limit set. (1996: 55)

Within this time span, the artist has various options for intervening in the musical process, as we can see using a close look at the temporal organization of the previously mentioned classic funk tune, “The Payback”—a song that can be heard as a mini-version of a typical groove-based live musical form.6 The song’s consecration phase is represented by a long introductory gesture, introducing us to the “community” of musicking: the listener/dancer is lifted up to the level of the groove and prepared to enter its flow. The eight-unit intro (each unit equals two measures of 4⁄4) becomes much more complex toward the end—more and more voices are piled atop one another while the amplitude of the vibrato increases. The whole gesture suddenly collapses upon the first beat of the main groove. This transition from the introductory gesture to the main groove is the first opportunity for the groove to end something without achieving actual closure. This is called the cut, which traditionally refers to the point in the musical course when one or more tracks or layers depart so that the remaining voices receive more attention. Yet this impact works in the opposite direction as well, because a voice can also attract attention as it is itself cut. The beginning of the classic breakbeat in rap is also an instance of the cut. In this case, several voices—in particular those that have previously attracted the most attention—drop out in order to let the beat proceed on its own. James Snead places the cut within a repetitive, circular setting: In black culture, the thing (the ritual, the dance, the beat) is “there for you to pick up when you come back to get it.” If there is a goal (Zweck) in such a culture, it is always deferred; it continually “cuts” back to the start, in the musical meaning of “cut” as an abrupt, seemingly unmotivated break (an accidental da capo) with a series already in progress and a willed return to a prior series. (1984: 67)

Snead gives many examples from music and literature. In James Brown’s funk, the cut is the return to the groove after a bridge. In John Coltrane’s jazz

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improvisation, the cut is “the unexpectedness with which the soloist will depart from the ‘head’ or theme and from its normal harmonic sequence or the drummer from the tune’s accepted and familiar primary beat” (1984: 69). In the field of literature, Snead points to Ishmael Reed’s Mumbo Jumbo: “Reed, in the manner of the jazz soloist, cuts frequently between the various subtexts in his novel (headlines, photographs, handwritten letters, italicized writing, advertisements) and the text of his main narrative” (72). In general terms, then, the cut is a pattern of abrupt transfer from one level to another (and, one might add, the latter is never equal to nothing). In James Brown’s funk tunes, another form of abrupt change may be found: the bridge. Unlike the introduction of a new section in a musical form that is governed by functional harmony, the bridge’s groove arrives completely unprepared. As John Miller Chernoff describes it when discussing form in a West African drum ensemble: “all the instruments change together and then return to their former relationship” (1979: 115). Chernoff also stresses that rhythmic innovations in themselves are not the main concern within such repetitive groove-based forms; what matters is the continual flow, as well as when a given intervention (a cut, a break, or a bridge) occurs. In short, even though the repetitive groove may seem devoid of form, when we experience it from within, because of the ways in which listeners, dancers, and musicians are absorbed in the now of the musical course, it does, in fact, have a form—one that is premised on no change but includes various possibilities for intervention. This form is closely related to the absorbed state of being that characterizes a groove experience, because it enhances our presence in the “now” of the groove. The fact that groove-based music is often described as devoid of form should be related to this condition of being in the now of the groove, because when we are in such a state, we do not notice the passing of time. This is not to say that the groove is characterized by standstill, but that we do not notice time because we move together with time, co-producing the groove in accordance with its inner dynamics, driving forward the groove and ourselves as listeners and dancers alike.

Experience and tradition: A changing same Repetition and difference within a groove-based musical framework are very different from repetition and difference within what Jonathan Kramer would call a “linear temporality.” When one’s listening habitus7 has been shaped by

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experiences with the latter, it may be difficult to understand the former, and vice versa. If one is not moving together with the groove, or taking part in it through perceptual co-production, repetition may soon become repetition without a difference: the same is no longer transparent but rather too pronounced, almost obtrusive, nerve-racking, perhaps similar to what Theodor W. Adorno described as a sort of torture.8 Viewed this way, intracategorical variation is, as an aesthetic phenomenon, as fundamental to repetition as repetition itself. That is, intracategorical variation is the strictly necessary supplement to repetition. If our habitus is inclined toward goal-directed listening, we will search continually for syntactical structures at an overarching level, such as the periodicity introduced by melodic phrases, chord progressions, and the like. This search for overarching form is an obstacle to the perception of the intracategorical variation produced by the inner dynamics of the groove; this inhibits us from “moving together” with the groove. When we are unable to give into the moment, repetition becomes unbearable—it becomes repetition of the same. To experience “joy in repetition,” as Prince once called it,9 one has to be absorbed in the groove; one has to move, or one has to be moved. This crucial condition of being in the groove also reminds us that even though it does not proceed toward a definite goal, it is not standing still; it is, to the last second, in motion. To sum up, what might be heard as repetition and variation itself varies with the listener and the musical context. Moreover, contrary to what has sometimes been claimed, whether there is actually variation in the repeated pattern is not decisive as such. In fact, much repetitive music is built up of units that are almost or exactly like the preceding ones, and whether the groove belongs to the former or the latter of these categories is not what decides whether repetition ends up being torture or pleasure. Even in music where the basic units, if taken out of time and placed on top of one another, are identical—for example, music performed by machines and not human beings—every repetition may be experienced as repetition with a difference, because the time is different.10 In a similar vein, the impossibility to repeat repetitive music also pertains to the act of repeating repetitive music across cultures, and, one might add, across time periods. Even at this larger scale of temporal and cultural difference, repetition is repetition with a difference. Experiencing the grooves of James Brown, for example, is unavoidably a changing same, either because it involves a transposition from the black popular music market to the mainstream pop audience in the cultural context of the 1960s and early 1970s, or because it implies transposing this historical situation to the present time.

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Notes 1 Parts of this chapter rely on work that was first published in Presence and Pleasure: The Funk Grooves of James Brown and Parliament (Danielsen 2006b). 2 See, for example, Keil 1994a; 1994b; 1995; Prögler 1995; Monson 1996; Waadeland 2001; Iyer 2002; Butterfield 2006; Hove, Keller, and Krumhansl 2007. 3 With “basic unit,” I am referring to the one- or two-bar pattern that is repeated throughout a groove (see Danielsen 2006b: 43). 4 For more examples and analyses of this and other structural aspects of rhythm in electronic dance music, see Butler 2006 and Zeiner-Henriksen 2010. 5 For early examples of the extreme microrhythmic manipulation of a groove, see D’Angelo’s album Voodoo from 1999 (for analysis, see Bjerke 2010 and Danielsen 2010); Snoop Dogg’s Rhythm & Gangsta from 2004 (see analysis in Carlsen and Witek 2010 and Brøvig-Hanssen and Danielsen 2016: 101–16); and Brandy’s song “What About Us” on the album Full Moon from 2002 (analysis in Carlsen and Witek 2010). All of these examples represent new rhythmic feels that could not have been achieved by live musicians or any preceding technological tools. 6 The unusual form of this recording is due to the fact that it was originally recorded as the soundtrack to a film. However, the producer did not think it was funky enough and turned it down. In his autobiography, Brown confesses, “I knew that the song wouldn’t make it without the movie, so I came up with the story line that you could see” (Brown with Tucker 1997: 241). The story he refers to is probably the one printed on the cover of the double album The Payback, released in 1974, which anticipates the song by including some of its characteristic verbal expressions. 7 For a discussion of the notion of musical habitus and the dynamic relationship between aesthetics and culture in this regard, see, for example, Danielsen (2006a) and Rimmer (2012). 8 See Adorno with Simpson (1941); Adorno (1973). 9 “Joy in Repetition” is the eighth track on Prince’s album Graffiti Bridge (1990). 10 This is brilliantly demonstrated in the writings of Søren Kierkegaard—see,“Repetition: A Venture in Experimenting Psychology by Constantin Constantius” ([1843] 1983).

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Toward an Alternative History of Repetitive Audio Technologies Christophe Levaux

In the literature dedicated to twentieth-century music, the development of technological repetitive devices such as closed grooves and tape loops is systematically linked to that of electronic music. Numerous works affirmatively state that the reiterative devices fabricated in the experimental music studios of the postwar period (notably by Pierre Schaeffer and his associates) opened the door to experimental and electronic aesthetics. This, together with the scarcity of works dealing with the “prehistory” of such repetitive technologies, has led to the widespread assumption that they were “discovered” or “invented” by the early representatives of electronic music.1 By extension, it is also largely assumed that the experiments carried out in the aforementioned studios significantly contributed to the development of subsequent genres relying heavily on repetition—from Terry Riley and Steve Reich’s minimal music to Afrika Bambaataa’s hip-hop. Looking further into the long history of musical technology, from the Banu Musa automatic flute of the ninth century to the Hammond organ of the 1930s, it appears, however, that similar devices were not only used by the earliest experimenters in musical automation: they also evolved in a variety of contexts far removed from any form of musical institution. Likewise, a closer look at the history of both popular and art music of the twentieth century suggests that the crucial role attributed to the aesthetico-technical experiments carried out in postwar Paris with respect to the development of later trends that have come to be classified as “repetitive” also needs to be nuanced. This chapter has two objectives: first, to shed light on the little-known history of repetitive audio technologies prior to Pierre Schaeffer’s experiments;2 second, to reassess the impact of Schaeffer’s work on the development of various kinds of repetitive music in the latter half of the twentieth century. Finally, I will

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conclude with an epistemological appraisal (inspired by the works of Bruno Latour and the Actor-Network Theory) of the construction of the musicological discourse surrounding these issues.

The (pre)history of repetitive audio technologies The history of repetitive audio technologies is frequently dated—more or less explicitly—to 1948. This was the year that Pierre Schaeffer—broadcaster and founder, a few years earlier, of Paris’s Studio d’Essai, dedicated to radiophonic experimentation—discovered looping through the presence of dust and scratches on a gramophone record. Dust and scratches, he observed, resulted in audio clicks, but they also caused the needle to keep skipping back to a previous position, resulting in the repetition of the same sound—or, to put it differently, the unintentional creation of a locked groove. In the words of Daniel Teruggi: This was one of the first accidents that caught the attention of Pierre Schaeffer at the beginning of 1948 and led him to use this and other techniques to make a new kind of music, which he called “musique concrète. ” (2007: 213)

For Schaeffer, the continuous repetition of a fragment of sound isolated “the ‘in-itselfness’ of audio phenomenon” (Schaeffer [1952] 2012: 21) (i.e., what he regarded as the most essential, the most “concrete” sound). In the early 1950s, following a period of experimentation dedicated to engraving closed grooves on shellac records, Schaeffer set up the first magnetic tape loops. The procedure went as follows: sound was recorded on a section of magnetic tape; this was then cut and spliced end-to-end to create a loop that could be played continuously. For concrete composers, this opened up new organizational possibilities with respect to the gramophone. Looping devices began to be integrated into new machines like the phonogene and the morphophone, enabling Schaeffer and his colleagues to extend their experiments with sound modeling far beyond repetition. Indeed, no sooner did concrete composers feel themselves to have attained the maximal benefits of repetition than they veered sharply away from it. In the meantime, Schaeffer’s studio had become a landmark. One after the other, composers such as Olivier Messiaen, Edgard Varèse and Karlheinz Stockhausen worked there. Other studios and places of experimentation progressively appeared. Stockhausen, who had used the Studio d’Essai’s phonogene to create his pioneering electroacoustic work

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Etüde in 1952, subsequently worked at the studio of the Westdeutscher Rundfunk in Cologne. Luciano Berio and Bruno Maderna were active in the Studio di Fonologia Musicale in Milan. In the United States, Louis and Bebe Barron had already begun experimenting with magnetic tape loops, following the creation of their first Stancil-Hoffman recorder in 1949,3 while Otto Luening and Vladimir Ussachevsky were simultaneously testing similar techniques at the Columbia Tape Music Center. By the 1960s, Schaeffer’s repetitive audio technologies were being used in numerous electronic and experimental studios. Such is the narrative relayed, integrally or in part, by numerous academic works,4 as well as many research articles by composer-musicologists like Marc Battier (2007) or Daniel Teruggi (2007), to name but a couple. Delving a little deeper into the use of repetitive audio technologies, however, it seems that the concomitance between their appearance and the works produced in the experimental music studios of Pierre Schaeffer and his peers needs to be nuanced: not only can repetitive audio technologies be traced back to medieval projects of musical automation, but, during the twentieth century, they were also explored and used in many other places than the postwar experimental music studios. If, in 1948, Schaeffer dreamed of creating “an organ with each key linked to a turntable that would have appropriate discs put on it as required” ([1952] 2012: 7–8), this does not alter the fact that, from the Telharmonium to the Hammond organ, instruments had already been functioning on a similar principle for decades. Nor can it be denied that, while Schaeffer made the most of closed grooves on shellac records, the American inventor Thomas Edison had already considered using the technique in the late 1870s to create a phonograph for teaching the alphabet. If the French broadcaster and his colleagues indeed transferred the technique of looped repetition to magnetic tapes in the early 1950s, looped tapes were already being used in the field of telephony some twenty years earlier. What, then, is the alternative history of repetitive audio technologies?

Mechanical instruments The history of repetitive audio technologies may be traced back at least to the ninth century (i.e., when three scholarly brothers from Baghdad, the Banu Musa brothers, designed an automatic flute player that could reproduce an audio sequence with minimal human intervention). The basis for this machine’s automatism was hydraulic pressure, generated by flowing water in a reservoir.

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The flute’s melody was encoded on rotating cylindrical drums by way of raised pins, which activated levers to open or close the flute’s holes (Koetsier 2001: 590–1). Some eight centuries later, in 1650, Athanasius Kircher’s automatic hydraulic organ, described in his Musurgia Universalis, was based on a very similar principle (346–52). Kircher’s organ was not the first Western European mechanical device to encode melody by way of a rotating pinned cylinder: cylinders of this kind were used to activate church bells by the fourteenth century, and then full carillons two centuries later.5 Around the same time, similar mechanisms started to be used in barrel organs, so that they could be heard above the general noise of streets and fairs. In the eighteenth century, small barrel organs known as serinettes were quite fashionable amongst the French aristocracy as a means of teaching melodies to pet birds—hence the French verb seriner (“to teach something through continuous repetition”), akin to the English expression “to drum something in.” As for the nineteenth century, it saw the advent of organettes and orchestrions. These portable organs, capable of reproducing predetermined musical sequences, were still essentially based on the model provided by the automatic flute player, but the raised pins were now replaced by perforated bands of paper wrapped around the cylinder—in some cases, it was the whole pinned drum that was replaced by a flat perforated rotating disc. By the end of the nineteenth century, player pianos (or pianolas) incorporating perforated cardboard rolls or sheets transcribing compositions by Mahler, Debussy, and Gershwin, amongst many others, marked a definitive step toward modern recording—and, simultaneously, their own demise: the success of Thomas Edison’s phonograph (1877) and Emile Berliner’s gramophone (1887), the latter of which transferred the cylindrical mechanism to zinc discs (Morton 2004: 31–42), put an end to the reign of mechanical music in the early years of the twentieth century. With a view to increasing the length of the reproduced musical sequences, Berliner’s machines favored the helical or spiral engraving of sound on flat discs introduced by the orchestrions several years before. Circular mechanisms died out—the sole vestige of their inherent continuousness being the final grooves of discs, closed on themselves to keep the needle on a circular track and thus prevent it from sliding across the labeled center of the record. A series of inventions nevertheless continued to attest the persistence of repetitive audio technologies—even in the phonographic sector. In 1878, for example, only a few months after having patented his phonograph, Thomas Edison invented a machine for teaching the alphabet, based on a cylindrical

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drum engraved with letters, which “turned on itself ” in the manner of a serinette (Davies 1996: 7). In 1906, in America, the Connolly brothers filed a request for the patent of a phonographic instrument endowed with grooves disposed in parallel loops, which could imitate and even “dilate” the various tones of flutes, clarinets, and the piano. Along similar lines, the inventor Ralph Colling had, ten years earlier, filed a patent application for an instrument based on a looped phonogram which enabled the pitch of the reproduced sound to be varied via the speed at which the disc was rotated, thereby enabling effects of legato and portamento unobtainable on the original instruments (Feaster 2011: 191–6).

Optoelectronic devices Circular repetitive technologies were also present in other technological fields at the beginning of the twentieth century, in particular in optoelectronics. The marked connection between circular technologies and optics at this time had already been curiously prefigured by the experiments of physicist Alfred M. Mayer in 1874 (the results were published in the American Journal of Science). Drawing inspiration from the magic lantern (the ancestor of the cinematographic projector), Mayer managed to produce a looped moving image of a sound wave by engraving the graph of the wave, end-to-end, on an otherwise opaque circular glass disc and use a lantern to project it onto a screen (Mayer 1874: 180–1). Though the purpose of Mayer’s experiment was purely didactic, the totally silent image of a sound wave anticipated the way, several decades later, optical tracks would be used to develop photoelectric instruments in the field of cinema. Like Mayer’s wave, cinematic tracks consisted of visual renditions of sound waves— now encoded on tape, translated into electric signals, and amplified by photoreceptive cells (Levin 2003). Looped (again like Mayer’s wave) these tracks enabled an uninterrupted flow of synthetic sound.6 This technology also served as the basis for the Syntronic Organ of 1935 and the Welte-Lichtton-Orgel of 1936.7 At the time, similar attempts were made in the field of magnetic reproduction; however, these experiments would not come to fruition until the 1960s with the Mellotron that would, in fact, abandon discs for tape (Davies 1996: 6). In the meantime, a slightly different kind of technology was being employed for certain kinds of electronic organs, notably thanks to the experiments carried out by Johannes van der Bijl at the Western Electric Company in New York in the mid-1910s, and by Charles-Emile Hugoniot in France in the early 1920s. These

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experiments combined optical technology with the principle of the phonic wheel. At the time, this consisted of a toothed disc, which, when rotated before a sensor, generated an electric signal and produced a series of notes whose frequency was determined by the number of teeth and the speed at which the disc rotated. This principle had, since the late eighteenth century, been used in sirens8 and electromechanical instruments like the Choralcelo (1903) and the Telharmonium (1905).9 Imported into the optical field, the procedure underwent slight modification: a light ray was projected onto a notched disc and when the disc was set to rotate at a constant speed, the light, passing through the notches at regular intervals, generated a periodic tension which was caught and amplified by a photoelectric cell. This procedure was used to create the Cellulophone in 1927 and the Radio Organ of a Trillion Tones in 1931. Still in the field of photoelectric sound generation, in 1931, the “protoexperimentalist” composer Henry Cowell teamed up with Leon Theremin to device the Rhythmicon (i.e., the ancestor of the rhythm machine, or beatbox). The rhythmic content was generated by rotating discs that interrupted the light beam triggering the photoelectric cells at regular intervals (Holmes 2008: 23). The finished result was an instrument capable of simultaneously producing all sorts of rhythms impossible to execute manually using traditional musical instruments (Glinsky 2000: 135).

Magnetic sounds It was in the field of telephony, in the 1930s, that the first experiments with looped magnetized sound were achieved (Davies 1996: 7). Amongst these early experiments were the prototype voice recorders distributed by the American company Telephone & Telegraph. Based on the continuous circular rotation of magnetic steel wires, these machines, which rapidly fell into oblivion, again had a didactic purpose—namely to teach new employees how to use their voices efficiently through repetition (Morton 2004: 106–7). Steel wire, whose use in recording—through the magnetic variations of an electromagnet—had been discovered and demonstrated by Valdemar Poulsen in 1898, was abandoned in favor of ribbon or tape, which had the advantage of being easier to edit. In 1935, the “Magnetophon” was launched by Fritz Pfleumer in Germany. In the postwar period—following the discovery by the allies of numerous German innovations— this kind of technology was developed and democratized throughout the world (Thiele 1992; Morton 2004: 127).

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German influence was in fact already obvious even before the war. In 1939, following a series of experiments set up between 1935 and 1937, the American Brush Development Company brought out the Soundmirror, a recorder based on a system of looped magnetic steel tape (Morton 2004: 121; Paige 1972: 60). In 1944, the Jefferson-Davis Radio Manufacturing Corporation announced the creation of a recorder based on an eight-minute loop of cellophane ribbon (“Cellophane Records called Revolutionary Development” 1944: 63). In 1954— the year when Pierre Schaeffer transferred the closed groove to magnetic loops— George Eash introduced Fidelipac cartridges to the market. Used to play jingles and advertisements on the radio and inspired by Bernard Cousino’s “Audio Vendor” (1953) and “Mohawk Message Repeater” (“TelePro Cartridge Patent Plea Fails” 1967: 3), as well as cinema and the kind of on-loop films shown in exhibition rooms, Fidelipac-style cartridges would remain in use until the 1990s. The model they provided was notably used by the San Francisco Tape Center when it installed itself in the studios of KPFA radio in 1963 (Callahan 2008: 183). Around the same time, Don Buchla also made use of this kind of cartridge when he created, at the request of the composers of that same Tape Center, his “ten-touch” instrument (one touch for each cartridge), which prefigured portable studios and analogue sequencers (Subotnick 1992). The uses and aims of mechanical, optoelectronic or magnetic devices were not identical. For example, mechanical instruments (whether carillons, barrel organs, or mechanical pianos) were largely aimed at making it possible to reiterate or replay entire pieces. The role of their cylinders or discs was to facilitate the (immediate or later) return to the start of the piece. In contrast, optoelectronic devices did not aim to replay a musical piece, but to generate continuous sounds—through the uninterrupted rotation of the disc—within the organological framework of the first synthesizers. The rotational speed of the cylinders and discs then differed considerably: in the case of mechanical devices, each complete cycle took a few minutes, while optical disks spun tens of times per second. In both cases, repetition was a technical means rather than an (aesthetic) end in itself: if it was heard, this is fortuitous rather than intentional. Magnetic loops, which were more easily manipulated, had a more diverse range of uses but were most often used as part of the first system, enabling pieces (or, in this case, sequences of a few seconds) to be re-played—a process notably exploited with the jingles and advertisements recorded on cartridges. Pierre Schaeffer’s “locked grooves,” for their part, had another purpose, that of the ad nauseam repetition of sound sequences (only at first identifiable as such) to

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create concrete music. It is this manifest and audible repetition of sound segments that was to encounter unprecedented success in the history of postwar music, beginning with the works of minimalist composers such as Terry Riley (Music for the Gift, 1963) and Steve Reich (It’s Gonna Rain, 1965). These different forms, uses and aims, however, did not prevent these technologies from using one long-standing piece of equipment: the circular devices on which the sound was “engraved,” and upon which it can be repeated at will. The goal of this first part was to observe this in detail. In light of the previous lines, it does seem necessary to temper the idea that repetitive audio technologies were “invented” or “discovered” in the electronic music studios of the postwar period. In doing so, I have no intention of denying the aesthetic originality of Pierre Schaeffer and his peers; I only want to stress that these technologies date from far earlier, and evolved in many other places besides these institutional studios. The history of loops touches upon a whole panoply of objects, from mediaeval “automates” to the first synthesizers, from fire-engine sirens to sound film. It came into play in fairs, bell towers, bedrooms and on radio waves, as well as in experimental studios. In brief, a whole other history of repetitive audio technologies exists.

Another history of the Schaefferian legacy The innovative, even pioneering character so often attributed to Pierre Schaeffer’s experiments has inevitably affected the way the history of (repetitive) audio technology has come to be told. In some respects, it has also contributed to shape the standard view of the history of music in the second half of the twentieth century. Numerous texts present the technologies elaborated in Schaeffer’s studio as the basis for the subsequent development of a whole range of repetitive genres in the fields of popular and art music. Pierre Schaeffer, inventor of the closed groove, father of the magnetic tape loop, emerges in these texts as the figure who opened the door to the electronic minimal music produced by Terry Riley and Steve Reich in the early 1960s, and in anticipating sampling, he even paved the way for late-twentieth-century electronic dance music and hip-hop. In 2016, this vision of things was propounded by both popular magazines like Fact (where Jonathan Patrick described Pierre Schaeffer as “the Godfather of Sampling”) and more specialist works such as Jens Gerrit Papenburg and Holger Schulze’s Research Companion to Sound as Popular Culture (which states that

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“the experimental instruments of Pierre Schaeffer found their way into the everyday culture or popular music via sampling and hip-hop”—361). The idea is also to be found in earlier reference works—for example, Peter Shapiro’s Modulations, which informs us that the innovative technologies developed by Pierre Schaeffer and his GRM (Groupe de Recherches Musicales) associates were subsequently integrated into the everyday practice of almost all musicians, across all musical genres (2000: 23), while Christoph Cox and Daniel Warner argue, in Audio Culture, that “Schaeffer’s first concrete composition, Railroad Study, anticipated hip-hop and electronic dance music” (2004: 329). Still, what this literature presents as straight facts requires a little nuancing.

Minimal music The idea that the repetitive character of minimal music resulted from the transposition of certain compositional processes from (tape-)recorded music to instrumental music has been around for some time. It goes back at least as far as Steve Reich’s Writings about Music, in which the composer explains that his initial interest in “constant repetition partially grew out of working with tape loops since 1963” (1974: 50), and that repetitive instrumental works like Melodica (1966) constituted “a transition from tape music to instrumental music” (51). The fact that Terry Riley’s famous In C—which Reich claimed as another source of inspiration (50)—was composed in the wake of several works using magnetic tape loops, such as Mescalin Mix (1961) and Music for the Gift (1963), partially realized in the ORTF studios in Paris (i.e., the French national broadcasting studios) also nourished this idea of transfer as well as that of the pre-eminence of technology in the aesthetic development of minimal music. In 2009, Robert Carl asserted that Riley set out to “transfer this [looping] procedure from the electronic domain to that of real-time performance” (2009: 41); the following year, Johan Girard made this idea of a transfer from tape-recording procedures to instrumental composition the central theme of his book, Répétitions: l’esthétique musicale de Terry Riley, Steve Reich and Philip Glass (2010). While the idea of a technological-instrumental transfer explains an important aspect of minimal music and its development in the early 1960s, it should not be lost from view that obsessional repetition drew on a wide and diverse range of spheres. This was, in fact, indicated by Steve Reich himself when he wrote, in 1974: “in retrospect, I understand the process of gradually shifting phase relations between two or more identical repeating musical patterns as an extension of the

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idea of infinite canon or round” (1974: 50). Many other examples similarly back up the fact that Riley and Reich’s interest in repetition in the early 1960s was inspired by a wide range of musical influences. The most frequently evoked examples in minimal music studies are Satie’s Vexations (1893), rediscovered by John Cage in 1949, and La Monte Young’s X for Henry Flynt (1962), which consisted in repeating at regular intervals, and at high volume, a cluster of notes produced on a piano using forearms rather than fingers. As Steve Reich stated in the 1980s, jazz and rock also furnished notable sources of inspiration (Bergman and Horn 1985: xii) to say nothing of the pictorial branch of minimalism that developed in the late 1950s (Strickland 1993) nor of the generalized postwar interest in repetition—manifested by a host of different media and the subject of Robert Fink’s Repeating Ourselves (2005).

Hip-hop Hip-hop’s alleged indebtedness to Pierre Schaeffer is a lot more controversial than that of minimal music. Though Pierre Schaeffer and his colleague Pierre Henry were amongst the first to splice and loop recorded sound to create musical pieces, though they were certainly “pioneers in sampling” (to quote John Diliberto’s 1986 article in Electronic Musician), and though, of course, hip-hop would exploit sampling, the technological roots of this new genre were far less imbedded in the splicing and looping of audio fragments carried out in postwar experimental studios than in other practices, developed in a very different context. This was 1950s Jamaica, and the practice was “toasting” (i.e., speaking or chanting over a sustained rhythm or beat). Drawing on numerous African traditions, toasting was notably promulgated in the ghettos of Kingston by a musician known as Count Machuki, an active promoter of the burgeoning sound-system business. Lorries loaded with generators, record players and loudspeakers provided the backbone for street parties organized for the poor, black population, unable to gain access to clubs and theaters. On these improvised platforms, Count Machuki emulated the jive talk of American radio DJs over the opening bars of records, toasting, and sometimes beatboxing—vocally emulating, and thereby reinforcing—instrumental rhythms he found a little weak.10 A few years later, one of the Kingston party-goers, DJ Kool Herc, emigrated to the Bronx, New York. There he set up his own sound systems, notably incorporating dual mixing decks connected to dual amplifiers. This enabled him to single out and highlight short percussive parts of given tracks—parts

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specifically chosen to get people up and dancing. Switching between the two turntables enabled him to prolong the experience of these isolated passages by continually cueing in the beginning of the other as each came to an end. Forming the basis of his sets in the early 1970s (Hermes 2006), the technique progressively emerged as the blueprint for hip-hop music, notably coinciding with the emergence of sampling and reasonably priced drum machines.

Dealing with antagonistic discourses Neither the history of repetitive audio technologies, nor the legacy of the experiments carried out in the celebrated postwar music studios, are straightforward affairs: in both cases, a standard picture and an alternative view exist. Rather than simply substituting one for the other, the aim here is to raise the following question: since alternative ways of relating these histories exist, how did they come to be overshadowed by the standard one? In the case of repetitive audio technologies, Douglas Kahn provides a partial answer. According to him, it was essentially the postwar development of institutionalism—accompanied by a certain form of historical amnesia—that led to episodic explorations of the status of continuous practice, and thereby legitimated concrete music as a phenomenon and genre (1999: 123–39). The idea of “historical amnesia” merits some attention, notably in the light of the Actor-Network Theory, of which Bruno Latour’s Science in Action (1987) is one of the pioneering works. What is it that this theory highlights? Principally, the idea that scientific (or, in this case, historical) facts become established through a process of collective interests. In other words, certain views of history become established not because they are intrinsically truer or more rational than others, but because they manage to attract and bring together so many allies that they impose themselves to the detriment of others. The idea that repetitive audio technologies were born in experimental studios in the postwar period perfectly illustrates this process. This idea met with the interests of a large number of actors who took it up and then transmitted it. Amongst those actors were—and are—defenders of the kind of electronic music produced in studios attached to radio stations, universities, and other institutions. The modernist vision of the invention or discovery of repetitive technology helped legitimize the originality of their own activity. Furthermore, the creation of an autonomous “electronic” category (notably through the efforts of personalities like Hugh Davies), at least with respect to the other technological

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forms and musical genres that emerged in the 1950s and 1960s, contributed to free repetitive technologies from their “organological” roots and thus avoid potential criticism regarding the idea of an “invention,” or “discovery.” The idea that repetitive audio technologies first appeared in the postwar experimental music studios also met with the interests of a series of theorists aiming, on their side, to establish the even more controversial idea that the (re) discovery and success of repetitive or minimal music in the last third of the twentieth century was firmly attached to the Western art music tradition. The idea that repetitive technology was discovered or invented in the postwar period added weight and legitimacy to this other “discovery,” (i.e., musical repetition as an aesthetic per se, notably promoted by the looped magnetic tapes of Terry Riley and Steve Reich).11 How, then, should we deal with these two antagonistic discourses—one celebrating the invention of repetitive technologies in the experimental music studios of the postwar period, the other emphasizing the recurrence of such technologies throughout the history of sound manipulation? As I have argued above, the Actor-Network Theory helps answer this question by encouraging us to “provide an empirically justified description of historical events, one that highlights the controversies, trials, and contingencies of the truth, instead of reporting it as coherent, self-evident, and available for discovery” (Piekut 2014: 193). The history of music is diverse and multiple. Presumably, the most suitable approach is not to try to reduce it to a series of unidirectional schemes, but rather to aim at revealing its complexity and diversity.

Notes 1 Amongst the works that inquire into the origins of recorded and/or electronic sound, Hugh Davies’s merits particular mention: his “History of Recorded Sound” (1979) goes back as far as the twelfth century BC, notably describing a Chinese prince who spoke messages into a special box, which was then delivered to another prince; equally noteworthy is his International Electronic Music Catalog (1968) whose “Precursors” appendix lists both mechanical and “drawn sound” devices amongst the predecessors of tape-based electronic music. 2 See Levaux (2017) for an illustrated study of this history. 3 It was in collaboration with Louis and Bebe Barron that John Cage organized the “Music for Magnetic Tape” project in 1951 and composed his Imaginary Landscape No 5 the following year (Holmes 2008: 82).

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4 For example, Tom Holmes’s Electronic and Experimental Music (2008: 50, 131, 197), Simon Emmerson’s Living Electronic Music (2007: 67), Richard Osborne’s Vinyl: A History of the Analogue Record (2012: 20) or Brian Kane’s Sound Unseen: Acousmatic Sound in Theory and Practice (2014: 16–17). 5 On mechanical instruments see, in particular, Ord-Hume (1973, 1978, and 1982). 6 Looping was not an unknown procedure in the pre-cinematic world: the phenakistiscope (1832), the zoetrope (1833), the praxinoscope (1877), as well as Thomas Edison’s 1888 kinetoscope—one of the first cinematographic viewers—were all based on the loop principle (Dulac and Gaudreault 2006). On a different register, in the early 1930s, the term “looping” (or “dubbing”) began to be used to designate essentially the trial-and-error process used for synchronizing sound and image: a sequence of film was played on loop until the actor managed to synchronize his lines with his own moving image (Bordwell and Thompson 1995: 124). Yet another facet of repetitive technology in sound film during the 1930s was the use of “click loops” (or “click tracks”), again used to synchronize sound and image recordings—sound editors of the time used a whole range of click loops of differing tempos to create tempo maps for the film’s musical director (Lustig 1980). 7 Vladimir Baranov-Rossine’s optophonic piano, developed in the late 1910s in Russia, was based on the same principle (i.e., the generation of sound by means of a rotating disc). 8 At the time, the wailing sound of sirens was produced by acoustic pressure, created by the movement of pierced discs. 9 The Hammond organ used the same principle in 1935. Similarly, Luigi Russolo’s Intonarumori, conceived in the 1910s, produced sound through the rotation and vibration of a cord attached to a disc. Both were part of a long tradition of wheelbased hurdy-gurdies stretching from the Middle Ages to the early twentieth century (Baines, Bowles, and Green (2017)). 10 On Jamaican music, sound systems and the origins of hip-hop culture, see in particular Chang (2005) and Shapiro (2005). 11 See Strickland (1993: 146–7) and Potter (2000: 105–7).

Part Two

Issues of Perception

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Loops, Memories, and Meanings Chris Cutler

I am not looking for balance in this chapter: I am making a negative case. I know the issues are complex but I want to draw attention to implications that are usually ignored or glossed over. I think the short loop—the obvious loop—is the key to the knottier question of the loop in general; this, in turn, speaks to the wider social phenomenon of an accelerating loss of presence. First I should clarify what I mean by a loop. To be consciously performed—or recognized—repetition requires recall because, for human beings, repetition is a function of memory. It is an inescapable fact that human memory is, by its nature, profoundly unreliable so, whatever our intentions, acts of repetition are inevitably realized as a chain of uncontrollable mutations. In other words, since all human action is locked into a present that is always immediately lost— and can never be recovered—repetition is inevitably a process of creative reconstruction, because, although we may try to repeat something, there is no way to know whether we are failing or succeeding, since there is never anything left of the original to which our new rendition can be compared. At least not until sound recording delivered us the loop—not a re-performance but a mindless, mechanical re-iteration: an artifact, rather than an action. From that moment forward, loops quietly colonized the aural arts, releasing in the process a powerful corrosive that has progressively unsettled all of our inherited experiential, existential, and theoretical musical routines. I want to argue that loops change us. Even though they may sound like the riffs and repetitions of traditional music, they are not. They are the walking dead—and it is this side of their personality on which I will concentrate. OK. So it is 1875. What do we think we know about the ontology of sound? We know it has no substance. We know it has no permanence. We know it has duration and quality and that we encounter it as an event or a process but never as a thing. Given that we know that sound-as-a-process exists only in the immediate

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present, we also know that any sense we might have of its articulation or continuity must in fact be an artifact of recall. I want to say that music, narrative, and structure are perceived and created only through the action of memory. When the form of that memory is biological, then any repetition is necessarily an act of re-creation since, if I remember a tune and sing it again, I am bound by nature to be engaged in a process that is reconstructive—because that is how human memory works. It is, at least in part, through this faulty mechanism that most music—in the absence of writing—has lived and evolved: because the immediate context of our recollection leads us instinctively to bias our reconstruction to the aesthetic benefit of the situation in which we are remembering. That is why, in every form of music mediated by biological memory, forgetting is such a vital engine of change. There may be endless repetitions in aural cultures, but there can never be loops because, as long as human agency is involved, the same thing is always going to be different: no man, as Heraclitus said, can step twice into the same river (Plato [360 BC] 2009: 98). A loop is an expression of an altogether different form of memory: an inhuman form. Where biological systems are creative and unreliable—qualities which I believe are profoundly linked—mechanical or electronic systems are unerringly accurate, but mindless. It is a quality that makes them spookily fascinating. It was, after all, a stuck record that reportedly led Pierre Schaeffer to the meditations and experiments that ended in the invention of musique concrète—a discipline in which loops went on to play a prominent and important part.1 Cylinders also loop, so we can assume that loops must have occurred accidentally from the earliest days of recording history, but were regarded as unwanted malfunctions and ignored. Although many experiments using gramophone records as productive means were documented from the first decade of the last century onward, no mention is made of looping before Schaeffer in the late 1940s, and then only as an underlying technique. Intentional—and aestheticized—loops only appeared in the sonic arts in the early 1960s, at around the same time as multiples appeared in the visual arts. Certainly there were superficial resemblances between the two, since both relied on accumulated iterations of the same event or object. Multiples, however, have their roots in simultaneous presentation—while loops work through a disruptive sequentiality. Space is the medium of the multiple and time the medium of the loop. While multiples open our sense of space, loops close our sense of time. It is this closing that sets my alarm bells ringing.

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It is hard not to notice that the iconography of the loop, at least in its short form, is infused with a sense of madness, futility, and death. A camera pans slowly from a stuck record down to a corpse cooling on the mat; a beat-up truck with its steering-wheel locked trundles mindlessly in a circle at the end of Werner Herzog’s Strozzek (1977); a hopeless ring of prisoners forms a closed loop in van Gogh’s 1890 Exercise Yard. As the Chorus in T.S. Eliot’s The Family Reunion puts it: “We do not like to walk out of a door and find ourselves back in the same room” (1939: 127). What that stuck record seems to express instinctively is the fact that while time rolls forward for the living, the dead are frozen in the past. Unable to advance, they become powerless to act and henceforth can only be acted upon. One could say that a loop marks the point at which an infinity of possibilities collapses into a single, mindless, inevitability. While the real world goes on about its business, whatever is trapped in a loop goes nowhere. To quote Ludwig Wittgenstein: “a wheel that can be turned though nothing else turns with it, is not part of the mechanism” ([1953] 2009: 101). We have all observed that if we repeat anything long enough it disintegrates into meaningless noise. Since our brains are programmed to blank out information that does not change (pain partially excepted), repeated information slowly ceases to carry significance. At first, a loop may be an irritant, then a kind of disorientating drone until, eventually, it becomes a species of semiotic silence. Such is the ontology of the death loop. The picture becomes more complex and more instructive when we think of recordings per se. After all, when we listen to any recording we are listening to a loop because recordings are, by definition, never more than sonic revenants brought back by way of technology into a simulacrum of life. Yet we feel very positive about recordings; we believe that by affording us instant access to any sounds we want, whenever, wherever, and as many times as we want, they have changed our lives for the better. What is more, recording has given sound a history—a dimension it never had before—and has made that history—potentially—universally accessible. A sound is an event. That means it unfolds in time. A picture or a carving is an object. That means it exists in space. The visual arts, therefore, concentrate on the construction of things—fixed objects, built to last. Writers and painters construct rafts that ferry their creations across time; they take as read the fact that their works will continue to exist—to be studied, copied, and consulted—long after they themselves are dead. Musicians and composers, however, have for most of human history been oriented toward the production of events—aestheticizing

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finite but precious durations of shared time—of which nothing survives other than, at best, some impressionistic echoes in the memories of witnesses physically present. By conferring on sound the quality of objecthood, sound recording, against all understanding, brought the sonic arts into a kind of parity with the visual arts. A recording is an object: it will survive. Importantly, it is a temporal rather than a spatial object—so I am going to call it an event-object.2 In the eventobject, sound could, for the first time in human history, be treated as a material—a thing—capable of being fashioned, adjusted and finally frozen into permanent works that might be copied, consulted, or stored. Understandably, it was consciousness of these immense benefits that informed the general understanding of what recording meant, rather than the somewhat academic and theoretical recognition of its deadness and existential absence. Of course, there were Cassandras who, like Plato in the face of writing, warned of its destructive influence, but in general it was hard to see past the obvious advantages that recordings brought in their wake. It is only now, as they accumulate beyond enumeration, that some of the more dubious and antisocial effects of the new technology are beginning to be more widely felt. Should we worry? Are not novels just as dead as recordings? Has not reading been a solitary activity for a thousand years and more? Is there anyone who misses epic storytelling today? Of course not. That world is lost—at least to us. However, the social reality of what Christopher Small calls musicking3 is still very much with us; we are still able to see, as Plato saw in the early years of writing, exactly what it is that is being lost, as well as what is gained as we adapt to the demands of the new technology. The old paradigm is still deeply ingrained, since musicking as an active—and profoundly social—practice has, for millennia, shaped our understanding of what music is. The sine qua non of that paradigm— and of music as we have inherited it—is entrainment: a biological endowment we share with vanishingly few other animals.4 Entrainment is what enables us, when we hear or see a regular pulse, to synchronize with it, move in step, anticipate or adjust to a rhythm. It is the mechanism that allows us collectively to create consensual tempos and individually align ourselves with things that are not ourselves. Through a principle of what I do I am, entrainment has been the engine of an embodied empathy whose effect and affect has been to unite and bind. It is one of the attractors that induce and empower collective identity, of which music and dance are only our most harmonious and aestheticized expressions (hence, of course, their universal centrality in ritual, religion, and collective celebration).5

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It is the incremental attenuation of such socially mediated entrainments— mirroring the advancing solipsisms of the iPhone, iPad, iPod, computer, and myriad selfish pleasures that today’s flesh is heir to—that our collective intelligence is beginning now to register. We see that recordings have not only played a significant role in the preservation and dissemination of sounds, but also in the fragmentation endemic in contemporary life—it is in the nature of recordings, after all, that there is nobody there. In addition to which, the instant availability of recordings on demand, and in private rather than shared time, leaves little sense of occasion attached to the musical experience, while the perfectibility of recordings has led to invidious comparisons with live performance. Since we can turn recordings on and off at will, and pick and choose freely between them, there is increasingly less call on listeners to exercise an already too rare generosity of aesthetic hospitality. Over the last half-century, I have watched as the Western world moved steadily away from what was still, in the late 1960s, a fairly integrated musical culture, the broad contours of which would have been familiar to any generally interested citizen. Now we face an impenetrable thicket of specialized subcultures, most of which we know nothing about. So, yes: there is much more information and much, much more music out there. But it is already so much that no-one can keep up with even a fraction of it. In the face of such excess, our focus tends to narrow. Where the same is easy to access, and endlessly duplicated, the different becomes increasingly elusive and occulted behind a fog of noise. That is no reason to come over all Luddite, but neither is it something we can safely ignore. If we are going to jump into the volcano, let us do it, like Empedocles, knowing why, rather than just because we are not looking where we are going. Do not get me wrong: I love recordings, and the world is a better place because of them. But there is no dodging the fact that they represent an army of the dead. At present it is an army we think we control, an army of zombies—of dead things that do our bidding—and, certainly, for composers, performers and listeners, recording still appears as an unprecedented boon. It is possible with this technology to craft sounding objects without the now-or-never breath of time setting fire to our shirts and to compose with our own performances—in fact with anybody’s performances; or the wind and the rain and the sound of traffic. Moreover, in the span of a few decades, recording technologies have created entirely new aesthetic fields—such as sound art, soundscape, electronic and concrete music, sound design, and plunderphonics—immeasurably expanding our aesthetic horizons. Music, once the only sonic art on offer, is now just

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one of myriad possibilities—all of which flow from the ability to capture and petrify sound.6 So the things that are great about recordings—that they are unable to forget and cannot adapt—are also the things that are dangerous about them. I hit my instrument one way in the cathedral and another way in the living room, but the recorded me just bashes on regardless of where it is, taking no account of surroundings, context or listeners. All recordings are such one-way streets: we listen to them and they remain indifferent to us. Recordings, in other words, oblige us to be satisfied with the exercise of choice rather than influence. About this, I want to say no more here than that I think we should be cognizant of these untrivial and hidden costs, and approach recordings through an awareness of their dangers, as well as of their opportunities. Of course, recordings per se, while they come with caveats, are not the death loops of popular iconography. Neither is simple repetition, which after all forms the basis of most jazz, rock, and popular music. So what is it about these short, regular, unmodified, mechanical reiterations that I find not only intellectually but viscerally bothersome? I think it is the fact that they throw their deadness in my face. Riffs and beats are human and speak to the present—loops are not and do not. In fact, they willfully ignore the present, and everyone in it. Perhaps that is why so many early loop explorers, while still investigating the unique possibilities of the new phenomenon, worked so hard to undermine their essential loopness. I think of Steve Reich’s tape phasing pieces, in which two identical loops—either of which would quickly become intensely boring if heard alone—are marginally offset to produce a constantly modulating and engaging river of sound. I also think of Alvin Lucier’s I Am Sitting in a Room (1969), which uses room acoustics and tape degradation to similar effect; or the work of Pierre Shaeffer and Harry Chamberlin, who looped single sounds not so much to repeat as to extend them, turning short percussive sounds into longer, unfamiliar, pitches; or Terry Riley, who piled loops on top of one another to create constantly modulating textures. The naked, brutal, looping that concerns me here only came later, when the deadness of loops had ceased to be a quality to be undermined and had become— like deafening volume or quantized rhythms—a thing to be accepted and embraced for itself. Strangest of all was the way that, from the late 1970s onward, loops came to dominate dance music. Late disco, techno, house, rave, hip-hop, and their endless variations and tributaries have all been built on the back of loops. As a spur to dancing it seemed that the young and the would-be young

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preferred their music to be mechanical, inhuman, and unforgiving. Certainly, that is what brought them back en masse to the dance-floor—not rock, not salsa, not African pop, not bands of any sort, nor any music performed by human beings, but automated, programmed beats—with or without a human topping. There seems to have been a clear shift away from the old socialized desire to be part of a mutual enrichment of time—which is what happens when dance bands play for dancers—to the desire to be held in a spinning cage somewhere outside the rush of time, from which, as individuals, we are unable, temporarily, to shake free (indeed, the more we shake the more embedded we become). The attraction seems no longer to be to experience human-to-human entrainment, but humanto-machine entrainment—that is to say, not to adjust, locally, one to another in unique configurations, but rather to be entrained at a distance to universal templates. In this, the brutalism of loops seems not to be incidental, but instrumental, since the goal from the human side is not socialization or musical appreciation, but a species of ritualized obliteration.7 Perhaps priming the psychic immune system to survive in a world made by zombies and computers requires such a lethal cocktail of jackhammer precision and relentless repetition, but, at this level of action, it is hard to distinguish the malady from the cure.

Notes 1 “I arrived at an itinerary leading to sound . . . through experiencing a skipping needle (without that skipping needle, my method would doubtless never have seen the light of day)” (Pierre Schaeffer, quoted in Nattiez 1990: 94). 2 The term event object describes the recording itself and is not to be confused with the carrier, which is a physical object—cylinder, disc, tape, cassette, hard disk, and so on. 3 “To music is to take part, in any capacity, in a musical performance, whether by performing, by listening, by rehearsing or practicing, by providing material for performance (what is called composing), or by dancing. We might at times even extend its meaning to what the person is doing who takes the tickets at the door or the hefty men who shift the piano and the drums or the roadies who set up the instruments and carry out the sound checks or the cleaners who clean up after everyone else has gone. They, too, are all contributing to the nature of the event that is a musical performance” (Small 1998: 9). 4 Until very recently believed to be uniquely human, it has now been identified in some bird species, all—possibly significantly—noted for their skill in vocal mimicry.

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5 The profoundly humanizing and socializing effects of entrainment in human history have been argued by William H McNeill in Keeping Together in Time: Dance and Drill in Human History (1995). He overstates and over-speculates, but the heart of his argument is, I think, persuasive. 6 Brian Eno said that he recorded a walk in the park, which he listened to over and over again for weeks. For him it became a composition, in the sense that he knew what was coming next: he could sing along (Toop 1995: 129). In other words, recordings provide the means by which a listener alone can turn the most unintentional and random of sounds into a composition just by listening repeatedly—until the sound carves itself into memory. No intentional or communicative input is required. I still hear musicologists authoritatively asserting that musical effects work through the operation of subverting expectation: we are led to anticipate X and we hear Y. But in the age of loops, this is manifest nonsense: their musical affect works precisely because we do know exactly what is coming next. 7 Observed, with a different emphasis, by Charlie Chaplin in his 1936 film Modern Times.

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Machine Possession Dancing to Repetitive Beats Hillegonda C. Rietveld

Enter Through a focus on the electronic machine aesthetic in genre variants of techno music, this chapter addresses affective relationships between repetitive beats associated with electronic dance music culture, and a technoculture that is centered on the accelerated data flows of electronic information and communication technologies.1 The argument here is partially underpinned by a consideration of contemporary media forms as “structures of feeling,” which are symptomatic, in that they provide indices of complex social processes . . . they are also productive, in the sense that do not represent social processes, so much as they participate actively in these processes and help to constitute them. (Shaviro 2010: 2)

In this context, media works “are machines for generating affect . . . They generate subjectivity” (ibid.: 3). An additional cue is taken from the suggestion by Jacques Attali that music is prophetic, articulating social structures as they emerge. Representation against fear, repetition against harmony, composition against normality. It is in this interplay of concepts that music invites us to enter, in its capacity as the herald of organizations and their overall political strategies— noise that destroys orders to structure a new order. ([1977] 1985: 20)

Developed in parallel with conceptual thinking about the technoculture, techno music is of particular relevance here. Its musical aesthetic is characterized by the textures of its instrumental electronic sounds (without the emulation of acoustic instruments),2 which may, as I argued previously (Rietveld 2004),

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be regarded as a type of interface between the human subject and the machine. Combined with repetitive beats of 130 bpm and faster, played for several hours, those sounds enable the dancer to enter into a type of machine-­driven trance, whereby one’s self-­conscious subjectivity is (temporarily) sacrificed to become cyborg. Here I wish to further this point, arguing not only that participation in electronic dance music events occurs in a world dominated by robotics and electronic communication devices—a characteristic of the technoculture—but also that such participation occurs within the context of a political-­economic system based on acceleration, about which Benjamin Noys posits that human beings have their “own machinic nature that coincides with the repetitions of labor and production” (2014: 41). Elsewhere, Noys illustrates this with reference to 1980s and 1990s techno music from Detroit and its relationship to the car industry that has long dominated the city. The music is the driving sound of the future, but also a sometimes-­stuttering swirl, a movement forwards and backwards, a repetition that alters. Something new takes place. Something old takes place as well. Older dreams from the Fordist space race, as well as the new dreams inspired by robot production lines at Ford. (Noys 2017)

To enter into this discussion, the machine aesthetic of electronic dance music—and specifically the electronic sound of techno—is addressed in relation to the use of what in popular parlance are called “repetitive beats,” suggesting an emphasis on the metronomic pulse of a 4⁄4 beat. Most techno dance music is characterized by a post-­disco, house-music-­inflected, rhythm that is known as “four-­on-­the-­floor,” in reference to the pulse that is explicitly emphasized by a kick drum on each beat (regular like the piston of a mechanical machine), while the snare is heard on the second and fourth beats, and an open hi-­hat sound provides a sense of pull and push in between the beats. Music styles that fall within the rhythmic realm of the disco-­continuum include not only Chicago house music and Detroit techno, but also hi-NRG and trance. However, this pulse is not always emphasized; as Simon Reynolds (2013) puts it, “the UK came up with its own unique mutant versions of House and Techno . . . adding elements from dub reggae, dancehall,” as well as electro, resulting in UK breakbeat music that he calls the “hardcore continuum.”3 This is not to be confused with hardcore techno, though, a fast-­moving nihilist four-­on-the-­floor style of techno that emerged from, for example, Rotterdam in the Netherlands. By contrast, within the UK hardcore continuum, the pulse is present yet ruptured by a polyrhythmic

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combination of digitally processed repetitive breakbeats that offer both speed in the rhythm elements and, simultaneously, slowness in the basslines. In electronic dance music, then, two versions of repetitive beats can be identified: on the one hand, the kick drum beats of the four-­on-the-­floor of the disco impulse; on the other hand, the syncopated breakbeats of the hardcore continuum that “de-­emphasize strong beats” (Butler 2006: 78). Both provide a seemingly infinite machine-­generated pulse to a dance DJ-set within which sounds and textures of synthesizers, rhythm machine as well as various musical elements, are brought together within a danceable journey for its “musicking” participants (Small 1998). This is even truer in the case of breakbeat music, where sampler effects (such as stuttering, truncating, time stretching) are given prominence.4 Such an assemblage has led Drew Hemment, in relation to the work of Gilles Deleuze, to conceptualize popular electronic music as “the sonic machinic . . . a dispersed terrain that includes multiple, mobile nodes” (2004: 78). In this way, music is “an expanded field.” As I have shown elsewhere, the nomadic DJ-mix creates a fluid referential framework that shifts according to its context (Rietveld 2011). In a similar vein, giving recognition to the complexities of the (possibly prophetic) assemblage of techno, its rhizomic dis/connections of musical styles, multiple rhythms, cultural settings, and technological shifts, Kowdo Eshun wrote, in the late 1990s, that techno exists within “the matrices of the Futurhytmicmachinic Discontinuum” (1998: –001). My argument is that within a cyclone of repetitive beats within a DJ-led ritual of sustained dancing over several hours, a breakdown of subjectivity can occur during a peak dance experience. In an important study of music and possession trance, Gilbert Rouget ([1980] 1985) shows that an effective way to induce trance is through dance as an embodied engagement with pulsing music that eventually intensifies to a climatic peak. Such possession trance can be found in West African religious music practices, which were arguably transposed and morphed as a result of the experience of the Atlantic crossing of West-African people who were forced into slave labor, finding their way in secularized form into African-American and Afro-Caribbean dance music genres (Sylvan 2002). Paul Gilroy usefully theorizes the resulting diverse cultural outcomes of this diasporic experience as “the Black Atlantic” (1993). Within its original West African religious contexts, melody or words provide a figurative component to the abstractions of the rhythm, which is then acted out as a god or sacred animal by the possessed dancer with the effect of a cathartic “release” (Rouget [1980] 1985: 118).

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In the case of techno and its variants, it is tempting to think that the instrumental abstraction does not lend itself to a figure. Yet, although the possession figure is not an animal spirit or deity, the machine aesthetic of electronic music can provide a contemporary “figure.” Roughly speaking, the abstractions of the rhythm are danced by the legs and torso, and the “machinic figure” is given shape by the movement of the arms and hands. Importantly, Rouget shows that music can act as “a real architecture of time,” in which melodic or rhythmic statements are sequenced in such a way as to transform “our awareness of time and space,” bringing “about a transformation in the structure of consciousness” (ibid.: 122–3). Although Theodor W. Adorno stated back in 1951 that the machinery of post-­war culture produces “(a) dissolution of the subject, without a new one appearing in its stead” ([1951] 2011: 8), I suggest that new subjectivities are produced within the media-­saturated flows of affect that are processed and given shape by physically engaging with repetitive electronic dance music. As Robert Fink (2005) observes, various subject positions are nevertheless possible during a dance event, including the bystander and the DJ—the latter is both part of the event and an accommodating, mediating, spectator. The electronic dance music DJ in particular, according to Fink, is able to produce a musical journey that generates a double experience of jouissance: first by producing a sense of a forever present, through the sheer length of a dance session based on strongly emphasized repetition; second, by “peaking” the dancefloor, an intense moment of energy release within both the dancers and the music. The peak can be a specific point in—or a series of points throughout— the sequence of the DJ’s music programming. Peak experiences can also be embedded in the microstructures of music productions. Through the combination of the regular repetitive pulse with the electronic machine textures of the music, a trance experience is made possible that may either generate a type of machine possession or a form of machine exorcism, depending on the symbolic, structural, and subcultural context. In this contemporary dance ritual, the dancer is figuratively inoculated, within the relative safety of a musically controlled procedure, against the bewildering machine-­driven pulses of the technoculture.

Repetitive beats Rave culture spread across Europe during the early 1990s and elsewhere, particularly to Australia, Canada, Japan, and the US, as well as to backpacker

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destinations, such as Thai island Ko Pha Ngan. Long-­term nomadic visitors to the Indian coastal province of Goa and the Spanish Balearic island Ibiza produced their own blueprints that partly inspired, and partly intermingled with, the rave concept. In the UK, the British Criminal Justice and Public Order Act (CJA), 1994, s  63(1)(b) partially defined raves by “sounds wholly or predominantly characterized by the emission of a succession of repetitive beats” (“Powers in Relation to Rave” 1994).5 Raves are dance parties that, for a range of logistical and legal reasons, are held outside the legislated nightclub and music venue environment (Collin 1997; Garratt 1998; Reynolds 1998), effectively functioning as “temporary autonomous zones,” or TAZ—a term adapted from Hakim Bey (1991). Around 1990, such events could attract hundreds of participants as a result of a British media-­generated moral panic (Thornton 1995; Melechi 1993; Redhead 1993; Rietveld 1993). The above legal definition of raves can appear to be vague, if only because most forms of contemporary popular music—including jazz, rock, and funk—are characterized by a repetitive beat. Still, the CJA, 1994, does indicate the foregrounding of an explicitly driving repetitive pulse that characterized the soundtrack of such marathon dance events. These were dominated by the emerging hardcore rave music, imported house music from Chicago, techno from Detroit, Italian house, as well as the more industrial inflected electronic beats from Belgium, the Netherlands, and Germany. Although these styles all have their own complex genealogy, they are related by a shared dance club history that connects in rhizomic ways to the 1970s New York City disco scene (Lawrence 2003; Fikentscher 2000; Shapiro 2005); the disco-­impulse, with its rhythmic structure of four-­on-the-­floor, is audible in their own musical structure. In disco and subsequent dance music styles, a regular repeating pulse has a double function. Firstly, it enables the DJ to segue and blend recordings in a continuous beat-­based mix, which slowly opened the door for machine-­generated rhythms during the 1970s (Rietveld 2010b). Secondly, it encourages dancers to stay on the dancefloor as the beat goes on and on. Robert Fink identifies this as “music of the drive” (2005: 38), without the immediate final closure based on a tonic note resolution as one expects in “music of desire” (ibid.), such as a standard pop song, or with a more intense push toward guitar and drum-­driven sexual climax, in rock recordings. By the early 1990s, the sound of electronic dance music picked up some of the more “motorik” aspects of European electronic dance music that was initially tagged as “hard house,” which incorporated a strong mix of acid house and techno music influences, with a hint of industrial music in its genealogy.

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Eventually, this morphed into a trance-­inducing format that came to be known as “trance,” an instrumental beat-­driven music with a tempo of around 135 bpm. This techno subgenre propels the dancer subjectively forward, as the repetition transports the music through an electronic wash of morphing sound that rarely seems to resolve on the tonic. In turn, this can have a synesthetic effect: when the eyes are closed, it is possible to experience a feeling of travelling through a spiraling, never-­ending light tunnel of a psychedelic mandala. Physically moving the body to a continuous digital flow of repetitive beats, dancers are encouraged to reach a mental state in which conscious awareness of the past and the future disappears, and to become as one with the sound of music, in particular its machinic pulse and electronic textures (Rietveld 2010a). The characteristic four-­on-the-­floor beat of techno and trance, then, developed from a range of directions. Connections are made that are not always direct, but, to use a Deleuzian term, “rhizomic,” broken and reconnecting (Deleuze and Guattari [1980] 1987). It was during the 1970s that the strut of soul, funk, and rock morphed toward a machine beat, not only in disco, but also in German experimental rock, belligerently called “Krautrock” by the British music press. According to Simon Reynolds, Krautrock “brought into focus the idea that had been latent in rock . . . that the rhythmic essence of rock music . . . was a kind of machine-­like compulsion” (2000: 32). Known as the “motoric,” this was pioneered by bands like Neu! and Can—whose style may be defined as residing between the “man-­machine rigor” of the German electronic outfit Kraftwerk, and the “sex machine sweat” of American funkster James Brown. Authors such as Peter Shapiro (2005) have suggested that the trope of long-­ distance trains that transported African-Americans from the southern states to the industrial north of the US during the first half of the twentieth century, had an important influence on the looping, repetitive grooves of the blues; in turn, this partially inspired Kraftwerk to produce the intense train-­drive of their 1977 recording “Trans-Europe Express” (Flür 2000). According to Shapiro, the stepping grooves of the marching bands of New Orleans were also important to the development of the tight funk grooves that ultimately informed disco. Robin Sylvan also emphasizes the importance of this southern American city, showing it as a link to the secularization of West-African musicoreligious practices, in which energetic intensity and repetition in movement are generated to produce a state of possession trance in the dancer (2002). Through such Black Atlantic connections, remnants of possession rituals entered the profane realm of modern

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popular music, becoming intertwined with various forms of dance music, from R&B to the sound-system culture of reggae (of importance to UK breakbeats), and on to the ritual of techno.

Machine possession In terms of Robert Fink’s concept of drive in repetition, it is tempting to find, as Drew Hemment puts it in a Deleuze-­inspired assessment of electronic dance music, that “a pulsing flow of intensity” produces “a flow of desire not directed toward a climax or resolution” (2004: 87). Indeed, in the context of the genealogy of DJ-led dance parties, a musical space is created where the journey (rather than the end-­goal) is emphasized, where time is now, and binaries such as inside– outside, subject–object, seem to be erased—a point I have made in the past (Rietveld 1993; 1998; 2004) and which is illustrated by a Chicago-­based dancer who stated, in 1992: “I dance until the walls fall away from around me” (in other words, until boundaries dissolve). In this way, the ability to articulate the experience is hampered. For example, over the countless dance events I have attended since the rise of techno at the end of the 1980s, many dancers have found that their intense experience is beyond words, using descriptions such as a wide-­eyed “there is nothing like it,” or a simple “I feel reborn!” (an intense experience leading to a new perspective or subjectivity). Here, as Fink points out in the context of disco, links may be made to libidinal philosophy, which “offers liberation through ‘pure’ desire, not dialectical struggle” (2005: 37). Fink points out that the driving experience of repetition cannot be fully explained though the concept of jouissance however, as this may cloud the analysis through overgeneralization. In particular, over the length of a track or of a DJ-set, intensely repetitive music can have a direction that, eventually, leads to climax, the peak experience. For example, Kai Fikentscher’s (2013) shows how the programming of separate musical elements (the recordings) is an essential DJ-skill (2013). Other commentators, including Robin Sylvan, observe the importance of the journey in electronic dance music, which eventually leads to an energetic climax (2002). This can be illustrated by the Tantric-­inspired approach of pioneering Californian trance DJ Goa Gill, who explains how in the Indian province Goa he developed a DJ style that drives dancers through an assault of the senses with industrial mechanical repetitive beats through the night, disorienting and hypnotizing his crowd into a trance.

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Only at sunrise does the relentless drive recede to give way to narrative songs, giving the dancer the opportunity to return to a sense of wholeness (Davies 2004; Rietveld 2010a). Mark J. Butler points out that recordings within the subgenre of trance “typically feature especially climatic builds, in which devices such as snare drum rolls . . . and crescendo create dramatic increases in intensity” (2005: 226). Such an increase in energetic intensity, as Gilbert Rouget has found, may help to achieve a state of trance ([1980] 1985). A different example can be found in the programming technique of DJ-producer Frankie Knuckles (once a Chicago-­based house music pioneer), with the support of remixes he specially prepares in advance, emphasizing the “foot,” or four-­on-the-­floor kick drum. Over six, eight, or even ten hours, he almost insidiously envelops dancers into the repetitive beat, slowly increasing the speed of the music selections, thereby increasing the energetic intensity, until all present dance in unison toward the musical peak moments. US-born DJ Osunlade—also a Yoruba-­trained priest— adopts a different strategy, building up his set with multiple peaks, taking the energy slightly down after each one—this creates a tension of anticipation, holding them in suspense on the dancefloor for hours through the night. The management of energy or vibe (St John 2009; Fikentscher 2000) is, to adapt Robert Fink’s libidinal framework, a matter of “syntactic control, a transformed, complex musical erotics of repetitive tension and repetitive release” (2005: 41). The performance of this sex machine is a matter of “recombinant teleology” (43) characterized by an excessive timeframe, “imagined as the music of machines, androids and cyborgs” (45), an imperceptible duration toward a climax, as illustrated above by a Frankie Knuckles DJ-set. The structural climax—or even multiple climaxes—may not occur in a linear or regular fashion. By contrast, “a complete tension-­release arc might be smaller than the piece” (46), typical of a lot of dance music. For example, Kai Fikentscher shows that the repetitive qualities of post-­disco dance club music are more than just an emphasis on the pulse through an on-the-beat rhythm, as these provide DJ-friendly predictable internal musical structures that additionally operate according to the logic of four-­bar, eight-­bar, sixteen-­bar, and thirty-­ two-bar cycles (2000). For Fink (2005), recombinant teleology that can be found in disco characterizes the wider social realm, dominated by instant consumerist desire, which he identifies in the aesthetics of repetition of advertising and the flickering flat television screen. The breakbeat-­driven hardcore continuum seems to respond to a more intensely accelerated experience, though, which is addressed next.

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Accelerating rupture During the 1980s, UK rave culture had also taken its cue from Jamaican sound systems that were used for dance parties, originally called “raves.” In the UK, the reggae music that was favored by the first generation of Jamaican immigrants tended to be replaced initially on these occasions by electro for a younger, ethnically mixed, working-­class generation. The breakbeat style of electro would have important consequences for the development of a set of recognizable music genres, first in London, and next in other English cities.6 The resulting musical aesthetic went through a set of incarnations, both stylistically and in name, from “acid house” and “techno” to “rave hardcore” and the more dancehall reggae-­ inflected genre “jungle.” The latter two subgenres incorporate breakbeats based, as in hip-­hop and electro, on samples of drum fills or breaks that “originate in live percussion” (Butler 2006: 78). Unlike in hip-­hop and electro, though, breaks are accelerated in hardcore rave. This inspired Simon Reynolds to introduce the concept of the “hardcore-­continuum” to designate those subgenres characterized by rhythm programming that utilizes accelerated breakbeat samples. The resulting digitally ruptured approach to rhythm informs genres that follow, such as jungle, and then drum ’n’ bass, which appeared around 1995 (Martin 1997; Belle-Fortune 2004). A combination with “half-­time” (halved tempo) low-frequency basslines resonates with dub reggae, in effect making such dance subgenres part of what may be called the “dub diaspora” (Sullivan 2014; Rietveld and van Veen 2015). In the second half of the 1990s, this morphed to the funkier, and more erotic, UK garage (also known as underground garage or speed garage), appealing to female dancers by taking inspiration from New York club music (“garage”) that was played in the second rooms at jungle and drum ’n’ bass events. This subgenre provided rhythmical and stylistic characteristics to other subgenres with a more macho-­stance that followed into the new millennium, such as grime (featuring rapidly speaking MCs) and the mostly instrumental dubstep (characterized by its slow-­moving sub-­bass). Breakbeats tend to stress syncopation, differentiating the hardcore continuum from the four-­on-the-­floor kick drum repetition of the disco impulse; the hardcore continuum is thereby more part of a reggae continuum. A much-­used repetitive accelerated breakbeat sample is the “Amen-­break,” a syncopated four-­measure drum break popularized by the electro music genre. This sample was taken from a 1969 b-­side soul recording, “Amen Brother” by the Winstons. This particular drum break features an inbuilt hesitation, as a teasingly delayed snare hit in the third

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measure is withheld from the fourth measure, producing a tiny climactic gasp of air, a moment of rupture and suspense, simultaneously producing a desire for return to the regular rhythmic flow (Harrison 2004; Butler 2006). Such a sampled “block of time-­space” (Hemment 2004: 88) produces a sense of excitement, which, through relentless repetition, creates the main rhythm that plays with the musical pulse in accelerated form. As such, this musical form sounds like an attempt to keep up with the ever-­accelerating immediacy of communications that characterize a culture embedded in rapid global capital flows. With reference to Fredric Jameson’s 1980s work on the cultural logic of late-­ capitalism (1991), Mark Fisher observes about his London-­based students that “we . . . are now facing a generation that is born into that ahistorical, anti-­mnemic blip culture—a generation, that is to say, for whom time has always come ready-­cut into digital micro-­slices” (2006). Breakbeat samples may act as the “digital micro-­slices” that are experienced in everyday life by this particular generation. A rhythmic complexity can be achieved in high-­resolution digital production that, as Anne Danielsen argues, can feel almost “organic” (2010: 21). This seems a long way from the explicit mechanical beat of the drum-machine-­ generated four-­on-the-­floor beat, and indeed, in the popular mind, breakbeat music does no longer adhere to a 4⁄4 measure. Nevertheless, the Digital Audio Workstation (DAW) on which digital music is produced provides an internal clock (its mechanical heartbeat) to produce a metronomic pulse. As sampled breakbeats are dislodged from their original contexts, their surface value is emphasized without connection to their original signifiers, thereby amplifying the effect of what seems an empty desire, an aimless continuous jouissance. However, as dancers engage with this aesthetic—this “architecture of time” (Rouget [1980] 1985: 122)—a new set of meanings is actually produced in relation to the intensity of city life and the speed of communications. To understand the underlying rationale of London’s breakbeat genres, Chris Christodoulou has applied Paul Virilio’s notion of “dromology” (study of speed) and notes that “speed provides an important impulse for ritualized social interaction” (2013: 196). Steve Goodman too addresses issues of tempo in electronic dance music, in particular with regard to differences between genres, introducing the method of “dromography” to identify “speed tribalism”—a concept he mainly discusses in a London-­based context of drum ’n’ bass and related music styles (2005). A cultural philosopher, and owner of the Hyperdub label also known for his dubstep productions under the machinic name Kode9, Goodman argues that a subjective transformation occurs depending on the

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speed of musical pulse: “at certain affective and speed thresholds, an audio collective will undergo a mutation marking the emergence of a rogue vortex, spinning off on its own vector through the sonic” (ibid.: 8). The sense of speed is intensified by the polyrhythmic quality of music genres in the hardcore continuum, in which the repetitive pulse may be around 170 bpm, while, especially in drum ’n’ bass and jungle, low rumbling basslines tend to be perceived at half the speed. Jean Baudrillard comments, perhaps pessimistically, that “ever since acceleration has become our common condition, suspense and slow motion are the current forms of the tragic” ([1983] 2001: 197). As such, a social stratification appears in which one is forced to keep up with accelerated culture, in order not to be excluded from the metaphorical “fast lane.” Connecting the aesthetic of breakbeats with the “libidinal economy” of capitalism—to loosely borrow an expression from Lyotard ([1974] 2004)—musical acceleration seems an understandable response, either to heal oneself from the inhuman speed dictated, directly and indirectly, by informational data exchanges, or to come to terms with the ravages of the deceleration of capitalism—which is, according to Benjamin Noys (2014), a contradictory “dual dynamic.” As London is “a global nodal point for the accelerated flow of commerce, information and migration” (Christodoulou 2013: 211), it is perhaps no coincidence then that the tempo within the musical aesthetic of UK breakbeat music also pulls in two contradictory directions: the urgency of accelerated breakbeats, that attempt to keep up with the proverbial “rat race,” and a deeply vibrating tragic sense of exclusion, articulated in the dub-reggae-inspired sub-­bass lines. Steve Goodman further suggests that rhythm and pitch (especially bass) exist on a continuum that he calls “bass nature,” in which “the musical distinction between rhythm (infrasonic frequencies) and pitch (audible frequencies) dissolves, each merely constituting bands on the frequency spectrum” (2005: 3). This is also of interest to a parallel development of acceleration in four-­on-the-­ floor hardcore techno genres. Initially developed in Rotterdam during the 1990s, gabber house (or “gabba”) tended to accelerate its tempo to 180 bpm by 1993 (Rietveld 1998), with Billboard reporting in 1997 that “200 beats-­per-minute is quite typical” (Tilli 1997: 44). Speedcore outdoes this with tempos of 300 bpm, and some extremes are clocking up to 1,000 bpm (Balli 2014; Christodoulou 2013). As the music accelerates to a beyond-­human speed, a meditative drone emerges that holds the listener in a state of permanent present time. Accelerating repetitive phrases thereby, perhaps paradoxically, create a sense of inertia, suspending the dancer in a timeless sonic space, a looped forever “now,”

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temporarily erasing awareness of past and future. Within each musical attempt to address acceleration, and inertia, some form of machine possession may occur. Or perhaps, reversely, at this extreme, a type of machine exorcism seems enacted, comparable to the tarantella dance in southern Italy, where the musicians attempt to find the right musical form to heal the dancer from possession by the “spider’s bite” (Rouget [1980] 1985). Around 2004, while digital networks increased information flows to non-­human processing speeds, genres such as dubstep seemed to take an opposite trajectory to acceleration by stripping out the accelerated breakbeats of drum ’n’ bass, and emphasizing its defiantly dragging high-­volume sub-­bass. Hereby, the perceived tempo halves the actual pulse from 160 to 80 bpm, while the forceful sub-­bass demands audio space, giving the dancer an experience of being in the eye of a hurricane.

Slowing down The crackling sound of digitally sampled old dirty vinyl, a low sub-­bass drone-­ like buzz suggesting the cinematic sound of an alien space ship that slowly moves with the momentum of an extremely heavy mass: “Subtemple,” by Burial (2017), offers no rhythm section. Instead the irregularly repetitive sound of a needle skipping at the end of a vinyl record, reminiscent of Brian Eno—who, when ill, was unable to remove a record from the turntable his friend had put on earlier, and ended up listening attentively to environmental sounds framed by the rhythm of the click of the skipping needle, which led him to produce what he called “ambient music” (1975). On “Subtemple,” the ambience is achieved through an accumulation of multi-­layered sounds of incidental voices, the crackling and buzzing, digital samples offering traces from a bygone analog era as they are wrapped in distancing echoic effects. Eventually, a small prayer bell joins in play of spirits (or, perhaps, it is a sonic remnant from the film Bladerunner—1982). A truncated sample of a single female vocal, like a cyborgial remnant of a once-­ human world, repeatedly calls out something that various people interpret as “so get too loud,” or “so get some love,” the last syllable sustained, fading into oblivion. Reviewer Pekke interprets the same vocal sample as “took you so long,” a statement of impatience, so typical of acceleration: “someone is in anger and the journey into nothingness continues, as we further dive down things distort into grand halls devoid of any detail with only humid air giving a sense of infinity as a thick fog” (2017). About two-­thirds into the track, a different sampled voice

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whispers: “All that’s left is the procedure.” Here, in the tragic performance of inertia, the sluggish machine rules. The aesthetic trajectory of this track places it in a genealogy of electronic dance music genres so typical of London, the hardcore continuum, the music associated to “raves”—those DJ-led dance rituals fueled by non-­stop machine-­generated repetitive beats that, with some intoxicating chemical enhancement, move dancers into a state of ecstasy. In “Subtemple,” ritualistic engagement with a machine-­like entity remains, which is now explicitly digital, its almost shape-­shifting rhythm no longer emphasizing a mechanistic metronomic beat, even though implicitly a strong pulse remains, sucking the listener, unable to dance in this multi-­layered tapestry of digital sound, into a downward spiral. Is this a reaction to the ever-­accelerating whirlwind that seems now beyond human reach? Having discussed specific ritualistic characteristics of electronic dance music in terms of its electronic machine aesthetic and repetitive beats, I have argued that machinic “structures of feeling” (Shaviro 2010) are produced. Lengthy electronic dance music events enable an affective flow within a vertiginous maelstrom of contemporary data, where amplified bass and repetitive grooves, sprinkled with bleeps and swoops, both affect and move the body. In the case of techno, which is produced at a humanly danceable pace, one may be able to speak of possession trance in which the dancer ecstatically adopts a cyborg subjectivity. Where the speeds of repetition become challenging, either by being faster than the pace of a human breath and the rate of a beating human heart, or by being so slow as though being stuck at the event horizon of a black hole of data density, it seems more likely that the dancer may be exorcized from overwhelming daily experiences of inhuman machine speeds. Ultimately, within the repetitive beats of the machine-­ aesthetic of electronic dance music, the dancer is inoculated against the assault of accelerated information overload within the contemporary technoculture.

Notes 1 The concept of technoculture is addressed, amongst others, by Robins and Webster (1999), Penley and Ross (1991), and Shaw (2008). 2 Synthesizers generate sound, and sequencers order the musical structure. Nowadays, the functions of such devices are usually embedded in software-­based Digital Audio Workstations (DAWs), but modular as well as analog electronic sound generation is still possible, and is even gaining popularity with some producer–performers.

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3 See also Reynolds (2010) and (1998). 4 Audio samples of differentiating textures, rhythms, and tempos can be heard on Ishkur’s Guide to Electronic Music (Taylor 2017). 5 The popularity of this term in the UK inspired Steve Redhead to publish a collection of interviews with fiction authors he dubbed, with reference to the previous American beat generation, the “repetitive beat generation” (2000) and who narratively produce structures of feeling that complement electronic dance music and its cultural context. 6 In particular Bristol and Manchester, each with a working class population that includes a significant mix of Irish and Caribbean ethnic backgrounds, arguably demographic remnants of an English colonialist past.

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Repetition and Musical Meaning Anaphonic Perspective in Connection with the Sonic Experience of Everyday Life Danick Trottier*

As human beings, we hear sounds that gain meaning through experience of everyday life. The significance of these sounds may be symbolic or cultural, but the way we experience sounds also depends on our upbringing, cultural background, and personal baggage. To take a mere example, when I go for a drive and hear another car honking its horn, my immediate reaction is to ask myself what is wrong with my driving. This is why sounds of everyday life are part of what Howard S. Becker has theorized under the idea of “conventions” (2008: 40–67). Our actions, decisions, and experiences are all grounded in social and cultural conventions that influence the way we live in society. These conventions are important because they generate patterns of meaning that render discussion unnecessary: we simply know how to react in certain circumstances. Sounds are also part of these conventions: when people hear a police siren, danger comes to mind and they feel an urge to back up and make space for the police to work freely. The reason why the connections between specific sounds and particular social and cultural significations are so obvious is that we have experienced these sounds from the early stages of our lives. In sum, the repetition of sounds and how they affect our experiences determines our consciousness as human beings. Yet, it is not so simple: daily repetitions of specific sounds can also generate disillusionment, even a lack of interest or a kind of negligence. For example, I pay more attention to police sirens at home rather than at work: I work in downtown Montreal, so I hear police, ambulance, and fire truck sirens * The author wishes to thank singer/songwriter Jon Davis for his help with the linguistic revision of this chapter. He would also like to thank Louis Bédard Giulione and the editors for their critical comments.

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every day, as is most likely the case for anyone working in a big city. In contrast, at home (say, in a quiet suburb), hearing a siren is not part of my everyday experience, especially when they appear in the middle of the night. Then we might ask how the repetition of specific sounds influences the meaning we attribute to them, and how musical structures interplay with these same specific sounds from our environment. Considering this, the present chapter investigates the issue of repetition and how it affects musical meaning, namely the way repetition is used by musicians to create signification. This is possible if, as Philip Tagg argued in his semiotic of music, “we accept that music is some sort of symbolic system [and that] musical structures ought also to be carriers of symbolic values, discretisable as such by their culturally perceived message” (1992: 370); or, to put it differently: if we assume a homology between music and culture through associations with musical structures and everyday environment. These associations function through what Jean-Jacques Nattiez calls the significations extrinsèques (2004: 269–72)—the cross-­reference to what is external to music—what Carolyn Abbate translates as “extrinsic referring” (Nattiez [1987] 1990: 117). The process that creates signification in the act of listening to music is anchored in the laws, style, or form of musical structures. This is the cross-­reference to what is internal to music, which Nattiez calls significations intrinsèques (2004: 265–9), and which Carolyn Abbate translates as “intrinsic referring” (Nattiez [1987] 1990: 117). Finally, the way repetition alters the musical meaning in tandem with homology between music and culture is found in what Kofi Agawu calls the “region of play” (1991: 24) in the process of musical meaning, precisely the interplay between the intrinsic referring and the extrinsic referring. More specifically, I would like to demonstrate that repetition is at the forefront of our sonic experience of the world. To do so, I will focus on how it circumscribes some of the links that we, as listeners, make between musical structures and cultural experience. I will look into the creation of meaning through repetition— particularly the number of times a specific sound (e.g., the sound of a siren) should be repeated to gain signification. As we will see, repetition applied to the homology between musical structures and the experiences of our cultural environment is also affected by elements found in songs—the meaning of the lyrics, the song’s form, the tone color of instruments, the interaction of musical layers, etc. To explore such issues, I investigate the determination of musical meaning by repetition in two different contexts: first, I analyze the way train sounds are imitated in songs from the so-­called blues tradition of train songs

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through the crazy trains of 1980s hard rock; I will then examine the way gunshots and war experiences are imitated in songs from 1970s heavy metal through to 1980s speed metal. All the songs were chosen on the basis of their relevance to how repetition plays a specific function in the homology between musical structures and cultural experience; they make no claim to completeness regarding the topics discussed below. Last but not least, the theoretical groundwork behind this study aims to forge relations between the semiotic approach of Tagg (1992; 2003; 2013), the gestalt approach of Leonard B. Meyer (1956), and the work of other authors who are relevant to these kinds of studies—e.g., Richard Middleton (1990) or Allan Moore (2001).

Repetition in motion: Are we still on the train? How can the musical structure of a song come to evoke a train? The human experience of trains, albeit common to everyone, is multiple depending on the angle that we choose. Regarding the musical tradition, we can circumscribe at least four specific sounds pertaining to trains, none of them being exclusive: (1) the train whistle as a kind of siren aimed at transmitting specific information (e.g., when it sounds at a railroad crossing for the cars to stop); (2) the bells on a train as a way to indicate its arrival or departure (in brief, to inform the passengers that something is happening); (3) the wheels on the train as a locomotive sound that is repeated sequentially throughout the journey with varying speeds from departure until arrival, including slowing down and accelerating; and (4) the heavy sound of the wheels rubbing against the rails (e.g., when the train driver applies the breaks or when it turns or merges onto another railroad track). These four experiences of train sounds are shared by everyone in a plethora of contexts; studying them requires a focus on repetition—the sound of the wheels is constantly repeated in the experience of locomotion as much as the sound of the bells or the sound of the whistle. Then analogies between musical structures that are influenced by trains and sounds or experiences of trains as locomotive technology become meaningful depending on musicians’ choices and how they are explicit or not. To delve further into this topic, let me summarize Tagg’s theory of anaphones. In Tagg’s semiotic of music, the way specific sounds produced by musical instruments are linked to human experiences is known as an anaphone— etymologically, the fusion of analogy and sound.Anaphones are not a phenomenon

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of bruitage; rather, the resemblance is obtained by musical sounds (e.g., a voice, a guitar, drums, etc.). This distinction matters since trains can be represented by the sound of a real train or by an imitation of the latter using musical instruments. For example, the song “Friendship Train” was released twice between 1969 and 1970: once by Gladys Knight and the Pips (1969), and once by the Temptations (1970). In both recordings, the metaphor of friendship via trains “suggests that outward expression of peace and unity” (Maxile 2011: 601), but the way trains are evoked is handled differently: in Gladys Knight and the Pips’ version, the cowbell is used at the beginning to evoke the train’s bell, not to mention the “musical structures” (Tagg 1992) that generate many other analogies with its sounds (e.g., the motor-­like riff of the bass, the fuzzy sound of the guitar, etc.); in the Temptations’ version, the sound of a real train is incorporated into the song. Such choices are important to the meaning of each song: Gladys Knight and the Pips work through evocation and analogy, while the Temptations are more explicit. In other words, anaphones exhibit something different, which can be summed up in semiotic through a symbolic association: that association may vary depending on the context, or the experience. Anaphones are commonplace in music history—one only need think of bird songs or, precisely, train songs. According to Tagg (1992: 372–5; 2003: 99–101; 2013: 306–8), anaphones are divided into three categories: (1) sonic anaphones (i.e., homology between real sound and music—e.g., the sounds of animals); (2) kinetic anaphones (i.e., homology between movement and music—e.g., walking); and (3) tactile anaphones (i.e., homology between physical sensations and music—e.g., the sensation of movement or comfort). In a song where trains are the main subject, we may at least assume that musicians would like to communicate the impression that trains are real (i.e., the sensation of being in motion). A common theme in twentieth-­century music is new technologies and how they have amazed and influenced musicians (e.g., see the old reference to railroad technology in blues—Cooper 2006). From this perspective, the search for meaning in tandem with trains leads musicians to engage in a homological perspective between human experiences and railroad technology—what Maxile, after Floyd (1993), has coined the “tropes of transit” (2011: 594). Tropes fulfill the same function as anaphones, because they are “forms of expression (such as simile or metaphor) used to convey meaning by making one thing comparable or analogous to another that has an association or a connotation familiar to a reader or listener” (ibid.). The parallel between tropes and anaphones is a passage obligé to recast the ways writers and musicians

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enhance the effects and meanings of their works through associations and experiences with everyday life. From this perspective, the “region of play” (Agawu 1991: 24) in the process of musical meaning is obtained by the way musical structures are connected to the experience of everyday life or cultural experience (e.g., the different paths taken by musicians to evoke trains). To shed some light on this issue, the four types of train sounds mentioned above are common examples of sonic anaphones: the whistle, the bells, the wheels squeaking on the rails can be imitated, evoked, or suggested, albeit with specific musical structures or sound effects. Let us consider “Golden Gate Gospel Train” (1937) by the Golden Gate Quartet. In a capella style, the song is well known for its imitation of train sounds using human voices: while one voice sings the lyrics, three others perform a repetitive riff (characterized by a syncopated rhythm) in the background; this gives the listener the impression of being on the train. Then the repetitive riff stops; all the voices can imitate the sound of the train whistle in unison on the onomatopoeia “wahhh.” If two sonic anaphones can be identified here (namely the wheels and the whistle), the listener is also struck by other anaphones generated by these musical structures: the repetitive riff fosters a sense of locomotive motion, of wheels in movement (i.e., kinetic anaphones), as much as the sensation of being on board and travelling (i.e., tactile anaphones). The quartet explores more anaphones that could represent trains (e.g., the sound of bells and the prolongation of the whistle through a vocal solo). Repetition is an important issue here: considering trains offer an experience of repeated sounds at every level, and considering the most familiar example is the locomotive motion generated by the wheels, how is repetition represented by musical structures and where does it end in a song? To answer this question, the distinction between “discursive” and “musematic repetition” developed by Middleton can be useful (1983; 1990: 269–90). The former type of repetition relates to repetition on a large scale (phrase, sentence, section, form, etc.) and the latter type to repetition on a smaller scale (note, structure, riff, etc.). The evocation of trains in a song actually relates to both types of repetition: the “Golden Gate Gospel Train” is affected by musematic repetition with the riff or the whistle sound; it is also affected by discursive repetition in its form, despite an unconventional succession of sections (the locomotive motion at the beginning, the whistle in unison, the return of the locomotive motion, the chorus, the interplay of solos and unisons, and so on). As Middleton summarizes: “the former [musematic] tends toward a one-­leveled structural effect, the latter

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[discursive] to a hierarchically ordered discourse” (269). This can be observed in many train songs because the experience of trains is not only one of repeated sounds that belong to the technology of trains, it is also the experience of travelling on trains from one station to another, from departure to arrival, etc. The instrumental standard “Night Train” (1952) by Jimmy Forrest (music) and Oscar Washington (guitar) is another example of how the repetition of anaphones can function in both a musematic and discursive way. The aim of the instrumental is to create an atmosphere that reflects the experience of trains with the wheels, or the bells. In Oscar Peterson’s version (1962), the introductory riff is worked in as a contrasting effect: the trill (sonic) and the sequential rhythm (kinetic) generate an effect of contrast (tactile) between the train at the railway station and the locomotive motion of the wheels as it begins to move. Here, too, the entire form of the song is determined by a variety of impressions and experiences regarding the train’s environment. If, as Moore points out, “[repetition] is present in all layers of the musical fabric at some point” (2001: 37), then we may wonder about the specificity of repetition and how it affects anaphones. Are the latter affected by musematic and discursive repetitions as is the case for all musical structures? To some extent, the answer is yes. But repetition must also be distinguished from continuation, be it melodic or rhythmic, as Leonard B. Meyer scrutinized in his rhythmic studies (1956: 93). Continuation is also an issue when anaphones are used in tandem with the experience of train travel. For example, the kinetic and tactile experiences of sitting on trains during travel are more related to a sense of continuity than a sense of repetition: the notion of process according to experience of time cannot be circumvented. To distinguish repetition from continuity, let us take the example of “Freight Train” (c. 1906–1912) by Elizabeth Cotten. In the song’s rhythmic framework, the same pattern is repeated over and over again by the guitar, the accompaniment and the melody being tied together with a syncopated rhythm and a slight disturbance of the bending notes. The effect of this pattern, governed by rhythmic continuity, gives the feeling of riding on the train with the motoric movement of the wheels (sonic + kinetic + tactile). At first glance, continuity and repetition seem to work together, but the interaction between accompaniment and melody complicates matters. To quote Meyer: “continuation always implied change within a continuous process, not mere repetition” (1956: 93). This is why the human experience of trains is less a question of repetition than a question of continuity—railway stations, cities, or landscapes, what could be

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conceptualized as the immersion in a process of passing time. From the perspective of experiencing trains and anaphones, repetition intervenes on a surface level (rhythmically speaking) and produces a sense of continuity; however, it is not continuity. In Cotten’s song, the repetitive pattern does not create a continuity that can be linked to the experience of trains; continuity is created both by the rhythmic and melodic structures through the interaction between accompaniment and melody. The interaction of these elements through a contrast in musical perception, namely the “harmonic filler” (Moore 2001: 33) of the accompaniment and the melody, engages the continuity of the experience. The melody is composed in a syncopated rhythm, so the feeling of the trains’ locomotive motion (kinetic and tactile anaphones) is more real than a mere repetition of the same pattern. The same is true of other songs with trains as their subject, for example “Another Town, Another Train” (1973) by ABBA, where the riff of the flute in combination with the drums is used at the beginning and in the chorus to enhance a sense of continuity—the sonic, kinetic, and tactile experiences of locomotion are engaged through consciousness of passing time. This riff is used as an “episodic marker” (Tagg 1992: 377) inside the discursive repetition (beginning, chorus, ending of the chorus, and the ending of the song) as well as a cross-­reference to traveling from one town to another. From an opposite perspective, “Downbound Train” (1984) by Bruce Springsteen adopted a repetitive structure that is rather common in pop songs from the 1980s. The succession of chords on the guitar is possibly an ideal representation of the experience of trains from both a kinetic and a tactile perspective. The problem lies in the fact that the repetition is not combined with or contrasted by other musical structures: the process of continuation seems to stand still, except in the middle of the song, when the repetition stops; at that moment, the experience of a process in time is more explicit, as if the train had arrived at the station. Thus, anaphones are not just a question of repeated structures in tandem with the experience of trains: they are also a question of how locomotive motion is experienced, and how continuity is developed and worked out by songwriters and musicians. What happens if trains derail? In this case, continuity is a matter of fact because of what could happen to trains—derailment, deviation, or even explosion. “Crazy Train” (1980) by Ozzy Osbourne with Randy Roads’ guitar line casts the metaphor of social alienation trough the train’s derailment. If the drums and bass stabilize the music’s continuation with a rhythmic structure, the guitar plays another role: the different riffs and the solos work through sonic

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anaphones. At the beginning of the intro, we hear a melodic line with a sonic anaphone that suggests the sound of metal wheels rubbing against the rails: the derailment of the train is evoked to encapsulate the idea of alienation expressed by the lyrics. Still during the introduction, a power riff appears on the guitar with a circular shape through the repetition of sixteenth notes—the motor-­like sound of the riff is a clear cross-­reference to the sound of the wheels. After this, the main riff of the song is introduced by the guitar: in five units, with a contrast in low and high registers, it mimics the rotation of the wheels by the force of the train. Then the listener experiences kinetic and tactile anaphones until the chorus. But after the words “I’m going off the rails on a crazy train,” the guitar enhances this idea with a full bend followed by a descending solo line and a pick slide that suggests the idea of derailment, when the train goes crazy: the sonic, kinetic, and tactile perspectives are obtained by the guitar line. The chorus ends with a riff that gives a sense of harmonic and rhythmic closure; it provides a calming impression and the chance to breathe. In this specific song, the process of continuation that fulfills the use of anaphones in the experience of trains is obtained by musematic repetition (in the riffs and guitar lines) and discursive repetition (from one section to another), as well as the contrast between the layers of the rhythmic structure and the melodic guitar line. In addition, the contrast of deviations from symbolic signification through one riff to another is also relevant—the impression of the derailment at the beginning of the song and at the end of the chorus, the circular motion of the riff from the introduction, the rotation of the train on the railway with the main riff, etc. We may easily imagine how the experience of the crazy train could be less convincing with a guitar repeating the same riff from the introduction again and again, or using the same rhythmic structure as the one used by the drums: the train could still be evoked in this way, but the experience of continuity inside trains and the imitation of passing time in trains would not be the same. To summarize, continuity implies changes, whereas repetition can be the same over and over again: anaphones are concerned with both repetition and continuity, the issue being one of experience in tandem with the homology pursued by the musicians and the interplay between the intrinsic referring and the extrinsic referring. In the case of trains, anaphones take a specific shape with regard to sonic, kinetic, and tactile perspectives linked to the continuation of locomotive motion. Let us now consider a case from another field of experience with a different kind of repetition and the use of silence: the gunshot.

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Repetition cut by silence: No more guns and explosions! Whereas the experience of trains (or at least the experience of taking the subway or a car) is familiar to everyone, the experience of gunshots is less common in our everyday life, although the place of guns in our respective lives could depend on which city we live in or what job we do. We can expect that, for the average person, the fact that guns are weapons used to discharge a bullet and to kill is not a usual experience, except through the mediation of violence in mass media (e.g., guns used in the military, news stories, or in the movies). Guns are no less real and dangerous, and most people do not know what it means to have one in their hands; the experience of gun sounds is generally mediated through the screen; this is also true of the experience of war and the sounds of machine guns, bombs, and so on. This is why we should explore how anaphones of gunshots and war experiences take place in some songs through the emblematic case of repetition. Through this exploration, I intend to assess the specific experience that we could extrapolate from the homology between musical structures and gunshots. Gunshots raise a different issue than the locomotive technology with regard to the notion of continuity—indeed, repetition of the same sounds through an isochronal shape (e.g., repeated shots) might lead to the difficulty of masking or saturating the perception of musical structures that mimic gunshots. Thus, repetition of a sound regarding musical structures using anaphones to create a cross-­reference to gunshots needs to be complemented by the use of rests and stresses. The sound of gunshots may vary depending on the context, the kind of gun used, or the distance from the action. Perception is concerned here in the midst of what acousticians call the “sonic boom,” (i.e., the “burst of sound” produced by “the shock wave generated by a supersonic aircraft . . . or projectile” (Halliday, Resnick, and Walker 2011: 465). For example, shots from a machine gun and a pressure gun do not produce the same sound; the speed of the bullet is a determinant factor as well as the trigger. Repetition is a matter of concern here in tandem with technology. For example, the pulses generated by a machine gun are so fast that the overall perception is undermined by the grouping of cells. Here the law of prägnanz theorized by Meyer seems relevant: the sequence formed by these pulses might be perceived through “regularity and simplicity of organization” (1956: 87). However, traditional handguns with one bullet per click of the trigger, like those we find in western movies, highlight a situation where pulses become stresses from one bullet to another because of the rupture of time by each gunshot.

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As already mentioned, the musical structures that create a symbolic association pursue an external link—they are not a perfect imitation; here lies the interplay between the intrinsic referring and the extrinsic referring. Musicians who strive to create a symbolic association with gunshots must take into consideration the ways that musical structures evolve and how the pulses of gunshots could be perceived. It is a matter of perception regarding the use of these kinds of anaphones: repeating the same note or chord over and over again to make an association would only overshadow the possibility of such an association. In sum, sonic booms linked to gunshots must be combined with stresses (e.g., one pulse highlighted within a succession of pulses). This is why rests are also important: by breaking the continuity of rhythmic repetition, they generate a rupture where each pulse can be stressed like a gunshot. The following examples will shed some light on this issue. In the same way that trains might be evoked by musicians who are influenced by locomotive technology, war has amazed musicians through the evocation of battles, cannons, marches, and so on—see Elizabeth Morgan (2015) for an overview of the place of war in musical rhetoric, especially during the American Civil War. The anaphones of bullets or projectiles are not specific to gunshots: we find them elsewhere in music history. Tchaikovsky’s 1812 Overture, Op. 49, commissioned for the All-Russian Exhibition of Arts and Crafts in 1882, is a good example. As a commemorative work written for the seventieth anniversary of Russia’s defeat of the Napoleonic invasion of 1812, it was premiered for the consecration of the Kremlin’s Cathedral of the Redeemer. Even though we are a long way from pop music, Tchaikovsky deals with a common issue considering the sound of cannon fire. This sound is obtained by using a cannon as a musical instrument—even though the actual cannon is sometimes replaced by a bass drum or a gong. The cannon is consciously kept for the end of the work, in the Allegro vivace section. This final section offers an apotheosis of intensity and sound color: the texture is dense and each instrument contributes to the entire effect of this climax with repeated notes and sequences. The cannon appears for the first time at bar 388, with one single shot on the third beat of the measure. In the aftermath, Tchaikovsky uses cannon fire only once per measure, either on the first or the third beat. It is a relevant example of the careful use of sonic anaphones to represent cannon fire: to avoid a saturation in musical perception, the sound of the cannon is marked with a stress obtained by the sound color as much as by the rests and the interplay between strong and weak beats.

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As useful as it is for the current study, Tchaikovsky’s work shows a limit to the experience of war mediated through anaphones: he uses the cannon as an artifice for the sonic recapitulation of the battle, and in doing so he is less concerned with the consequence of explosions. Needless to say, the experience of battle also involves a plethora of sounds linked to the technology of war, including falling projectiles (e.g., bombs and their resulting explosions). The perception of stresses in time may be a result of gunshots or explosions from bombs; both are neither the same sound nor the same experience with regard to how they are evoked through anaphones, and how their repeated sounds are embodied in musical structures. The contrast between the two has been achieved by some musicians through musical structures, and here, rhythmic value, as much as repetition, plays a significant role. Let us consider the example of “War Pigs” (1970) by Black Sabbath. The allusion to war in this song is both a reality and a metaphor for evil—the members of the band have said that it was an anti-­war song (Held 2013: 171). The main concern is the first riff of the song in the opening section after the introduction: we find only two power chords (D5, E5) at the beginning of the first and third measures in a four-­bar sequence; the chords are played with sixteenth notes and the remaining four measures are filled with rests. The chords are stressed: the anaphones obtained are clearly an allusion to two bullets from a machine gun. What can banish any doubt in musical perception is the use of silence within the repetition of musical structures. The rests enhance the stressed chords at the beginning of this sequence: the effect of the anaphones is more powerful as a result. Moreover, the transitory section that leads toward the second section of the song again takes up the same two chords, though with shortened silences and three additional chords (G5, FG5, F5): the anaphones obtained feature not only the shots from the machine gun, but also the explosions with a stressed half-­note pulse. The anaphones engaged by these musical structures are as much sonic, with the sound of the shots and the explosions of the bombs, as they are tactile: the guitar trills in the high range create a contrast in musical perception with a kind of confusion and disturbance, which is the consequence of the explosions. The other sections of the song are filled with repeated power riffs, though the distinction between the shots and the explosions is kept in mind with the use of rests to break the continuity of musical material associated with the terrifying experience of war. As for musical structures, “War Pigs” has much in common with “One” (1988) by Metallica. The fact that “One” is a song about war and the consequences of

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war on human life is shown in the music video, which uses scenes from Johnny Got His Gun—Dalton Trumbo’s anti-­war film released in 1971. The video exemplifies the meaning of the lyrics: images from Trumbo’s film are coupled with the speed-­metal quartet’s performance of the song in a dark chamber. The song’s message cannot be misinterpreted by the viewer/listener, as they are confronted with the apocalypse of war and the terrible consequences of the destruction of human flesh. This song, like many other songs by Metallica during the 1980s, adopts a contrasting structure in two parts, which summarizes the moment of engagement in war and its consequences. In a moderate tempo, the song begins with an introduction, which is followed by the verse and the chorus; those sections are repeated after the interlude; then the chorus is heard one more time before a transitory section; a double whole note as an “episodic marker” (Tagg 1992: 377) ends that part. In a fast tempo, the second part of the song expresses the dark side of the lyrics with a constant allusion to hell, as this moment plunges the listener into the physical suffering of the soldier: it is built around a quick riff at a fast tempo, the verse of darkness, guitar solos, etc. The riff is driven by quick repeated notes on the open sixth string of the guitar and one power chord (E5): the open sixth string plays sixteenth notes in two triplets with a stress (one eighth note) on the power chord. Obviously, rests (here, an eight-­ note rest) are used to break up musical continuity; the resulting effect, supported by the images in the music video, is the evocation of a machine gun. The drama of this situation regarding the cross-­reference to war is the monophonic texture of the riff at the beginning of the section: the two guitars and the bass play the same note (E), in combination with the double bass drum pedals. Repetition of the same note, with the stress of the power chord and rests, generates sonic anaphones of gunshots and tactile anaphones of the blow that we can image by pressing the trigger. As with Black Sabbath’s “War Pigs,” the riff is varied with the addition of another power chord and the withdrawal of rests: the effect is different since the sequence is developed in two phases, one with two sixteenth-­ note triplets followed by an accented power chord (E5) on a quarter note, the other with the same two sixteenth-­note triplets now followed by two power stressed chords (E5 and F5) in eighth notes. The use or withdrawal of rests in the repetition of the opening note (E) with one power chord (E5) is of great significance in the second section of the song: the variation of the riff without the silence and with the addition of another power chord (F5) carries the sense of an explosion of war, the machine gun bullets followed by the experience of explosions. Whereas the first riff produces anaphones that are both sonic and tactile like a

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machine gun, the second riff, with the same note and the same texture, conveys sonic anaphones to the listener with the machine gun, kinetic anaphones with the movement of explosions, and tactile anaphones through the sensation of activating the trigger as well as the discomfort of experiencing the explosions. It is salient to see how much the repetition of the same notes and chords does not fulfill the same function, whether it is worked through the combination of stresses and rests, or the prolongation of stressed chords. Regarding the kind of experience the song wants to emulate, what matters is how repetition is handled within the musical structures in terms of continuity: the deviation, the modification, or the prolonging of musical continuity obtained through the repetition of one and the same note generates different anaphones through the homology between musical structures and human experiences. In the second section of “One,” Metallica continues to work on the contrasting result obtained in an anaphonic perspective from the riffs with and without rests. Because of where the stresses fall, namely on the downbeat, the organization of meter is difficult to follow. This song, insofar as repetition and continuity are concerned in the second section, gives a striking example of the inconsistency of measures in some music, as Simha Arom explored with the aksak tradition (2007: 929–30). As is the case with some medieval music and certain musical traditions from the Indies and Africa, the riffs used by Metallica in the fast section of “One” are less concerned with measures than with a unifying pulse, except for the stresses created by the power chords (E5 or F5). What matters is the isochronal pulse and musical continuity regarding the experience of machine guns and explosions throughout the song. A comparison may be drawn with a song from the same period: “Janie’s Got a Gun” (1989) by Aerosmith. The theme of the song combines child abuse, incest, and murder; the story of Janie being raped by her father ties it all together, as the music video encapsulates very clearly (see Vernallis 2002: 27–8). This song is unconcerned with war; rather, the gun and gunshots are dramatized in the final phase of Janie’s liberation from her father’s torture. The anaphones infiltrate most of the musical structures of the song, from the tactile perspective of the trigger represented by the blow of the pick on the guitar to the vocal onomatopoeias sung by Steven Tyler at the beginning of the song to evoke the sonic perspective of the gun and the gunshot. Other striking anaphones are obtained by the hit of the bass drum just after the lyrics “Janie’s got a gun” in the verse section, which is the sonic effect of the dramatic gunshot. The anaphone produced by this bass drum sound is also kinetic (the departure of the bullet)

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and tactile (the sensation of the trigger). As the experience conveys a dramatic gunshot, the repetition in the song is less important: the anaphones of the gunshot are repeated only in the verses to enhance the idea of the father’s death caused by Janie’s actions. Considering the human experience of a single gunshot that could change a person’s life, here the stresses and rests seem irrelevant: the repetition is not one of continuity, but of specific hits with the lyrics in mind and a sense of space throughout the musical process, as is the case with Tchaikovsky’s use of cannon fire in his 1812 Overture. To recall the concepts theorized by Middleton (1990: 269), sonic anaphones representing an evenly spaced and calculated number of repeated gunshots (e.g., four shots) with regard to the lyrics and the development of the story, are very much anchored in discursive repetition, whereas sonic anaphones that represent the repetition of bullets with explosive breaks are very much anchored in musematic repetition.

Conclusion: Repetition and cultural fatigue To create musical signification and share cultural experience, musicians can explore anaphones and regard them as the foundation of their songs. Through cross-­references in musical meaning, musicians can, amongst other things, communicate specific ideas, establish points of reference, and handle the meaning of the lyrics. Yet the issue of how to achieve these goals in musical structures and reach those same goals through effective communication remains. As the current study has shown, using the specific issue of repetition, the homology that we might obtain between musical structures and cultural experience is always a precarious process regarding musical perception: it is a symbolic evocation through musical instruments. Anaphones also fit into compositional process; they will never be a carbon copy of everyday sounds, movements, or experiences. This is perhaps why some musicians are more comfortable adopting an easy way to communicate certain experiences, as is the case with the reproduction of sounds (e.g., real trains, real cars, real gunshots, or real explosions). In so doing, they are less confronted with specific choices that carry a homological perspective in relation to the shape that musical structures should take to enhance the meaning of the lyrics. Furthermore, they avoid the difficulty of choosing the kind of repetition that should govern the use of anaphones. Musicians who work with anaphones are confronting a dialectical process in musical perception: how far should they go with cross-­references and how can

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they maintain these associations or evocations while maintaining musical continuity, within musical structures, and in an entire song form? In other words, how far can they go with the interplay between the intrinsic referring and the extrinsic referring without losing the listener’s attention? The dialectical process between musical meaning and human experience is very subtle. As with the locomotive motion of trains in tandem with musical continuity or gunshots and bomb explosions in tandem with stresses and rests, musicians must make choices that do not ruin, mask, or saturate the musical structures of a song. Repetition makes a strong case of this reality insofar as it is distilled everywhere in the musical process and musical layers—anaphonic perspectives of trains and gunshots or bomb explosions require a specific sensibility to be mediated in musical structures, and the songs cited in this study are relevant examples. Considering familiar experiences leads to a form of cultural fatigue wherein we are less responsive to certain sounds, movements, and sensations, the songs that explore symbolic associations gain a specific value: they bring us back to the very nature of our experiences in everyday life. When the repetition of particular sounds, movements, and sensations in everyday life is well handled and mediated through compositional process, musicians face the double task of communicating strong cross-­references through their songs and reanimating a consciousness of what might seem to have been neglected.

Part Three

Repetition as a Structuring Device

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From “Sectional Refrains” to Repeated Verses The Rise of the AABA Form Olivier Julien

In the following pages, I address the development of this particular formal type that is known as the “AABA form.” The expression is one of common usage, and it might be argued that there is a broad consensus on its origins amongst popular music and jazz scholars. Taking the example of “South of the Border (Down Mexico Way),” Richard Middleton even links it to a time-­honored songwriting tradition in Anglo-American popular music. “Down Mexico Way,” a 1939 hit by the British songwriting team of Michael Carr and Jimmy Kennedy . . . is a typical Tin Pan Alley-­style ballad, and like most it uses the thirty-­two-bar form. In this form, the musical structure of each chorus is made up of four eight-­bar sections, in an AABA pattern. (Actually, the A sections here are doubled in length, to sixteen bars—but this affects the overall scheme only marginally.) (1990: 45–6)

Strictly speaking, Michael Carr and Jimmy Kennedy were not associated with the Tin Pan Alley, but with “a small side street off Charing Cross Road called Denmark Street” (Nott 2002: 105), on the other side of the Atlantic. Yet, the fact that this particular street came to be known as “London’s ‘Tin Pan Alley’ ” (ibid.) is surely no coincidence in Middleton choosing one of their songs to illustrate Adorno’s assertion that “thousands of Tin Pan Alley tunes share this scheme,” with the result that, “to listeners of the time, it would be totally predictable” (Middleton 1990: 46). In a similar vein, Larry Starr and Christopher Waterman describe the AABA pattern as the “schematic structure” of the refrain in the classic Tin Pan Alley verse-­refrain form between the two world wars. During the 1920s and 1930s [a] new generation of composers and lyricists explored the possibilities of song forms inherited from the nineteenth century, including the

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AABA structure of “Jeanie with the Light Brown Hair” and the verse-­and-chorus form of “After the Ball” . . . the most common form for Tin Pan Alley songs . . . in effect, fused these two to produce a verse-­refrain form, with an AABA refrain. (2007: 66)

Allen Forte corroborates this view when he notes that, in the American ballad of the golden era,“the refrain usually consists,” as illustrated by songs like Cole Porter’s “How Could We Be Wrong?” (1933) and “Why Shouldn’t I?” (1935), “of three parts: a double period of sixteen bars in length . . . followed by an eight-­bar period, often in another key . . . and a repetition of the first eight-­bar period” (i.e., A, A, B, A—Forte 1995: 38). John Covach also traces this formal scheme to the golden age of the Tin Pan Alley, except that he insists on calling the AABA refrain a “sectional refrain” (2005: 70), so as to avoid confusion with an actual refrain. Finally, in their book on the “stories behind the songs of Broadway, Hollywood, and Tin Pan Alley,” Philip Furia and Michael Lasser evoke “Ol’ Man River”’s “standard thirty-­two-bar AABA chorus” (2006: 58–9), whereas, in another book, Philip Furia describes that same AABA pattern as “the Alley[’s] sturdiest pillar” (1990: 280). In sum, Middleton, Forte, Furia, Lasser, Starr and Waterman agree on the AABA pattern having its origins in the basic phrase structure of what used to be the “main section” of interwar Tin Pan Alley songs, whether they call this section a “chorus,” or a “refrain.” John Covach argues for calling it a “sectional refrain,” but he also observes that even though such songs originally consisted of a “sectional refrain” and what should therefore be labeled as a “sectional verse,” as time went by, more and more singers, arrangers, and instrumentalists got into the habit of dispensing with the latter verse. The sectional verse [was] a kind of a lead-­in to the song, with lyrics that set up the sentiment expressed in the sectional refrain. The sectional verse tends not to be heard much in modern performances, and the sectional refrain is what most listeners recognize as the song itself.1 (2005: 70)

Along with so many Broadway and Tin Pan Alley classics, the work of Johnny Green and Edward Heyman exemplifies this point.

Verseless songs and standalone refrains Nominated several times for an Academy Award, composer Johnny Green began collaborating with lyricist Edward Heyman at the turn of the 1930s.

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“Body and Soul,” from the Broadway show Three’s a Crowd (1930), arguably remains their most popular song, but they scored a few more hits together, including “Out of Nowhere” (1931), “I Wanna Be Loved” (1934), and especially “I Cover the Waterfront,” which they reportedly penned in 1933 for the eponymous film.2 In the years that followed its first public performance on Ben Bernie’s radio show, this song was covered by jazz musicians like Joe Haynes, Louis Armstrong, or Billie Holiday, who “recorded versions . . . in 1941, 1944, 1945, 1947, 1948, 1949, 1951 and 1954” (Murray 2000: 297). As shown in Table 7.1, Holiday’s 1945 version is interesting in that it appears to be a classic example of an AABA “sectional refrain” following a “sectional verse.” But this version becomes even more interesting when one compares it with the version “Lady Day” recorded a year before, in 1944: this time, there was simply no verse at all—the overall formal design was a mere AABABA (i.e., a full sectional refrain followed by an abbreviated reprise). Two years later, when Sarah Vaughan recorded that same song, she used an AABABA structure too, and so did the Ink Spots (whose version also dates from 1946). In 1954, Anita O’Day used that same formal design again, and, three years later, Frank Sinatra opted—as he usually did when confronted with an AABA song—for AABAA (with a reprise of the final A). “I Cover the Waterfront’s” verse, which served, like in “Somewhere Over the Rainbow” (1939) or “Bewitched, Bothered and Bewildered” (1940), to set the scene, was indeed less and less likely to be performed as time went on.3 In the process, the “sectional refrain” established itself as the one and only part in the song, insomuch that this “part . . . is usually considered ‘the song’ today” (Starr and Waterman 2007: 67). And this, in turn, induced an increased focus on a and b phrases, hence transforming their very nature, since they were now the only two contrasting structural units around which the whole song was organized—as Ken Stephenson puts it, “a chorus intended to be independent of a verse [needed to] have not only length but formal complexity as well” (2002: 136).

Table 7.1  Formal scheme of “I Cover the Waterfront” as recorded in 1945 by Billie Holiday.

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The entry Richard Middleton wrote on “Song Form” for the second volume of the Continuum Encyclopedia of Popular Music of the World (EPMOW) helps put this shift from a and b phrases to A and B sections in proper perspective. In this entry, Middleton identifies two principles underlying “formal schemes . . . to be found in popular songs.” The first is what he calls the “additive principle,” in which “a particular musical unit, setting a line, a couplet, a stanza or whatever, is repeated as many times as is necessary or desired.” As for the second principle, he calls it the “sectional principle” in reference to its relying on “a musical unit . . . divided up into clearly distinguished parts, usually organized so as to articulate an overall emotional or dramatic shape.” Broadly speaking, the former principle is more frequent in folk and traditional music (“dance songs, work songs and ritual songs, but also in many narrative song genres, such as traditional ballads from many cultures”), while the latter is more typical of “operatic arias (including, sometimes, popular types of musical theater) [or] the European art song or lied (which has influenced some popular song genres).” Nevertheless, Middleton points out that, “in practice, aspects of the two principles frequently intermix, especially in popular songs”: It might be tentatively suggested that, in many popular song traditions, there was a shift in the balance of additive and sectional principles away from the former and toward the latter . . . Often, this shift can be observed around the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, when in many cases recognizably modern, mass-­mediated popular song types first emerged. (2003d: 513)

He also analyzes the genesis of the modern chorus this way, noting that most commercial popular songs produced in Europe and North America in the nineteenth century, for performance in the home, in the street or in music halls, cabarets, vaudeville theaters and the like, used a strophic form: that is, a sequence of stanzas was set so that each stanza was sung to the same tune. (514)

And it was finally under “the spreading influence of Bourgeois musical practice” that the short refrain that could be found at the end of each stanza in such strophic forms evolved, from mid-­century, into a “stand-­out” . . . refrain intended to be sung by a group—hence the term “chorus.” From about the same period, music hall songs in Britain followed the same principle, the chorus here often being sung by audience as well as performer. (513–14)

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To put it differently: as elements of sectionalism infiltrated the additive strophic principle, a phrase that originally belonged to the verse gained such importance that it eventually became a section in its own right, which, in turn, gave birth to a new formal type—namely the verse-­chorus form. My point is that this is exactly what happened with the 32-bar aaba phrase structure in post-World War II popular music. In the same way that the modern chorus grew out of nineteenth-­century tail refrains, I believe those two contrasting sections one may hear in Carla Thomas’s “Gee Whiz” (AABA), Dusty Springfield’s “I Only Want to Be with You” (AABAABA), the Shirelles’ “Will You Love Me Tomorrow” (AABAA), Serge Gainsbourg’s “L’Eau à la Bouche” (AABAA), the Platters’ “The Great Pretender” (AABABA), the Everly Brothers’ “Crying in the Rain” (AABA), or the Beatles’ “Yesterday” (AABABA), to name but a few examples, should be interpreted as a heritage of the a and b phrases of Tin Pan Alley’s “sectional refrains” developing into stand-­out modules.

From the Tin Pan Alley to the “age of rock” Needless to say, I am far from being the first to stress the similarity between the classic phrase structure of the Tin Pan Alley and the AABA pattern of what has been described as the “age of rock” (Eisen 1969)—one only need think of Jon Fitzgerald’s, David Thurmaier’s, or Timothy Scheurer’s work on the Beatles’ debt to the Brill Building and the Tin Pan Alley (Fitzgerald 1995; 1996; 1999; Thurmaier 2016; Scheurer 1996), John Covach’s study of “form in rock music” (2005), Trevor de Clercq acknowledging “some sort of connection . . . between the use of AABA forms in the first half of the 20th century and the rock era” (2012: 39), or Drew Nobile defining the “AABA form” as “a particularly common form in rock music of the late 1950s and 1960s, tracing its roots back to Tin Pan Alley songs, which were virtually always in thirty-­two-bar AABA form” (2014: 120). To quote Richard Middleton’s entry on “Song Form” again: At the beginning of the twentieth century, choruses of 16 or even, on occasion, eight bars were still to be found, but the norm was already 32 bars. While the four eight-­bar sections may be related in a variety of ways, by the postwar period one particular pattern—AABA—was clearly predominant, to the extent that it is this pattern that is commonly understood by the terms “32-bar” or “standard Tin Pan Alley ballad” form . . . after 1955 . . . the popularity of the 32-bar form continued . . . and not only with an older generation of musicians, but with rock ’n’ roll and R&B performers as well. (2003d: 515)

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Still, Middleton never gets more specific as to the actual consequences of this aaba phrase structure evolving into an AABA sectional form, if only in terms of what Franco Fabbri calls “a nomenclature for song sections” (2012: 23). He certainly uses expressions like “thirty-­two-bar form” or “‘standard Tin Pan Alley ballad’ form,” but these do not truly account for the upheaval inherent to the shift from a four-­phrase pattern to a full-­blown formal pattern. Moreover, one must admit that the rest of EPMOW’s second volume does not help clarify the issue. For example, in one of the three entries Fabbri cosigned with Chris Washburne, one may read that “riffs made up of chords or including chords” may be found in “the chorus of an AABA song (the Beatles’ ‘I Feel Fine,’ 1964)” (2003: 593). To be specific, “I Feel Fine”’s overall formal design may be described as AABAAABA; is that to say the song’s structure is a “double chorus”? Unless, of course, what the authors call a chorus is the A section of this AABA song? I will come back to this. For now, let us begin with a more general question and wonder about the most appropriate way to designate the AABA formal pattern once, in the words of Ken Stephenson, “the [AABA] chorus has taken on a multisectional form itself ” (2002: 136). Considering The use of the terms “verse,” “chorus,” and others for sections in pop music of the 1950s and beyond often differs from earlier usage, as regarding the music of Irving Berlin, Cole Porter, George Gershwin, Richard Rodgers, and their contemporaries, (Everett 2009: 143–4)

should one want to call it a refrain? After all, if one believes Larry Starr and Christopher Waterman, “the increasingly free-­standing choruses of Tin Pan Alley songs were often called refrains, and this term proves useful to distinguish them from the choruses in strophic songs that are almost always performed with their verses” (2006: 30). Unfortunately, this does not fit with Richard Middleton’s definition of a refrain as “a short section (usually not more than one or two lines of text) that recurs at the end of every verse in a song,” and in which “both words and music are repeated” (2003b: 511). It does not fit either with Jay Summach’s, Derek Scott’s, and Allan Moore’s descriptions of “a segment of invariant lyric” that is “part of [a] strophe” (Summach 2011), “a recurring combination of words and tune” (Scott [1989] 2001: 239), or “the portion of a song which occupies the end of a verse whose lyrics, on repetition, recur” (Moore 2001: 255). Nor does it fit with Luis Tatit’s explanation that “a refrain [can] only [be] defined as such when the song takes a different direction, thereby creating a profound sense of

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anticipation of a return to the refrain” (2002: 38), or John Covach’s reminding us that this kind of subsection . . . often occurs in a verse. It functions much as a chorus does except that it is too brief to be considered a separate section and is otherwise clearly part of a larger section. The refrain will often occur as the last phrase or phrases of a verse, but may also constitute the opening phrase or phrases of a verse. (Covach 2009: G–3)

Should one then want to keep calling this AABA formal pattern a “chorus”? Probably not if the term is understood as referring to “a recurring structural unit, with unchanging words, which follows a verse or sequence of verses” (Middleton 2003a: 508), “the portion of a song that follows a verse” and whose lyrics, on repetition, “will . . . recur” (Moore 2001: 223) or “the most important or easily remembered section of a song, containing the title and the catchiest musical material” (Covach 2009: G–1). Interestingly, John Covach adds that “not all songs have a chorus, but [that] when one is present, it is the focus of the song” (Covach 2009: G–1). Consequently, a chorus can only be defined as such in comparison with a verse, that is part of the same song and which it is supposed to follow. Larry Starr and Christopher Waterman also insist on the chorus being, in essence “a repeating section,” and its drawing its raison d’être (both as a repeating section and the focus of the song) from its being combined with a verse (2007: 477). For all that, what we are facing here is an unrepeated chorus. And, in the context of postwar popular music, it seems no more logical to keep calling the corresponding AABA pattern a chorus than a refrain. But what of A and B sections? Once the a and b phrases have turned into sections in their own right, how should they be labeled, or even described? Here, things get even more confusing. Amongst other examples, Kenneth LaFave calls the A section a “refrain” and the B section a “bridge or ‘release’ ” (2015: 68); echoing Allan Moore’s description of the “verse, verse, middle 8, verse” pattern that “replays on a larger scale the AABA pattern itself ” (2012: 58), John Covach evokes a “verse” and a “bridge . . . often referred to as the ‘middle-­eight’ ” (2005: 69); Trevor de Clercq admits that “A sections may act as verse material and that B sections may act as bridge material” (2012: 179), but he simultaneously emphasizes the “chorus-­like qualities” of many A sections (188) before concluding that “the term ‘verse’ for the A section of an AABA song may not always be well-­ suited” (184); finally, Allen Forte, Michael Buchler and Franco Fabbri argue for “chorus” and “bridge,” with this difference that, unlike Forte, who distinguishes

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between “Chorus 1” and “Chorus 2” (Chorus 1 bringing together the first two A sections—1995: 36–41), Buchler and Fabbri insist on calling each A section a chorus and the B section a bridge (Buchler 2008; Fabbri [1996] 2008a). Apparently, “bridge,” “release,” or “middle-­eight” are rather consensual terms when referring to the contrasting section of an AABA song. But calling the A section a “refrain” or a “chorus” seems more problematic, and this probably accounts for Fabbri trying to justify his nomenclature in half a dozen essays and presentations over the past two decades ([1996] 2008a; 1999; 2003; 2008b; 2009; 2012). Basically, his vision is shaped by the idea that the section “relying on the most captivating and easy to remember melodic hook” (2003: 682) is “what is known in French as a refrain, in English as a chorus, and in Italian as a ritornello” (679). He certainly makes a difference between the chorus in the context of the verse-­chorus form, where “the whole section is repeated with the same lyrics that feature the song’s title,” and the “chorus-­refrain” originating “in the context of musical theater,” which is also based on “the main melodic hook,” and whose lyrics also feature “the song’s title, but not only”—other lines may “change from one chorus to the other” ([1996] 2008a: 161; 2003: 682). According to him, this formal design was typical of “1920s musicals”; it then became “one of the most common patterns in the . . . 1930s and 1940s,” and it may be found in a number of songs “throughout the twentieth century, including a majority of those written by John Lennon and Paul McCartney.” On that basis, the Beatles’ “Yesterday” should be described as “a ‘chorus-­bridge’ song” (2003: 681; 2008b: 186).

Ritornellos, hooks, and chorus-­like verses Obviously, Fabbri’s description of “Yesterday” as a “ ‘chorus-­bridge’ song” is in full contradiction with Walter Everett’s observation that “the Beatles wrote dozens of songs, including ‘Yesterday,’ with a refrain but no chorus” (1999: 16). By the same token, it contradicts Tim Riley’s description of “Yesterday” beginning with “Paul [McCartney]’s solo verse,” before “the strings enter for the second verse” (1989: 150), Jonathan Gould’s evocation of that same song’s “seven-­bar verse[s]” (2007: 279), not to mention analyses and commentaries by Philip McIntyre (2006), Alan Pollack (1993), Terence O’Grady (1983: 75–6), or Ian MacDonald (1994: 124–6). Truth to tell, I suspect Fabbri’s perception of “Yesterday”’s formal design to originate in his understanding of the term “refrain,” which he conflates with

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“chorus,” and whose actual definition he uses to develop a rather restrictive approach of the “hook” inspired by songwriting guides like Stephen Citron’s (1986), or Peter Pickow and Amy Appleby’s (1988).4 It must be said in his defense that such terminological issues are probably as old as popular music studies— notwithstanding these “refrains that [sometimes] act as the song’s hook” (Covach 2010: 9), “the confusion around the terms ‘chorus,’ and ‘refrain’ [even] begins,” as Ralf von Appen and Markus Frei-Hauenschild observe, “in the mid 19th century in sheet music editions” (2015: 8). Nonetheless, if one agrees with Starr and Waterman’s, Moore’s, Scott’s, Middleton’s, Tatit’s, Sumach’s, or Covach’s consensual definitions of the terms, calling the A section a chorus or a refrain raises two issues: first, where is the verse? Second, since the words of a chorus (or a refrain) are expected to be repeated along with the same music, what about the lyrics? To try and answer that question, let us get back to “I Cover the Waterfront” and examine its so-­called “sectional refrain”’s four stanzas (Example 7.1). The bridge’s function as a contrasting section is perfectly reflected in the third stanza, whose lyrics alternate eight- and nine-­syllable lines, as opposed to the seven-, five-, five-, and six-­syllable pattern characteristic of the three

Example 7.1  “I Cover the Waterfront” ’s “sectional refrain.”

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surrounding stanzas. In this section, the singer adopts a more external viewpoint (“Here I am, patiently waiting”), and then a more direct way of expressing her feelings when she addresses her lover and asks where he is, if he is forgetting, if he remembers, or whether he will ever return. These changes echo other changes in the melody (which suddenly becomes more disjunct) and its supporting harmony (most of the section is based on a ii–V–I–vi sequence, which is heard twice in the home key, and then transposed a whole tone higher, hence entailing a three-­bar modulation—the only one in the song). In comparison, the A sections basically rely on the same musical material. This material is heard in three out of the four eight-­bar sections, which clearly makes it the focus of the song. From the lyrics’ standpoint, it also appears that the three corresponding stanzas begin with the same line, which is none other than the song’s title. So far, everything seems to indicate that we are actually facing a chorus with a head refrain (or a “hook,” if one subscribes to Fabbri’s understanding of the term). A closer look at the lyrics from the first and final stanzas even reveals that both their first and second lines are identical, to say nothing of their third and fourth lines, in which one and the same idea is expressed in two different moods—interrogative (“Will the one I love be coming back to me?”), and then indicative (“For the one I love must soon come back to me”).5 This change of mood inevitably affects the words, but not so much that it would contradict Allan Moore’s comment that, if “choruses tend to repeat the same lyric,” they may also repeat “a close variation of it” (2001: 52). The second stanza, however, is quite another matter. It certainly shares its first line with the other A stanzas, as well as its elaborating on the idea of the singer “watching the sea,” at night, “in search of [her] love.” But, apart from that, the words from lines two, three, and four have nothing in common with those from the corresponding lines in the first and final stanzas. Given that all three stanzas are basically set to the same music, this section sheds a new light on the whole set of A sections: taken as a body, they are, in fact, less reminiscent of a chorus or a refrain than of “a complete unit . . . in the lyrics, and the music used to set several such units . . . the same music [being] used for each [stanza], though perhaps with some variation, but not . . . the same lyrics.” Those words are used by Richard Middleton to introduce the “Verse” entry in the previously mentioned volume of EPMOW. In this entry, the term’s usage is traced back to religious liturgy and traditional secular song; its evolution is addressed from “commercially produced genres in the nineteenth century and earlier (for example, broadside ballads)” through the late twentieth century, and,

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the more one reads on, the more it becomes relevant to “I Cover the Waterfront” ’s A sections. Refrains and choruses are distinguished from verses in that both lyrics and music are repeated . . . In the more varied and fluid forms characteristic of Western popular song since the mid–1950s, the definition of verses has continued to be much the same as previously, although the narrative function that was usual before the twentieth century has become optional. (2003e: 519)

At a time when Tin Pan Alley songs were increasingly likely to be performed without their introductory “sectional verses,” this optional narrative function is precisely what explains the similarities between the first and final A sections, with their “open/closed (antecedent/consequent) relationships between . . . phrase endings” inherited from nineteenth-­century strophic forms (Middleton 2003: 514)—that being the case, the altered reprise of the first stanza in the final section turns out to act like a device that helps round off the AABA “sectional refrain” as a self-­contained unit.6 As John Covach remarks, in such a context, “the focus . . . is always on the verses (or A sections), with the bridge (B section or middle eight) offering contrast to prepare listeners for the return of the verses” (2006: 40). Furthermore, “a refrain is often found in the verses . . . especially in songs composed during the Brill Building days, and the refrain is often where the hook is located” (2010: 5). In this respect, the chorus-­like quality of “I Cover the Waterfront”’s verses makes the song a perfect example of those interwar Tin Pan Alley numbers heralding the verse-­verse-­bridge-­verse pattern of so many popular songs from the 1950s and 1960s.

“These little one-­word openings to the verse” Verse-bridge forms, chorus-­like verses, internal refrains developing out into full-­ blown sections, and verseless songs giving rise to chorusless formal designs: writing these lines, I am not merely playing with words. As a matter of fact, I am trying to synthesize contrasting views on an issue that relates to “discursive repetition” as Richard Middleton defined it in 1983, that is, the repetition of . . . units, at the level of a phrase . . . the sentence of even a complete section . . . likely to be . . . mixed in with contrasting units of various types . . . and . . . tend[ing] towards a . . . hierarchically ordered discourse. (238)

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Thirty-­five years after the publication of Middleton’s seminal essay on “the productivity of repetition,” expressions like “musematic” and “discursive repetition” are part of the lingua franca of popular music studies. On the other hand, there is still no consensus on how to label song sections when referring to one of the most common instances of the latter type of repetition in postwar popular music. To be sure, the “verse-­bridge” nomenclature I have myself used in the previous pages has been adopted by a majority of authors since the mid–1990s.7 Even so, some dismiss it on the grounds that, being an “etic nomenclature for song sections,” it is “poorly related to the emic nomenclature used both in the Tin Pan Alley era and by the Beatles” (Fabbri 2012: 23). But should an emic perspective and an etic approach necessarily be perceived as opposing to one another? Using such terms, one must not forget that “there can be no purely emic or purely etic analysis.” As Jean-Jacques Nattiez remarks, “we are of course obliged to accept the idea that the researcher . . . is capable of revealing facts,” yet, at the same time, any researcher should be willing to reconcile “emic data and etic data” by showing “the emic relevance” of their work ([1987] 1990: 196–7). This is why I will conclude this chapter with the words of four professional songwriters from the “age of rock” touching upon the subject of the AABA form. A laureate of the Polar Music Prize in 2001, the first of these songwriters, Burt Bacharach, has been described as one of “the most inventive of the ‘Brill Building’-style songwriters” in the 1960s (Campbell 1996: 240). Remembering his strained relationships with A&R men at the time, he explains in his autobiography that most pop songs have two verses and then a bridge that leads to the final verse . . . In the beginning, I wrote in that format, because I thought it was the correct way to do it, but then without really intending to do so, I began breaking the rules. (Bacharach with Greenfield 2013: 64—my emphases)

Paul Simon—the second of these songwriters—was also associated with the Brill Building throughout his career. In his contribution to George Martin’s Making Music, he does not say whether this was where he got acquainted with the AABA song form, but he does use the example of what he calls “a simple A, A, B, A—verse, verse, bridge, verse—[song]” to describe his “writing process” (1984: 67—my emphases). A native of Birmingham, the third songwriter, John Carter, joined Denmark Street in the early 1960s, and cosigned hits for the Ivy League, Herman’s Hermits, Peter and Gordon, the Music Explosion, or Brenda Lee during

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that same decade. In an interview with musicologist Gordon Thompson, he goes through his favored “song structures . . . such as AABA and its variants,” and evokes the songwriting routine he and Ken Lewis developed at the time in the following terms: “you did verse one, verse two, middle eight, maybe a solo, went back to the middle again, and finish[ed with] a verse” (quoted in Thompson 2008: 196—my emphases). Finally, the words of the fourth songwriter, Paul McCartney, are all the more precious because they concern a song whose example I have already used to illustrate diverging views on how to label the A and B sections of an AABA form in the context of postwar popular music. Hailed as “the most popular song of all time” (Sandford 2005: 11), “the most covered song in the world” (Vincent 2015), or the song whose recording received more radio plays in the United States than any other record in history (Everett 2001: 300), the song in question is no other than “Yesterday.” McCartney waking up with the melody running through his head one morning in May 1965 is an oft-­told story, but it may be less well known that he first used it to set to music words like “scrambled eggs, oh, my baby, how I love your legs.” As he confessed in an interview with biographer Barry Miles, it was only later in the month, while driving from Lisbon to Bruce Welch’s villa in Albufeira, that he came up with more suitable lyrics. It was a long and dusty drive . . . when I’m sitting that long in a car I can either manage to get to sleep or my brain starts going. I remember mulling over the tune “Yesterday,” and suddenly getting these little one-­word openings to the verse. I started to develop the idea: Scram-­ble-d eggs, da-­da da. I knew the syllables had to match the melody, obviously: da-­da da, yes-­ter-day, sud-­den-ly, fun-­il-ly, mer-­il-ly, and Yes-­ter-day, that’s good. (Miles 1997: 204—my emphasis)

In other words, be it from the etic perspective of the likes of Alan Pollack, or from McCartney’s emic perspective,“Yesterday” is indeed a “verse-­bridge” song. As for its overall AABABA (or “verse-­verse-­bridge-­verse-bridge-­verse”) formal design, the parallel with the way Billie Holiday, Sarah Vaughan, Anita O’Day, or the Ink Spots extended “I Cover the Waterfront”’s AABA core when performing it as a verseless song confirms, if need be, the continuity between the thirty-­two-bar AABA pattern of interwar Tin Pan Alley songs and the verse-bridge form of an era when the music industry . . . succeeded in subverting the powerful response to early rock ’n’ roll, retaining the term “rock ’n’ roll” while substituting a musical style (invoking the aesthetic of latter-­day Tin Pan Alley) and a new type of performer . . . more congenial to its own traditions. (Hamm 1995: 191)

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Notes 1 It is noteworthy that this trend also shows through the evolution of songwriters’ approach to formal design during the 1930s and 1940s—examples of AABA verseless songs from that period include Otto Harbach and Jerome Kern’s “Smoke Gets in Your Eyes” (1933), Dorothy Fields and Jerome Kern’s “The Way You Look Tonight” (1936), Johnny Mercer and Hoagy Carmichael’s “Skylark” (1941), and Ira Gershwin and Kurt Weill’s “My Ship” (1941). 2 As David Jasen explains, the song was originally composed “to be used in the film of the same name starring Claudette Colbert and Ben Lyon. However, the movie was completed before the song was written,” and it was only “after Ben Bernie and his orchestra plugged it on his radio show, [that] the sound track was rescored to include the song” (2003: 195–6). 3 On this issue, see Charles Hamm (1979), for whom “the verse-­chorus form of the Tin Pan Alley functions in much the same way as the recitative-­aria patterns in opera.” He also speculates that, “in the 1920s, [the verse] was often omitted in performance away from the stage . . . because the dramatic setting of a song was unimportant when it was heard over the radio or from a phonograph recording” (359). 4 To summarize, Fabbri defines the hook as the catchiest passage in a song, which may appear in “the chorus, or even the verse,” and whose “lyrics (or part of them) are . . . used as the song’s title” ([1996] 2008a: 161). Admittedly, this is not really different from Steven Smith’s, Arnold Shaw’s, John Shepherd’s, or Gary Burns’s evocation of “a short refrain line containing the song’s title,” except that those four authors make it clear that the term may also refer to “a danceable rhythmic figure . . . a sonically melodic distinctive fill” (Smith 2009: 311), “an appealing musical sequence or phrase, a bit of harmony or sound, or a rhythmic figure that grabs . . . a listener” (Shaw 1982: 177), “the tone color of a singer’s voice and of the song’s instrumentation” (Shepherd 2003: 563), or “something [that can be] as insubstantial as a ‘sound’ (such as da doo ron ron)” (Burns 1987: 1). At the same time, Fabbri’s restricting his definition to the first meaning makes it reminiscent of those definitions that may be found in reference books like the New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians below “refrain”—that is, a term that refers, “in poetry, [to] a phrase or verse that recurs at interval, especially at the end of a stanza,” and that, when “applied to more recent vocal music . . . usually means that both melody and text are recurrent” (Stevens and Tilmouth 1980). In short, if “refrains . . . are,” for most English-­speaking writers, “common contexts for melodic hooks” (Burns 1987: 8), under Fabbri’s pen, the refrain becomes the hook itself. 5 Here too, it is worth noting that the harmonic pattern underlines this change of mood—the first A section ends on a half-­close, and the third and final A section on a full close.

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6 Another contemporary example may be found in the lyrics of Richard Rodgers and Lorenz Hart’s “Blue Moon” (1934). 7 See, for example, the work of David Brackett ([1995] 2000), Stephen Valdez (2002), Richard Middleton (1999; 2003d), John Covach (2005: 69–71; 2006; 2009: G–1; 2010), Walter Everett (2009), Jay Summach (2011), Robert Toft (2011), or Allan Moore (2012).

8

Standard Jazz Harmony and the Constraints of Hypermeter Some Thoughts on Regular and Irregular Repetition Keith Salley and Daniel T Shanahan

As unpredictable as jazz may seem, standard jazz repertoire is usually under­ pinned by regular and repetitive metric structures.1 These structures induce periodicity at multiple levels. Let us consider the structure of a basic thirty-­ two-­bar jazz standard with four eight-­bar sections: the 4⁄4 meter establishes regularly alternating strong and weak beats at the level of the measure;2 however, the measures themselves group into quadruple hypermeasures, with their own alternating strong and weak hyperbeats consisting of a measure apiece; and at yet another level, pairs of these hypermeasures may group into larger hyperbeats so that each section of a tune is heard as a single hypermeasure. Several writers have commented on the pervasiveness of hypermeter in standard jazz repertoire.3 Keith Waters takes the idea to its logical culmination when he examines how alternating strong and weak eight-­bar sections create thirty-­two bar quadruple hypermeasures at the level of a standard’s form—the highest level at which one would expect repetition to occur (1996: 22). As for Steven Strunk, he comes closest to summarizing the role that jazz’s foursquare metric background plays in establishing expectations in standard jazz, noting how “the utter simplicity and rigidity of these rhythmic structures highlight the complexity and subtlety of the jazz rhythmic nuances and syncopations which proliferate against the basic duple pulse” (1979: 6). Amongst the elements that proliferate against jazz’s various metric levels is the II–V–I progression (hereafter, “cycle”). A perusal through any jazz fake book or primer on jazz theory will confirm that cycles (and their incomplete II–V half-­cycles) are ubiquitous in straight-­ahead jazz, usually occurring in various keys within the same arrangement. However, the repetition of cycles is highly

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irregular; cycles vary in length, and often overlap with or interrupt other cycles. Consequently, this chapter considers two kinds of repetition along and between two parameters: harmony and meter. It investigates how the irregular yet frequent repetitions of the aforementioned cycles interact with jazz’s regularly repetitive and multi-­leveled metric structure.4 In dealing with harmonic groupings and their interaction with various metric levels, it also puts finishing touches on our 2016 study on the conditions under which certain harmonic patterns occur—in short, the latter study addressed the most common of those patterns, whereas the present chapter focuses on less frequent patterns in an effort to identify more specifically the constraints that hypermeter, as a regularly repetitive phenomenon, places upon harmonic organization in jazz.

The interaction of repeating parameters: cycle length and cycle strength In the following pages, we try and explain how two domains characterized by repetition in standard jazz repertoire (namely, the metric and harmonic domains) interact. Given the irregularity of cycle lengths and repetitions, is it possible to be more specific about how cycles fall across the foursquare metric structures that underlie so much of this repertoire? What exactly do we mean by a “II–V–I cycle”? Even though cycle lengths vary, harmonies in a normative cycle take on a harmonic rhythm with the succession of proportions 1+1+2, as shown in example 8.1.5 In practice, however, cycles are not always so “pure.” Often, the tonic is embellished by a substitute harmony such as VI or IV (see Example 8.2a).6 A new cycle may also begin in the second half of a cycle tonic’s sounding space, creating overlap (see Example 8.2b). Or, a cycle tonic’s sounding space may even be extended (usually doubled, as shown in Example 8.2c), or interrupted (Example 8.2d). All in all, such variations make recurrences of cycles very irregular. In our 2016 study on the taxonomy of cycles, we discuss how cycle tonics—as locally important points of arrival, or “structural accents”—sound against strong and weak hyperbeats. We explain how weak cycles reach tonic resolution on weak hyperbeats 2 and 4, while strong cycles reach tonic resolution on strong hyperbeats

Example 8.1a  Normative two-­bar cycle.

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Example 8.1b  Normative four-­bar cycle.

Example 8.2a  Common variations on the cycle: embellishment of a tonic’s sounding space.

Example 8.2b  Common variations on the cycle: overlap of a two-­bar cycle upon a purported four-­bar cycle.

Example 8.2c  Common variations on the cycle: extended tonic space in a two-­bar cycle.

Example 8.2d  Common variations on the cycle: interruption of a purported four-­bar cycle by a two-­bar cycle.

1 and 3. These relationships hold so far as prominent cycles (i.e., those occurring at or near the onset of a hypermeasure) or recurrent cycles of the same length encourage hearing at specific hypermetric levels. For example, the tonics of weak and strong two-­bar cycles in Table 8.1 interact with four-­bar hypermeasures, with weak cycles reaching tonics on weak hyperbeats, and strong cycles falling on strong hyperbeats. Similarly, the tonics of weak and strong four-­bar cycles fall on the onsets of weak and strong hyperbeats of eight-­bar hypermeasures, respectively.7 Taking into account the various forms that cycles may take, but also the effects that these cycles create as their structural accents fall against rigid hypermetric structures, a compelling interplay of harmony, rhythm—and, ultimately, form— emerges. At the center of this interplay are repetitions of two kinds: the irregular repetitions of harmonic (i.e., cyclic) activity, and the regular repetition of

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Table 8.1  Weak and strong cycles at two- and four-­bar levels.

alternating strong and weak hyperbeats. These pages engage with standard jazz repertoire at this level of interplay, showing how the rigid periodicity of hypermeter provides a steady backdrop against which the nuances of harmonic rhythm come to light.

Hypermetric constraint The relationship between cycle length and hypermetric orientation is difficult to address, as listeners can always direct their attention to whatever hypermetric level they wish (or to none at all, perhaps), regardless of a composition’s harmonic profile. Between the repertoire’s consistent segmentations of four and eight bars and the cycle’s even alternation of weak (pre-­dominant–dominant) and strong (tonic) functions, we find the aforementioned interplay of harmony and form that is essential to jazz’s momentum. This raises some important questions: why do cycles typically either reinforce hypermetric patterning by placing their weak and strong harmonic functions in perfect alignment with weak and strong hyperbeats, or sound directly against them, aligning weak harmonic functions with strong beats, and strong harmonic functions with weak ones? What accounts for the rarity of cycles that align with hypermeasures asymmetrically? To answer these questions, we must address what cycles do not do, which brings us to the topic of “hypermetric constraint” (hereafter, HC). In 2016, we briefly introduced this topic, observing that a cycle is generally constrained to begin at divisions of a hypermeasure that are equal to half of that cycle’s length.8 Example 8.3 models weak and strong cycles at the two-­bar, four-­beat, and four-­bar levels (compare this with Table 8.1). It also models unlikely settings—those that would violate HC—at each of these levels.

Standard Jazz Harmony and the Constraints of Hypermeter

Example 8.3a  Likely and unlikely settings of cycles: two-­bar cycles and four-­bar hypermeasures.

Example 8.3b  Likely and unlikely settings of cycles: four-­beat cycles and two-­bar hypermeasures.

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This study’s corpus—a digital collection of 688 jazz standards from the years 1920 to 19599—features few passages that do violate HC. In fact, no true violations occur with four-­beat and two-­bar cycles. One might already expect that to be the case with two-­bar cycles, since tonics generally fall on the downbeats of measures. While this is true, weak four-­beat cycles are also known to occur where tonics sound at the relatively weak mid-­measure point. The only true violations we discovered involved purportedly four-­bar cycles in patterns similar to the unlikely cycles shown in Example 8.3c.10 Moreover, each violating cycle began on a downbeat. This consistency with downbeats suggests that there may be some underlying constraint that limits either cyclic patterning or harmonic

Example 8.3c  Likely and unlikely settings of cycles: four-­bar cycles and eight-­bar hypermeasures.

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rhythm even more generally than HC—at least with respect to the level of specificity afforded by lead sheets. For our present purposes, it is nevertheless clear that one cannot answer the questions raised at the beginning of this section without addressing HC. Considering the irregular yet persistent cyclic activity that sounds across such repetitive and re cursively hierarchical metric structures in standard jazz repertoire; we find the idea that meter seems to place a constraint on harmonic organization curious indeed. Amongst other things, this chapter aims at explaining those few actual and apparent violations of HC.

Violations of hypermetric constraint: Bookending and sequences Most arrangements of tunes in standard jazz repertoire respect HC, whether the original tunes are written by “American songbook” composers or jazz musicians themselves.11 Amongst the 688 jazz standards of our corpus, a surprisingly small number truly violate HC.12 This section discusses those violations and the very limited contexts in which they arise, as well as near-­violations and the processes/ phenomena that put cycles back into alignment. In so doing, it speaks to the ongoing issue of how periodic hypermetric structures interact with irregularly repetitive harmonic patterns.

Bookending Outright violations of HC—where a cycle reaches tonic between hyperbeats— seem to occur only in two contexts: “bookending” and falling-­fifth sequences.13 In the case of “bookending,” a tonic precedes a cycle within a hypermeasure in such a way that the tonic places the following cycle out of alignment. As a result, tonics appear to play the role of “bookends,” with a II–V progression between them. Example 8.4 illustrates where (what would seem to be) a four-­bar cycle starts in the second measure of an eight-­bar section, and again in the fifth measure.14 Often, the initial tonic in a bookended progression is embellished with a passing chord (e.g., Edim7 at m. 2, G H dim7 at m. 5). At first, the cycle and its constrained relationship with meter seem subordinate to the need for an opening gambit that establishes tonic, just as many classical phrases open with the progression I–V4/3– V6/5–I, with no change in harmonic rhythm. In such situations, the repetition of

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Example 8.4  “Among My Souvenirs” (Horatio Nicholls/Al Dubin-Edgar Leslie), mm. 1–17.

tonics at half-­section “bookends” (mm. 1, 4, 5, and 8) would seem to override HC, as the tonics of four-­bar cycles should not occur at the fourth and eighth measures of a section. In effect, however, this violation is illusory: the tonic harmonies at mm. 5 and 9 effectively accommodate the four-­bar cycles’ length despite their apparent misalignment, so much so that we recognize how m. 1 actually functions as an anacrusis. This adjustment shifts the hypermetric downbeat to m. 2 and makes an extra measure at the end of the second A section necessary. Despite the change in chord quality over E H in the second ending, this added measure accommodates the four-­bar cycle’s length, and preserves the length of hyperbeat that four-­bar cycles establish. In this way, the effect of the violation is nullified. Chord substitutions may also obscure the bookending phenomenon, as in Example 8.5 (mm. 6–8, 14–16), a true violation where the initial Em7 at m. 5 sounds instead of CMaj715 (the subsequent E H dim7 is a passing chord). Bookending almost always occurs in A sections, serving an expository, tonic-­ prolongational function. An unusual case involves our corpus’s arrangement of Hoagy Carmichael’s “Stardust” (see Example 8.6). In this example, a number of embellishing chords mask what is essentially an eight-­measure bookend in the global tonic, DH major.16 Several factors make this cycle difficult to perceive. One such factor is length—spanning eight measures, this cycle is relatively large. The resultant effect is exacerbated when performers play the tune at ballad tempos,

Example 8.5  “I’m in the Mood for Love” (Jimmy McHugh/Dorothy Fields), mm. 1–16.

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Example 8.6  “Stardust” (Hoagy Carmichael), mm. 5–12.

as they typically do. Furthermore, the extra chords (especially the embellishing harmonies at mm. 6, 7, and 10) also detract from the effect of this larger-­scale bookend progression, as the resultant harmonic rhythm certainly discourages hearing at the level of the sixteen-­bar hypermeasure. Perhaps most unusual is the fact that this segment straddles two eight-­bar hypermeasures, crossing over from an A section into what one would consider the B section of a thirty-­two bar ABAC chorus.

Falling-­fifth sequences The second context in which violations occur involves falling-­fifth harmonic sequences. Here, another type of repetition—a simple pattern of root motion— takes place, the continuation of which detracts significantly from our ability to notice the violation. As in common-­practice tonality, harmonic norms are often not heeded in sequences.17 In standard jazz repertoire, this disregard may affect cycle placement.18 Example 8.7 presents a very well-­known standard in which what purports to be a four-­bar cycle begins at m. 2. This is the “wrong” place for a cycle of this length to begin (i.e., between hyperbeats) and the cycle reaches tonic at m. 4 at an equally “wrong” place. In all such occurrences in our corpus, the sounding time for the cycle’s tonic is cut in half as falling-­fifth motion continues through the section. The tonic is established weakly in this hypermetric

Example 8.7  “All the Things You Are” (Jerome Kern/Oscar Hammerstein II), mm. 1–8.

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Example 8.8  “Fly Me to the Moon” (Bart Howard), mm. 1–8.

Example 8.9  “Bouncing with Bud” (Bud Powell), mm. 33–40.

position, and here—as in most cases where cycles occur within falling-­fifth sequences—a tonic is more strongly established shortly thereafter (mm. 6–7). As for Example 8.8, it presents an especially interesting case, as two violations occur within the same falling-­fifth sequence. Still, stronger resolutions to the global tonic occur later in the section (mm. 9–16, not shown). A more exceptional situation arises in Example 8.9, where an embellished eight-­bar cycle in the key of the global tonic, BH, arrives at the very end of an eight-­bar section. The embellishing harmonies across the first four measures of this group detract from the effect of the cycle onset at the third measure.19 As in Example 8.6, a purported eight-­bar cycle is truncated by constraints imposed by the standard length of sections in this repertoire. These examples present several violations and near-­violations of HC. In each of these cases, however, a listener’s sense of hypermeter—that sense of weak/ strong rhythmic periodicity that structures expectations—is clearly maintained. Furthermore, we note the diminished effectiveness of cycles that do violate HC, and how such passages often lead to non-­violating cycles that are more effective in establishing their respective keys. As hypermeter is the parameter of jazz that is more regularly repetitive, it appears to exert a controlling influence in both directions. At the macro level, it typically determines the durations of formal units, but at the micro level, it influences harmonic content.

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Near-­violations of hypermetric constraint The foregoing discusses conditions in which recognizable cycles occur in hypermetrically unusual situations—situations where cycle tonics sound between the hyperbeats suggested by the prevailing harmonic rhythm. In these cases, cycles are typically truncated in order that harmonic groupings fit within hypermeasures or sections (see Examples 5, 7, 8, and 9), further demonstrating that the hierarchy of standard jazz’s regular and periodic metric structure places limits on its harmonic organization. In the examples that follow, other adjustments are made to either align the tonics of cycles with regular hypermetrically salient positions, or avoid closure altogether.

Dominant extension Our first type of adjustment is dominant extension. In general, instances of dominant extension are marked by cycles whose dominants sound twice as long as they normally would. Usually, extension accomplishes one of the two following things: it either moves the subsequent tonic into a position that is more metrically stable or it provides a similarly auspicious place for an interruption by another cycle. In either case, direct repetition of the local dominant distorts the normative proportions of the off-­kilter cycle to bring cyclic activity back into alignment. Example 8.10 illustrates a situation where extension allows for a more metrically stable cycle tonic. Given the somewhat unusual entrance of the modally borrowed II chord at mm. 6 and 14, the normative harmonic rhythm of cycles would lead one to expect a G major tonic to follow after only two beats of D7. However, the sounding space of the dominant harmony is extended, so it allows the G major tonic to sound on a downbeat—the proper place for the structural accent of a two-­bar cycle to sound.

Example 8.10  “It’s Only a Paper Moon” (Harold Arlen), mm. 1–16.

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Example 8.11  “Nature Boy” (eden abhez), mm. 5–12.

Example 8.11 shows a similar situation at a slower harmonic rhythm. Here, the resolution to A7( H 9) after one measure of Em7( H 5) suggests that a four-­bar cycle will follow. The additional measure of dominant harmony— essentially, repetition through extension—places the tonic in a hypermetrically strong position with respect to the eight-­bar hypermeter appropriate for four-­bar cycles.

Interruption Interruption, a second type of adjustment in which a cycle begins where another’s tonic would have sounded, allows passages to avoid tonics altogether. In Example 8.12, a purported four-­bar cycle begins on Dm7 at m. 22 (the sixth measure of an eight-­bar B section) in apparent violation of hypermetric constraint. However, a cycle of shorter duration interrupts at the eighth measure, setting up a return to the tune’s global tonic at the onset of the ensuing A section. Interrupted cycles therefore do not violate HC, as they never come to closure by reaching the tonic that would accentuate a hypermeasure oddly. Interruptions necessarily turn cycles into half-­cycles, but they do so by dint of irregular cyclic repetition, continuing the context of II–V and II–V–I activity, and creating a considerable sense of directed harmonic motion.

Example 8.12  “Moonlight Becomes You” (Jimmy Van Heusen/Johnny Burke), mm. 21–28.

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Mistaken harmonic identity Another phenomenon that only initially appears to violate HC involves a simple case of mistaken harmonic identity—namely a confusion of II–V and VI–V/V. Unlike dominant extension and interruption, this is not an adjustment. When both progressions feature the same sequence of chord types with falling-­ fifth root motion (e.g., Am7[or Am7( H5)]–D7), and when cycles are known to occur at any level of transposition, a certain degree of confusion between the two is understandable. While twenty-­four arrangements in our corpus feature the progression VI–V/V in a manner that appears to violate HC, a few factors usually weigh against one’s ultimately hearing that progression as cyclic. The first is a well-­established key center, which will prevent one’s mistaking VI for II. Whenever the progression VI–V/V arises in disguise of an apparent violation of HC in our corpus, it does so within a passage that exhibits a clearly established tonality—and, in all cases, this tonality is the key of the global tonic.20

Alignment Other factors may naturally detract from one’s hearing such a progression as a true cycle. One such factor is alignment. When alignment plays a role, the initial chord of an apparent cycle (i.e., the minor seventh chord) lasts for the duration of the final bar of a hypermeasure and the stronger hypermetric position of the following dominant chord encourages one to begin grouping harmonies there. This encouragement is often strengthened by the logical succession of harmonies that ensues. For instance, Example 8.13 presents a situation where alignment is a significant factor. While Am7–D7 (mm. 28–29) does suggest a II–V motion, the weak alignment of Am7 and the subsequently strong alignment of D7—followed by G7 and C6—encourages one to ignore the implication of an HC violation and hear a weak four-­bar cycle (with D7 substituting for Dm7) begin at m. 29 instead

Example 8.13  “You’d Be So Nice to Come Home To” (Cole Porter), mm. 25–32.

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(note the overlapping turnaround at m. 32).21 Alignment was a factor in nine of our twenty-­four instances of mistaken identity (37.5 percent).22

V/V extension Yet another factor involves extending the sounding space of V/V, usually by doubling its purported sounding time. Such extension may be observed in ten instances where mistaken identity occurs (41.7 percent). Like the dominant extension discussed above, extension of this kind adjusts an apparent cycle that arises in violation of HC so that it is no longer in violation when the cycle tonic (or an interrupting cycle) arrives. In Example 8.14, what would appear to be a two-­bar cycle in G major begins halfway through m. 22. The D7, as V/V in the global key of C, extends an extra two beats, which accounts for G falling on the downbeat of the final measure of the section. This is a stylistically appropriate place for the tonic of a two-­bar cycle to fall, so that one may experience a local cycle with extended dominant. However, one can also hear a larger cycle (with D7 substituting for Dm7) begin at m. 23—a cycle that places the tune’s global tonic at the downbeat of a new section and has no issues related to alignment. Example 8.15 shows a comparable situation with a slower harmonic rhythm. Here, where the global tonic is BH, a parallel interruption occurs at m. 9, where an extended V/V (C7) resolves to II (Cm7) and a weak four-­bar cycle (with VI embellishing I at m. 12) ensues.23

Linking closure Example 8.14 exhibits what we refer to as linking closure, a factor common to cases where VI–V/V resembles II–V. Linking closure is the form-­functional role of leading directly through the conclusion of a section and providing a link with a

Example 8.14  “Just You, Just Me” (Jesse Greer), mm. 21–28.

Example 8.15  “The Boy Next Door” (Hugh Martin/Ralph Blaine), mm. 5–12.

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tonic at the beginning of the section that follows. Fourteen of twenty-­four instances of mistaken identity feature linking closure (58.3 percent). While dominant-­ seventh chord qualities do sometimes substitute for tonics in jazz repertoire, the G7 at m. 24 of this arrangement sets up the return of the global tonic at the onset of the following A section. Thus, a number of factors weigh against one’s hearing the progression Am7–D7–G7 as some blues-­based variant of a cycle with a dominant seventh chord type functioning as tonic. The position of G7 in this section of the arrangement, its role in setting up the global tonic (which is rather strongly established throughout the tune) at the easily predictable onset of the next section, and the extension of the D7 chord are factors that may discourage listeners from hearing a cycle there at all. A listener is more likely to hear the D7 at m. 23 as a dominant substitute for Dm7, and notice a cycle starting there.

Hypermetrically stronger cycles In all cases of mistaken identity, a more plausible, hypermetrically stronger cycle arises, rectifying what would have been a violation. In this way, repetition as cyclic (or half-­cyclic) recurrence prevents a violation of HC from occurring. When alignment is a factor, the recurrence of a stronger cycle at a broader rhythmic level is preventative. In cases of extension, repetition at a lower rhythmic level (i.e., doubling the sounding space of V/V) fulfills this function. In Example 8.14, extension and linking closure work together to alter an ostensible cycle. And in Example 8.15, extension (m. 8) and interruption (m. 9) combine efforts. In truth, such factors work in concert more often than not when cycles are in play. But with standard jazz repertoire’s limited number of basic chord types, its abundance of dominant seventh and secondary dominant seventh chords, and its predilection for falling-­fifth motion, one might expect more than twenty-­four instances of mistaken identity in a corpus of 688 compositions. That so few instances arise is testament to the subordinate relationship that harmony plays with respect to meter—and even form—in this repertoire. This section began, however, by discussing two harmonic idioms that seem to function as adjustments preventing violations of HC: dominant extension and interruption. It is noteworthy that both of these idioms involve repetition in some way. With respect to the former, the immediate repetition of a cycle’s dominant allows a cycle tonic to fall at a more hypermetrically appropriate place. When interruption occurs, it is the more abstract repetition of the harmonic convention that is the cycle. As discussed at the end of the previous section, the regular and

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hierarchical repetition of hypermeter appears to govern harmonic content. In that domain, standard jazz’s hypermetric regularity forces adjustments—we found no instances where a violating or nearly ­violating cycle resulted in an adjustment of hypermetric structure. The steadfastness of hypermeter in the examples above (and throughout our corpus) suggests that it is a governing force in standard jazz repertoire—a force that constrains the placement of conventional harmonic groupings, and even leads to the creation of other harmonic idioms. In short, the repetition and regularity of jazz’s hypermetric structure creates the sturdy backdrop against which less predictable—yet stylistically consistent events may happen.

Case study: Sam Lewis and John Klenner’s “Just Friends” Example 8.16 presents an arrangement of a complete thirty-­two bar ABAC standard with a global tonic of G for consideration. As such, the periodic form of the tune provides the quintessentially foursquare backdrop against which we may appreciate variations in harmonic strength and activity, as well as many of the phenomena discussed above. While much of the harmony here is involved with repetitions of cycles, the majority of these cycles are not, as one might say, “pure.” Cycles in this arrangement resolve deceptively, undergo interruption, substitution, and extension. Moreover, we shall see that at least two cases of mistaken identity arise. The first complete cycle begins at m. 3—a strong four-­bar cycle that resolves deceptively to the global tonic GMaj7 at m. 5.24 A purportedly strong cycle of the same length begins immediately afterward at m. 7, but is interrupted at m. 9 with the first cycle of the tune that is completely in the tonic key. When the Em7 that embellishes GMaj7 at m. 12 leads to A7 in the following measure, a violation of HC would seem to sound. Such a hearing, however, would mistake VI–V/V for a true cycle. The extension of A7 at m. 14 casts further doubt on the presence of a true cycle having begun at m. 12, and any implication of arrival at a local D tonic is thwarted with the entrance of Am7 at m. 15. The passage across mm. 15–17 is curious. As the D7 at m. 16 follows m. 15’s Am7, it suggests that a strong four-­bar cycle continues in the global tonic. While this cycle would reach its tonic at m. 17, the G7 in the second half of m. 16 comes too early. To put it another way, a G7-as-­tonic in the second half of m. 16 (with a substitution of dominant-­seventh quality) would violate HC. This chord does, however, enable a strong two-­bar cycle in C major to arise (altered, with D7 substituting for Dm7). A cycle in this key is necessary for the tune’s return to its A section, which starts on CMaj7.25 What makes the passage doubly interesting

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Example 8.16  “Just Friends” (John Klenner/Sam Lewis), mm. 1–32.

is that, retrospectively, the Am7–D7 resolution across mm. 15–16 sounds as VI–V/V in the key of C major. In this way, a case of mistaken identity can be heard to arise in a prominent key other than the global tonic. From a broader perspective, then, the passage across mm. 12–17 features two cases of mistaking VI–V/V for II–V, as apparent half-­cycles in two keys vie for some sort of closure at the end of the tune’s first half. The first case—in the global key of G—involves

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Em7–A7 across mm. 12–13. Soon after, Am7–D7 creates mistaken identity in the “wrong” key of C major—almost by sleight of hand—just as the song’s lyrics refer to one’s pretending that the ending is not really near.26 Another case of mistaking VI–V/V for II–V arises in the arrangement’s C section (mm. 25–32). Here, the Em7 at m. 28 is the tonic of a weak two-­bar cycle, and not an embellishment of a cycle tonic, as it was at m. 12. The A7 that follows at m. 29 suggests a violation of HC, as did the harmony at m. 13. Rather than extend the A7 into another measure (as at m. 14), a parallel interruption by a strong two-­bar cycle begins at m. 30. This new cycle provides closure in the global tonic at m. 31—a hypermetrically strong place. And a turnaround at m. 32 sets up the return of C major at the onset of the A section upon repeating. In “Just Friends,” cyclic activity that is both repetitive and irregular sounds against a rigid and unvaried hypermetric structure whose periodic fluctuations of strong and weak allow us to qualify the strength of each cycle. The arrangement of cycles in this composition and their varying strengths create a compelling large-­scale form as well. Strong four-­bar cycles and long-­sounding tonics characterize the A sections. Contrastingly, sections B and C present weaker cycles, with a greater amount of harmonic activity in general. Repetitions of grouping lengths in the A sections and fluctuations in overall activity are reflected in the melody to a certain extent (not shown). Four-­bar melodic groupings sound in the A sections as repeated musical ideas in sequence.27 The B and C sections feature two-­bar segments, but also with sequential repetition. In a way, each half of the tune takes on the form of a sixteen-­bar sentence, with eight-­bar presentation phrases in the A sections (avoided cadences at mm. 8 and 24), followed by continuation phrases with fragmented and rhythmically busier passages that ultimately lead to strong cadences (see Caplin 1998: 69–70). The role of the VI–V/V (Em7–A7) progressions, occurring where they do, is to weaken the arrivals on the global tonic G major at m. 11 and E minor at m. 28, and allow these alleged continuation phrases to continue—while, at the same time, providing that familiar sequence of chords (i.e., the cycle) whose repetition lends the composition greater coherence.

Conclusion The pervasiveness of regular quadruple hypermeter in standard jazz repertoire directs our attention to the consistent alternation of strong and weak beats at

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multiple levels. Given the near-­ubiquity in this repertoire of II–V–I cycles and II–V half-­cycles of various lengths sounding at various levels of transposition, we cannot help but notice how irregular repetitions of nonetheless recurrent harmonic groupings interact with these highly periodic and repetitive metric structures. Further analysis of our corpus reveals that cycles behave in manners that are, if not predictable, easily accounted for at the very least. The examples above illustrate a number of situations in which the alignment of harmonies with respect to meter seems divergent. Throughout these situations, it is meter—the more regularly repetitive parameter—that constrains and directs harmony. When bookending occurs, an “extra” or seemingly “added” measure of harmony can preserve the foursquare hypermetric structure. In instances of falling-­fifth harmonic sequences, dominant extension, and mistaken identity (with either extension or alignment), a hypermetrically stronger cycle arises that lays any ambiguity to rest. It is also notable that bookending and dominant extension entertain the idea of simple harmonic repetition, both immediate and non-­immediate, respectively. On the other hand, violations of HC involving falling-­fifth sequences continue an established pattern of root movement. Interruption requires cyclic repetition (usually at another level of transposition), and cases of mistaken identity require either the same, or direct repetition through dominant extension. Our 2016 study raised the question of whether hypermetric constraint places a limit on where a cycle may start, or where that cycle may reach accentuation by resolving to tonic (13). By focusing, in the same repertoire, on instances where violations—or, at least, “near-­violations”—occur, this study makes HC appear as a characteristic of standard jazz that places a limitation on where cycle tonics may fall. After all, a small number of arrangements do feature cycles that start in ways that appear to violate HC. Yet, intervening processes such as interruption and dominant extension rectify the infringements, as if the initial harmonies of the off-­kilter cycles were only threatening to “offend.” One may of course wonder what the ultimate percentage of HC violations is in our corpus, as well as how to qualify a true violation. We believe that a true violation need not be a complete cycle with normative 1+1+2 harmonic rhythm. However, for a cycle to truly violate HC, it must present a II and a V of equal length, and then resolve to a harmony of tonic function. The tonic chord may be of a variety of chord types (Maj7, 6, m7, m6, 7), it may be embellished, or it may encounter an overlapping cycle. Furthermore, the cycle may even resolve deceptively to its tonic, though the final harmony of the violating cycle must

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unequivocally fulfill a tonic function. Using this qualification, we find only ten arrangements out of 688 that truly violate HC (c. 1.5 percent). When considering how cycles and half-­cycles (and even apparent, or ostensible cycles) interact with hypermetric structures, creating strong and weak patterning that either aligns with hypermetric accents or aligns perfectly—that is, symmetrically—against them, we are actually considering relationships between harmony and form. Standard jazz is certainly not the only repertoire that allows us to contemplate such relationships, but its repetitive characteristics do lead to interesting questions and discoveries. One such discovery—beyond that of HC itself, or of the difference between strong and weak cycles—is that form in jazz seems to be metrically determined, with harmony and melody behaving with respect to higher levels of metric organization. Our research has addressed several questions and discoveries, but more questions remain. For example, why do none of our true violations involve two-­bar or four-­beat cycles? There seems to be a lower limit on cycle length in these cases— one that we suspect relates, again, to tonics and how they fall metrically. We can support this conclusion with the reasoning that a violating two-­bar or four-­beat cycle would place a tonic somewhere other than on a downbeat—such an alignment rarely happens in this repertoire.28 Of course, this conclusion leads to more questions, such as whether there is a more general metric constraint in standard jazz repertoire that limits harmonies of more than two beats to start on downbeats. More generally, venturing beyond relationships between form (as macro-­ rhythm) and harmony in standard jazz repertoire, we hope the previous pages contribute to our understanding of the nature of repetition in popular music in general. Such research indeed raises questions about how form and harmony may relate in other repertoires, and how other stylistic aspects not necessarily related to harmony—but perhaps as ubiquitous as cycles are in jazz—relate, through their repetitions and reincarnations, to regular and predictable formal phenomena.

Appendix The iRealB corpus used for this study is a modified version of that originally presented in Shanahan and Broze (2012), which gathered chord symbols from the “iReal Pro” suite of applications. This software is commonly used by jazz performers both as a practice aid and a substitute for collections of lead sheets.

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A companion web-­forum (www.irealb.com/forums/) allows users to post versions of standards and playlists for others to download. The collection of pieces includes harmonic progressions compiled from various fake books and other user submissions. Each lead sheet in this dataset consists of chord symbols and metric information (no melodic information is given), which were then converted into a notational format that can be used with David Huron’s Humdrum Toolkit (1995). In addition to this dataset, a series of parsers and scripts were also released, which allow this information to be processed in a clearly structured way (Broze and Shanahan 2013). Shanahan and Broze 2012 undertook a validation of the corpus, checking a sample of the pieces against twenty printed fake books. Overall, the corpus was roughly 94 percent accurate when representing chords from commonly used fake books. Although these publications can often reflect the performance of a single version of a piece, in effect canonizing a recording at the expense of many equally viable options, they have gradually come to represent jazz practice (for better or worse) and the “iRealB” corpus draws from an array of disparate publications and sources, which could possibly make the corpus even more representative of jazz practice than many printed editions. Because the original dataset covered a broad time period—from 1896 to 2007—it was necessary to restrict the corpus so that it would reflect the era of jazz standards that predates post-­bop, modal jazz, and bossa nova. Consequently, we only examined pieces that were composed between 1920 and 1959. Additionally, we restricted the pieces we looked at to those in which the measure count was divisible by eight. We also included twelve-­bar tunes to include the many blues-­derived compositions in the repertoire. These refinements reduced the original dataset of nearly 1,200 pieces to 688, with a nice representation of composers—the most frequently represented being Thelonious Monk, Duke Ellington, Charlie Parker, and Cole Porter. While most aspects of the lead sheet were left intact when converting from the “iRealB” format to the kern format, some features could not be translated. If a piece ended with a suggested turnaround (e.g., if the last measures included a II–V that would resolve on the I chord in the first measure of the piece after a repeat), we were not able to account for this resolution. Additionally, in the chord progressions in which using a multi-­measure repeat was used (resembling a percent sign), only the last chord was repeated. Both of these errors, however, happen so infrequently that we do not anticipate that it would significantly affect the results of any large-­scale corpus study.

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Finally, searching for standard jazz progressions digitally can create a sort of ontological dilemma. Defining a cycle as a II–V–I progression requires the assumption that such a progression can occur at any level of transposition, and is not necessarily related to the key at hand—a II–V progression obviously need not be a chord on the second scale degree moving to another built on the fifth scale degree. This is why we searched for harmonic progressions in which a minor, minor7 or minor7( H5) chord proceeded to a dominant chord (with any type of extension) by root motion of an ascending perfect fourth, and the resolution included the movement to a major6, major7, minor7, or even minor-­major7 (see also Broze and Shanahan 2013). Such choices allowed us to search for any of the aforementioned patterns in a flexible, yet accurate way. As for regular hypermetric units (such as a weak four-­bar unit), searching for these would merely require looking for all of the above patterns that begin on mm. 1, 5, 9, etc.

Notes 1 As in Salley and Shanahan 2016, we define standard jazz repertoire as compositions written by North American and British songbook composers, bandleaders, and jazz musicians from the 1920s through the 1950s. 2 Simple triple meter is less common in jazz, but when it does occur, it usually generates regular four- and eight-­bar hypermeasures. See, e.g., Thad Jones’s “A Child is Born” (1969), or Sergio Mihánovich’s “Sometime Ago” (1963). 3 See, e.g., Martin (1988); Forte (1995); Love (2012); or Mulholland and Hojnacki (2013). 4 This is, therefore, a matter of phrase rhythm—a consideration of the alignment of groupings against meter. While some recent publications have dealt with phrase rhythm in jazz, these have dealt primarily with melodic groupings. In addition to Waters (1996), see Love (2011, 2012, and 2013); and also Larson (2006). 5 Many authors present the cycle this way, rather than as a succession of chords of equal duration. See, e.g., Coker (1970; 91–172) and (1975: 33); Mehegan (1985: 93–6); Reeves (2007: 83–90); Nettles and Graf (1996: 36–7); Liebman (2001: 17–23); Mullholand and Hojnacki (2013: 32–4); and Terefenko (2014: 65–7). 6 Chord symbols in these examples reflect those of the authors’ iRealB corpus (see appendix), but differ in some ways from those in the text. While minor seventh chords are indicated with a hyphen in examples, running text employs the equally conventional “m7.” Similarly, “O7” and “dim7” are equivalent. 7 Although four-­beat and eight-­bar cycles do exist, the arrangements in this table account for the vast majority of cyclic activity in our corpus.

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8 Strong and weak four-­beat cycles are significantly less common, but they are similarly constrained to begin at divisions of an actual measure that are equal to half of their length. Six-­beat cycles rarely occur in 3⁄4 time, as harmonic rhythm does not typically exceed the limit of one chord per measure in this meter. 9 See the chapter’s appendix for a discussion of the corpus and how we use it. 10 A “purportedly four-­bar cycle” is one whose initial harmonic rhythm indicates a length of four bars, regardless of interruption, overlap, or other factors that may compromise cycle length. 11 Here, “arrangements” is preferable to “compositions” because of the difficulty in determining the actual Urtext of a composition. See Salley and Shanahan (2016: 5–7). 12 The nature and limits of our corpus are discussed in Salley and Shanahan (2016: 6–9). 13 Two violations not discussed here were also found in our corpus, but they are, for different reasons, not wholly representative of standard jazz. The first, across mm. 5–8 of “Just a Gigolo,” presents the progression ‖ II | II | V | I ‖, an apparent cycle with elongated II and truncated I. While this progression may be heard in the tune’s earliest dance recording by the European bandleader Dajos Béla (1929) [orig.“Schöner Gigolo”], it was a tango at the time. Popular jazz renditions (Louis Armstrong in 1931, Louis Prima in 1956) present harmonizations that do not violate HC. The second violation of HC in our corpus is found in the second half of the eight-­bar A sections of “Lullaby in Rhythm” (‖ G H Maj7 | Gm7 | C7 | FMaj7 (C7) ‖), again with an off-­kilter, ostensibly four-­bar cycle starting in the second measure. However, Benny Goodman’s earliest recorded arrangement (1938) does not violate HC, and uses the succession ‖ G H Maj7 | Gm7 C7 | Gm C7 | FMaj7 (C7) ‖ instead. 14 Some controversy exists as to who penned the lyrics to this song (see Lassler 2014: 96). 15 The substitution of III7 for I7 in major keys is common in jazz. See Mulholland and Hojnacki (2013: 7), or Terefenko (2014: 43–4). 16 Technically, eight-­bar cycles would violate HC if they did not begin at the onsets of four-­bar hyperbeats. 17 One only need think of how minor mediants or root progressions by diminished fifth occur in common-­practice harmonic sequences, but rarely anywhere else in that repertoire. 18 For a discussion of unconventional harmonic turns in sequences, see Laitz 2016: 413. 19 Furthermore, this eight-­bar section is not part of the arrangement’s repeating AABA form. It is a coda (C section) that is typically only played with the tune’s melody at the end of the performance. 20 One exception to this claim might be found in Cole Porter’s “You’d Be So Nice to Come Home To” (1943). Here, the bulk of the tune prolongs what is ultimately the global tonic’s relative minor, and only progresses to tonic (via VI–V/V–V–I) within the last five measures. See Example 8.13.

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21 Note also the tritone substitution of AH 7 for D7 at m. 29. This harmony does not alter the cycle, but merely prolongs the D7 by retaining its active tones: C and FG/GH. See Mulholland and Hojnacki (2013 :63–5), or Terefenko (2014: 152–53). 22 Instances of apparent violations of this sort were not counted more than once when they occurred in a repeated section. 23 Salley and Shanahan define a parallel interruption as a situation in which the initial harmony of an interrupting cycle has the same root as the dominant harmony in the interrupted cycle—hence a “parallel” change from dominant seventh to minor seventh chord types (2016: 24). 24 Salley and Shanahan discuss deceptive resolutions of cycles, making note of the fact that such resolutions sometimes target the global tonic—a phenomenon suggesting that it is actually the first half of the cycle that sounds deceptively, or at the “wrong” level of transposition (2016: 20–1). 25 For a discussion of substituting dominant-­seventh-chord types for both II and I of a cycle, see Salley and Shanahan (2016: 21). 26 The duality between these two keys plays out on larger levels as well, as both of the tune’s sections begin on CMaj7. This harmony would seem to represent the global tonic, but only at the conclusion of the form does the true tonic establish itself conclusively. 27 Note that since the accompanying four-­bar cycles in the A sections are strong, they will only align with melodic groupings by 50 percent. 28 Weak four-­beat cycles do place tonics in mid-­measure, but these are very uncommon, occurring only 21 times in ten pieces. Our corpus features no misaligned two-bar cycles.

9

A Psychological Perspective on Repetition in Popular Music Trevor de Clercq and Elizabeth Hellmuth Margulis

Over the past few decades, psychologists and musicologists have increasingly begun to work together to formulate cognitive perspectives on human music making. Over the past few years, researchers in this area have started to address a previously neglected aspect of music making: repetition. This has been studied through the lens of psycholinguistics, neuroscience, and cognitive psychology in On Repeat (Margulis 2014a). In the current chapter, we bring work on the psychology of musical repetition to bear on questions about the role of repetition in popular music—a style in which repetition abounds yet which often departs from the conventions of common-­practice-era music typically taught in the college classroom and used as stimuli in music cognition experiments (e.g., de Clercq and Temperley 2011; Temperley and de Clercq 2013). Our general approach is to appraise theories and findings about repetition derived from music psychology and reflect on how they might apply to popular music—both to its organizational principles and to the listening habits it elicits. Specifically, we concentrate on pop/rock music, which we take to embrace the broad array of commercial popular styles from around 1955 to the present day produced for a youth audience (following Covach 2009), including but not limited to: country, rap, R&B, heavy metal, grunge, soul, folk, electronica, hard rock, alternative, and blues. We see three principal ways in which repetition occurs within this diverse array of styles: (1) repetition within a song, such as the repetition of a particular chord progression or the reappearance of a musical passage (like a chorus) at various points in a song; (2) repetition of a song, by which we mean the way that modern music consumers will purposefully relisten to the same song or different versions of that song over many repeated hearings; and (3) repetition between songs, which we take to be those stylistic traits and attributes common to a large body of music. Although each of these three types

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of repetition can be understood through a variety of lenses, we filter our discussion of each through three central branches of psychological research: attention, aesthetics, and expectation.

Repetition within a song and attention A fundamental paradox of musical repetition is that despite the potentially exact replication in the sound itself, the perception a listener sustains can differ significantly from iteration to iteration. Perhaps the best example of this phenomenon is Diana Deutsch’s speech-­to-song illusion,1 whereby a fragment of a spoken sentence, after being looped, no longer sounds like speech but rather like a form of singing. Mere repetition, then, can transform something non-­ musical into something musical. Although the perceptual transformations are not always this stark, repetition does tend to drive attention to different features of the sound and to different temporal levels (Margulis 2014b). We discuss this here in terms of harmony, form, lyrics, melody, and rhythm in popular music. Middleton (1990) has noted that repetition in popular music often involves the literal copying-­and-pasting of short figures (or “musemes”), in contrast to the more varied, phrase-­level approach to repetition typically found in classical music. One good example of this is the widespread use of chord loops (i.e., a series of typically two to four chords—each of which usually spans the same length of time, such as a bar—that continuously repeats throughout a significant portion of a song). The harmonic content of many pop/rock songs, in fact, is comprised solely of a repeating pattern of four chords looped over and over, as found in the songs “Halo” by Beyoncé (2008) and “Cruise” by Florida Georgia Line (2012), for instance. Looping chord progressions are not wholly endemic to popular music, of course; ground basses, chaconnes, and passacaglias are well-­ known instances of repeating harmonic patterns (or at least repeating bass lines) in common-­practice-era music, especially the Baroque period. Yet in classical music, these repeating chord progressions do not typically display any notable differences in terms of rhythmic, melodic, or phrase organization as compared to non-­repeating chord progressions. That is to say, there is nothing particularly special or remarkable about a chord loop in classical music except the repeating harmonic pattern itself. In contrast, chord loops in popular music often participate in a stratification between the harmonic domain and other pitch-­based aspects of the music.

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Nobile (2015) refers to this situation as a “loop divorce,” in which the melody and looping harmonies seem to behave independently of one another, to the extent that traditional concepts of consonance and dissonance become somewhat moot. The verse material of the Jane’s Addiction song “Jane Says” (1988), for example, is comprised entirely of an alternation between the chords G major and A major in the guitar parts, while the vocal melody revolves mostly around arpeggiations and neighbor motions within a D-major triad. This example is particularly illustrative, in that—unlike repeating chord patterns in classical music, which often span eight or more harmonic events— this song oscillates between only two chords, creating a pronounced sense of harmonic stasis. From a psychological perspective, we could say that the repetition of such a short harmonic cell—just two chords toggling back and forth—facilitates the melodic-­harmonic divorce itself, in that our attention is drawn away from the harmonic domain because it lacks new perceptual information. Taher, Rusch, and McAdams (2016) have shown that in two-­part textures featuring one repetitive and one non-­repetitive part, the line consisting of the immediate and exact repetition of a short fragment decreases in perceptual salience, with listeners rating the other part as more prominent. In the Jane’s Addiction example, the chords tend to recede into a background coloring agent, rather than to integrate meaningfully with individual occurrences in the melody. They lose their more functional, syntactic attributes and instead act as a stable layer against which attention can be driven to other aspects of the song. In terms of form, repetition can be found on a variety of hierarchal levels within a song, from individual notes to four-­bar phrases, all the way to large sixteen-­bar sections. To a certain extent, this situation is no different than any musical style. Yet the pattern of repetition employed in popular music seems to favor one format in particular, which we refer to here as the AAB(X) organizational scheme. In this scheme, a basic unit, A, is repeated once, followed by a contrasting unit, B, of roughly equivalent length; a final, fourth unit, X, is optional and, if used, is usually a third instance of the A material or some sort of new, closing material, C. AAB(X) organizational schemes are not unknown in classical music, of course; sonata form, for example, might be considered an AABA scheme if the exposition and its repeat are taken as two A units, the development as the B unit, and the recapitulation as the final A. The sentence theme structure (Caplin 1998) may also be considered an instance of the AAB(X) pattern.

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That said, popular music—especially pop/rock music—appears to employ AAB(X) schemes to a much greater extent than any other formal structure. This scheme can be found in the twelve-­bar blues, in which two four-­bar “question” phrases are followed by a final four-­bar “answer” phrase, thus creating an AAB structure (Covach 2005: 66–7). It can also be found in the sixteen-­bar blues, which may be viewed as an overall AABC pattern comprised of four four-­bar phrases (de Clercq 2016). As an AABC pattern, the sixteen-­bar blues may be viewed as a particular instantiation of a broader class of phrase organizations commonly referred to as SRDC, an acronym for the four functions of Statement, Restatement, Departure, and Conclusion (Everett 2009: 140) especially prevalent in popular music from the late 1950s and 1960s. In the context of repetition schemes, it may be more fruitful to view the SRDC pattern as an AAB(X) pattern, since the restatement gesture is typically a varied if not exact repeat of the opening statement gesture, and the conclusion gesture may or may not involve earlier material from the scheme as a whole. On a higher grouping level, the thirty-­two-bar AABA was a staple of popular music during the early years of rock history (Covach 2009) and persists to this day, especially in country music (Neal 2007). Although form structures in rock music began to shift away from the thirty-­two-bar AABA form during the late 1960s toward verse-­chorus forms, the arrangement of these sections was most often deployed via what Covach refers to as a “compound AABA” structure (2005: 74–5), in which each A module comprises a complete verse-­ chorus unit. Why, then, does the AAB(X) pattern—especially in its AABA instantiation— appear to be such a favored repetition scheme in popular music? Kraehenbuehl and Coons (1959) explain the effectiveness of the AABA pattern as a generic perceptual model through the perspective of information theory. If one goal of a song (or part of a song) is to capture and sustain the interest of the listener, then—as Kraehenbuehl and Coons show through various mathematical computations—the AABA pattern can be seen to best balance “informedness” (i.e., the transfer of new information to the listener) with “information reduction” (i.e., the avoidance of overwhelming the listener with new information). In other words, Kraehenbuehl and Coons calculate that the AABA pattern best balances unity with variety, an old axiom of artistic craft (e.g., Stravinsky 1942). The preference for the AABA scheme over others may also relate to the particular location of the repeated parts, as Ollen and Huron (2004) found that listeners preferred compositions that featured early over late repetition.

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The AAB(X) pattern may also simply be a generic perceptual preference, whether found in music or in other art forms. For instance, the AAB(X) structure can be seen as akin to the “rule of three” found in comedy. Many jokes are constructed to involve the description of three scenarios (often involving stereotyped characters), such that the third scenario contains the surprise or punchline. By nature, the AAB sequence is the shortest arrangement of modules in which a pattern can be established and then violated. The relationship between musical patterns of repetition and humor may thus have an interactive effect. Huron (2004) notes that the excessive repetition of a musical passage results in outbursts of laughter from listeners. This can cause a shift in attention: what seemed normal on a first hearing can start to seem somewhat strange and surreal. Laughter may be the natural response to the uncanny or unsettling feeling that is evoked in this scenario. Accordingly, patterns such as AAAB or AAAA may be less ideal than the AAB(X) template. Although only a portion of the classical repertoire involves vocalists, popular music—particularly pop and rock from the mid–1950s to the present day—is almost exclusively encountered as a vocal medium. Because lyrics play an especially central role in our understanding of popular music, it seems important to consider how repetition patterns shape the way we hear them. In the verse section of a song, for example, lyrics do not typically repeat; a listener will usually hear new and unique lyric content during each iteration of the verse material. Repetition in the vocal part occurs instead on the level of pitch, in that each new vocal phrase often recycles the melodic content from prior phrases. In the opening verse to Avril Lavigne’s “Complicated” (2002), for instance, the first two phrases of text—“Chill out, what you yellin’ for?” and “Lay back, it’s all been done before”— are set to almost identical melodies. Ignoring the close similarity of the phrase that immediately follows, the same melodic content reappears in the second half of the verse, now with the text “I like you the way you are” and “When we’re drivin’ in your car.” The high level of repetition found in the verse melody serves, arguably, to shift attention toward the lyrical content, presumably making it easier for listeners to process the information transmitted by the changing lyrics. Chorus sections differ from verse sections as to their typical repetition scheme, inasmuch as the same lyrics normally recur in each iteration of the chorus (Moore 2001: 52). Within the context of a single song, chorus sections thus tend to be repeated more exactly than verse sections. Not surprisingly, listeners are more likely to sing along with the chorus than any other part of the song, and fragments from the chorus are more likely than other parts of the song

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to get stuck in people’s heads (Beaman and Williams 2010). It appears that the exact repetition embodied by choruses serves as a covert invitation to participate. Margulis and Simchy-Gross (2016), for example, showed that people were more likely to move, tap, or sing along to music featuring exact rather than approximate repetition. In certain circumstances, listeners may sing along at full throttle (Pawley and Müllensiefen 2012), but in many others, the participation may be more virtual, with listeners singing through the chorus in their minds, or sensing imagined corporeal engagement with the music. People often find this variety of perceived bodily engagement highly pleasurable (Gabriellson 2011). Yet while each iteration of a song’s chorus may be identical in isolation, the position of each chorus within the song creates a changing context. In the song “One Boy, One Girl” by Collin Raye (1995), for example, the title text refers to two young lovers when heard in the first chorus, as the lyrics in the preceding verse make clear; but after the lyrics in the second verse and a bridge, the meaning of this title text changes; it now clearly alludes to the newborn twins of this young couple. Neal (2007) refers to this songwriting practice as the “time-­shift narrative paradigm,” which is common to many country music songs. In terms of temporal characteristics, pop and rock music might be considered to have a relatively repetitive metric organization. Popular music tends to have a consistent tempo and a fairly regular backbeat, often with a snare drum on beats 2 and 4. The steady tempo and consistent articulation of the metric grid makes popular music easy to dance to, but these repetitive rhythmic elements may also serve another purpose. Temperley (2004) argues that a steady tempo and backbeat allow for a great degree of syncopation to flourish. In particular, the strictness of the tempo is a trade-­off for the high level of metric irregularity often found in the vocal melodies of popular music. Generally speaking, this can be considered an instance of communication pressure—the lack of clarity in terms of metric structure that the melodic elements of popular music often convey due to their highly syncopated rhythms requires a steady tempo and strong backbeat so that the metric framework does not become entirely clouded for the listener. Overall, repetition in pop music tends to drive attention to new aspects of the sound, forging a more intimate connection between the listener and the music at hand. It also tends to create a sense of virtual participation, with the listener imaginatively singing along or feeling that the music has become a part of them. Both of these effects play an essential role in some of the most important social functions of popular music—group bonding, the generation of peak pleasurable experiences, and the crafting of personal and social identities.

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Repetition of a song and aesthetics The growth of popular music during the last century parallels the rapid progress of technology during this same period. Radio and vinyl records helped spread popular music during the twentieth century, enabling consumers to listen in their homes rather than out in public. With the development of the transistor radio in the 1950s and compact cassettes in the 1960s, consumers were able to listen to music in their cars, at the park or at the beach. These devices were superseded by portable cassette players, portable CD players, and then portable mp3 players, which themselves have become outmoded by the capabilities of the smartphone. All of these technological advances have created the modern luxury of being able to listen to whatever you want, whenever you want. Yet, perhaps ironically, consumers often listen to the same styles, the same bands, and even the same songs over and over. In fact, Huron (2006) estimates that just five albums in a consumer’s music collection will account for some 90 percent of their self-­programmed listening. With such musical variety literally at our fingertips, why do we keep coming back to the same music time and again? One explanation for our tendency to relisten to music can be found in psychological literature on the “mere exposure effect” (see Zajonc 1968). This shows that people prefer aesthetic stimuli that they have encountered before, also that the aesthetic stimuli that people have encountered the most tend to be the most preferred. It is a common experience to dislike a song on first hearing, but come to like it after multiple replays. Several different theories attempt to explain this phenomenon. One holds that repeated exposure makes it easier to process a stimulus. This increased processing fluency comes to be misattributed to some positive aspect of the song itself (Bornstein and D’Agostino 1994). Another theory holds that our preference for the familiar derives from evolutionary conditioning: anything that has been encountered once before and left a person around to encounter it again is probably safer and thus more preferable than the unknown (Berlyne 1971; 1974). Margulis (2014a) proposes a third theory, arguing that repeated hearings change the way that listeners engage with a piece of music, shifting attention to different and new aspects with each additional encounter. If the mere exposure effect were the only factor influencing our listening habits, the end result would presumably be something akin to a feedback loop, wherein we would have listened to a handful of songs so much—and thus like them now so much—that we would not want to listen to anything else. At some

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point, though, monotony and listening fatigue set in; eventually, we crave something different. For this reason, the relationship between preference and familiarity has been described as an inverted-U. This response curve, shown in Figure  9.1, depicts a positive correlation between liking and exposure up to a certain point; after a peak, however, further exposure results in a decrease in liking. From the perspective of behavioral neurobiology, the descending part of the curve is thought to arise from an evolutionary conditioning that seeks novelty, so that an organism is able to accept change and discover new opportunities in its environment. Accordingly, the connection between familiarity and preference reflects two opposing motivations: a healthy curiosity for the unknown tempered by a strong wariness of it as well. A good deal of empirical data supports this inverted-U relationship, perhaps the most obvious of which can be found in the typical life-­cycle of a hit song. In 1966, for example, Leon Jakobovits examined Variety magazine’s Hit Parade charts of radio airtime and showed that the position of songs on the charts tended to correspond with this nonlinear, rise-­ and-fall pattern. The popularity of songs today continues to evince this general trajectory, as exemplified by the history of “Smells Like Teen Spirit” by Nirvana (1991) on the Billboard Hot 100 chart (see Figure 9.2). The exact timescale of the inverted-U response can vary significantly from person to person and song to song. One significant factor in this regard appears to be the extent of a musical work’s perceived complexity. Songs that are perceived to be simpler, for example, will require a relatively shorter time for the listener’s preference to reach the apex of the inverted-U, whereas songs that are perceived to be more complex will typically require a relatively longer time for preference

Figure 9.1  Inverted-U relationship between preference and familiarity.

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1 6 11 21 26 31 36 41

07-12-91 14-12-91 21-12-91 28-12-91 04-01-92 11-01-92 18-01-92 25-01-92 01-02-92 08-02-92 15-02-92 22-02-92 29-02-92 07-03-92 14-03-92 21-03-92 28-03-92 04-04-92 11-04-92

Chart Position

16

Date

Figure 9.2  Billboard Hot 100 chart history for “Smells Like Teen Spirit” (Nirvana).

to peak. Note that the complexity of a musical work resides entirely in the mind of the listener, and experts in one style may have different assessments or thresholds for complexity than experts in another (e.g., Orr and Ohlsson 2001; Orr and Ohlsson 2005; North and Hargreaves 1999). Soon after the point where liking begins to dip, a listener will presumably engage in fewer and fewer rehearings, because each successive hearing will cause a reduction in preference. This creates something of a catch–22 for the listener, since preference for the song right after the peak of the inverted-U is still very high, but each time the listener interacts with the song, it is preferred less and less. The dynamics of this interaction are perhaps partly responsible for listeners’ tendency to seek out alternate versions of a song. These alternate versions might include different performances by the same artist, such as live performances, whether seen in concert, on a DVD, or a CD; outtakes of the original studio recording, typically released as bonus tracks, on special collection CDs, or via bootlegged files gleaned from the internet; or demo versions, which provide a glimpse into the creative process behind the music. In the same way, listeners may seek out cover versions (i.e., those recorded by performers other than the original artist) which may reinvent or reinterpret the original song in an entirely new way. One rather radical type of reinterpretation is the “mash up”, which may

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take the form of remixes, medleys, collages, or “megamixes” (Boone 2013). Because alternate versions of a song include a significant amount of variety from the original, hearings of alternate versions may not move (or may not move all that much) a listener’s progress on the inverted-U response curve to the right. Listeners, therefore, may seek these alternate versions so that they can continue to engage with material that generates high levels of liking without causing their preference for this material to overly decrease. In short, alternate versions may allow listeners to prolong their musical high.

Repetition between songs and expectation A central task for musicologists has been to explain why music affects us—why certain pieces or passages generate intense feelings and emotions amongst listeners. Researchers in music cognition argue that expectation plays a central role. A surprising chord, for example, may delight us or a different twist in a musical phrase might bring us to tears. In both of these cases, the emotional response derives from an expectation that has been thwarted. The fact that we often listen to a piece of music more than once presents something of a paradox with regard to the element of surprise. This paradox, commonly referred to as “Wittgenstein’s puzzle” (Dowling and Harwood 1986), goes something like this: how can a piece of music continue to evoke an emotional response for the listener if, upon hearing this particular piece of music multiple times, the listener is no longer surprised by events in the piece? To put it differently: if some significant element of music’s affect is how it thwarts our expectations, then why does a work still move us even after we know what to expect? One widely held explanation for Wittgenstein’s puzzle implicates the difference between various types of expectation. Bharucha (1987), for example, distinguishes between veridical expectations—which arise from knowledge about what happens in a specific piece—and schematic expectations—which arise from knowledge about what typically happens in a musical style. A classic illustration of the distinction between these two types of expectation is the deceptive cadence (i.e., a dominant chord (V) moving to the submediant (vi) at the end of a phrase). If a piece of music contains a deceptive cadence, we might know—via our veridical expectations—that this will occur in the same place every time we hear the piece; at the same time, this deceptive harmonic motion still rubs against our knowledge—encoded as a schematic expectation—that

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dominant chords at phrase endings tend, at least in classical music, to resolve to a tonic chord (I). There thus appear to exist at least two distinct neural pathways that explain how expectation shapes our response to music. Some researchers have couched this difference in terms of types of memory (e.g., Huron 2006). According to this explanation, schematic expectations arise from long-­term memory. This may be mostly unconscious (or at least, ineffable), especially in the case of untrained non-­musicians. That said, research in cognitive psychology has shown that humans have the ability to learn the statistical regularities found in an environment, even if they are unable to articulate or explain exactly what these recurring patterns are (e.g., Saffran et al. 1999). The field of music theory, on some level, can be seen as an attempt to explicate our schematic expectations for a particular style. In contrast, veridical expectations are hypothesized to arise from episodic memory (i.e., the memory for particular events (such as listening to a particular piece of music) that one has experienced in one’s lifetime). What, then, are the schematic expectations for popular music? This is not altogether easy to say. For example, the harmonic principles of popular music —especially pop/rock music recorded after 1955—are still a topic of debate. Sometimes, chord progressions in rock music seem to follow the phrase model of common-­practice-era conventions, such as in “She’s Always a Woman” by Billy Joel (1977). At other times, rock music seems to eschew the typical harmonic principles found in classical music. The frequent use of the “flat-­seven chord” in major keys (e.g., a G major chord in the key of A major) is one small piece of evidence in this regard (see Moore 1995; de Clercq and Temperley 2011). Some authors have attempted to frame pitch organization in rock as fundamentally a modal rather than a tonal system (Moore 1992; 2001); others have posited that the standard root movement of chords in rock is directly opposite to that found in common-­practice music (Stephenson 2002; Carter 2005); Everett (2004) describes six tonal systems commonly found in rock music, ranging from adherence to traditional harmonic and voice-­leading principles, through power-­ chord-based pentatonic systems, to systems based on chromatically related scale degrees in which common-­practice harmonic and voice-­leading principles are absent or irrelevant. In short, rock music does not seem to follow any unified syntax with regard to harmonic organization; instead, it appears to comprise a heterogeneous harmonic practice, with no underlying universal principles akin to the phrase model of common-­practice-era music. Yet although popular music may lack an overarching functional harmonic system, we may nonetheless still develop

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strong schematic expectations for harmony, if based primarily on the prototypical chord progressions found in the style. The twelve-­bar blues progression, for example, acts as one referential harmonic schema, even if the dominant-­tosubdominant (V–IV) motion typically found in the last phrase eschews common-­practice-era conventions. Doll (2013) identifies various instances of harmonic substitution found in a twelve-­bar blues, cataloging each according to the method by which the identity of the V–IV–I model has been altered. This may involve a change in its temporal identity, such as in the IV–V–I blues cadence in “20th Century Boy” by T. Rex (1973); or it may involve a change in the coloristic identity of the blues cadence, as in the substitution of a minor dominant for the major dominant in “Little Miss Lover” by The Jimi Hendrix Experience (1967). The chord progressions in these songs might engage listeners in part by playing off ingrained expectations that have presumably been acquired through repeated exposure to typical blues cadences in a large number of other songs. A variety of harmonic schemata have been identified in popular music —including the so-­called “doo-­wop progression” (I–vi–IV–V), the “double-­ plagal cadence” (I– H VII–IV), the “singer-­songwriter progression” (vi–IV–I–V), and the chromatic lament bass. Nonetheless, the harmonic content of many songs does not appear (at least in any straightforward way) to be structured around a common harmonic schema. With such variety within the style, it may not be possible to strongly thwart schematic expectations about harmony, yet a similar effect can be achieved through the violation of dynamic expectations. Dynamic expectations, which have been posited to reside in short-­term memory (Huron 2006), are those that a specific work itself creates through the repetition of some musical cell that cements itself in the mind of the listener. This is a particularly powerful type of expectation for popular music, as it allows for syntax to be created in the moment, without relying on inherited tonal norms or stock patterns. Instead, this type of expectation relies primarily on pure repetition. By repeating a particular progression, a song teaches us how to listen on its own terms, shaping expectations in possibly novel ways. Thus, one role of repetition in popular music may be to generate dynamic expectations, in the absence of overly robust schematic expectations. To this point, we have only discussed how thwarting expectations can generate an emotional response. Yet the fulfillment of expectation plays a significant role in why we listen to music, in that knowledge about what comes next enables us to imaginatively sing along and participate, deriving a sense of social connectedness even if listening alone in our living room. In all likelihood, a

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listener’s preference for a particular song relates to the extent to which it both fulfills and thwarts expectation. In this regard, we might posit that there exists an inverted-U relationship, as described above, between fulfilling and thwarting expectation—too few surprises are boring, whereas too many are overwhelming. Songwriters—whether consciously or unconsciously—presumably attempt to strike some ideal balance between the two poles, on one hand giving the listener something new and fresh, while on the other hand giving the listener something familiar and comfortable. Expectations are perhaps most often fulfilled in rock music within the domain of song form. Since at least the 1960s, the verse-­chorus form (with or without bridge) has seen widespread and extensive use, such that by the early 1980s, verse-­ chorus forms account for 100 percent of the #1 Billboard hits and 90 percent of the Billboard Top 20 songs (Summach 2012; von Appen and Frei-Hauenschild 2015). The hegemony of this particular form type far exceeds any sort of expectations for form types found in classical music. In pop/rock music, therefore, we can say that listeners have strong schematic expectations for form, which are influenced by the repetition of this form type in song after song. For example, the succession pattern of sections found in “You Belong with Me” by Taylor Swift (2008), shown in Table  9.1, will undoubtedly be recognizable by almost all listeners—even those with only moderate experience with pop/rock music. The use of this common formal strategy across a broad spectrum of popular styles serves, arguably, as a way to provide a conceptual and cognitive reference point for the listener in the face of new harmonic, timbral, or melodic content. Listeners are

Start Time 0:00 0:08 0:37 0:52 1:06 1:10 1:40 1:54 2:24 2:39 2:55 3:25

Section Intro Verse Prechorus Chorus Link Verse Prechorus Chorus Solo Bridge Chorus Outro

Table 9.1  Form chart for “You Belong with Me” by Taylor Swift (2008).

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thus able to orient themselves within the large-­scale structure of the song without having to listen to the song multiple times—they may be able to process songs more quickly, and thus more rapidly develop positive associations with them. Indeed, research has shown that listeners recognize the formal position of popular music fragments extremely quickly. Anderson, Duane, and Ashley (2013), for example, find that both musicians and non-­musicians can correctly assess whether a short excerpt comes from a verse or a chorus at rates significantly above chance, even when the excerpt is only 100 milliseconds long. It is not entirely clear how listeners are able to process formal areas so quickly, but Anderson, Duane, and Ashley posit that it derives from the consistent pairing of instrumentation and timbral characteristics with particular song sections. As compared to verse sections, for example, chorus sections are typically louder, brighter, and thicker, with more instrumental activity and higher vocal registers. The repetition of particular timbral characteristics in the same formal area across a wide body of songs thus creates strong schematic expectations in an experienced listener. In the early 1990s, for example, bands such as Nirvana and the Smashing Pumpkins employed a “soft verse, loud chorus” paradigm— whereby acoustic or clean material in the verse dramatically contrasted against heavily distorted guitars in the chorus—that became a prototypical formula for grunge and alt-­rock music. With this formula prevalent in songs of the era, a band could take advantage of a listener’s expectations by playing with the boundary of the distorted guitar entrance relative to the chorus itself. In “Creep” by Radiohead (1993), for example, the three bursts of guitar noise prior to the chorus (first heard around 0:57 in the original recording) are a signature part of the song—a song that was the first (and highest yet) charting single for the band on the Billboard Hot 100 chart, helping to launch their career in the US market.

Conclusion It is no secret that popular music is repetitive on multiple levels and in multiple ways. Yet despite the array of repetitive aspects in this music, people tend to listen and relisten to their favorite songs. A variety of factors likely contribute to this behavior, including factors that are social, cultural, and technological. In other words, the psychological explanations discussed in this chapter can be considered only one part of the complete picture. Repetition plays an especially salient role in popular music, so music cognition researchers might benefit from

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using it more frequently as stimuli in experiments. Similarly, musicologists who specialize in popular music might benefit from thinking more about psychological perspectives on how repetition functions. We hope that the theorizing about repetition in popular music, both in this chapter and this book as a whole, will encourage the proliferation of such work, since the many paradoxes of repetition’s allure remain one of the most fascinating aspects of the human behavior of music making and music listening.

Note 1 Can be heard at: http://deutsch.ucsd.edu/psychology/pages.php?i=212(last accessed 6 December 2016).

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Index 1812 Overture, Op. 49 see Tchaikovsky, Pyotr Ilyich “2 Bar Granular Fill” see BT “20th Century Boy” see T. Rex 4′33″ see Cage, John ABBA 95 “Another Town, Another Train” 95 Abbate, Carolyn 90 Adorno, Theodor W. 2–3, 9, 33 n.2, 49, 78, 107 Aerosmith 101 “Janie’s Got a Gun” 101 Afrika Bambaataa 51 Agawu, Kofi 90 Albrecht, Joshua 4–5 “All the Things You Are” 131 “Amen Brother” see Winstons, The “Among My Souvenirs” 130 Anderson, Benjamin 160 “Another Town, Another Train” see ABBA Anti see Rihanna Appleby, Amy 115 Aristotle 7 Armstrong, Louis 109, 145 n.13 “Just a Gigolo” 145 n.13 Arom, Simha 101 Ashley, Richard 160 Attali, Jacques 75 Bacharach, Burt 118 Banu Musa brothers 51, 53 Baranov-Rossine, Vladimir D. 63 n.7 Barbier, Jules xv Contes d’Hoffman, Les xv Barron, Bebe 53, 62 n.3 Barron, Louis 53, 62 n.3 Barthes, Roland 3 Battier, Marc 53 Baudrillard, Jean 85 Beatles, The 111, 112, 114, 118 “I Feel Fine” 112 “Yesterday” 111, 114, 119

Becker, Howard S. 89 Bédard Giulione, Louis 89 Béla, Dajos 145 n.13 “Schöner Gigolo” 145 n.13 Berio, Luciano 32 n.1, 53 Berlin, Irving 112 Berliner, Emile 54 Bernie, Ben 109, 120 n.2 Bernstein Ratner, Nan 20, 33 n.9 “Bewitched, Bothered and Bewildered” 109 Bey, Hakim 79 Beyoncé 148 “Halo” 148 Bharucha, Jamshed J. 156 Black Sabbath 99–100 “War Pigs” 99–100 Bladerunner 86 Bloodstein, Oliver 20, 33 n.9 “Blue Moon” see Hart, Lorenz; Rodgers, Richard “Body and Soul” see Green, Johnny; Heyman, Edward “Bouncing with Bud” 132 “Boy Next Door, The” 136 Brackett, David 121 n.7 Brandy 50 n.5 Full Moon 50 n.5 “What About Us” 50 n.5 Brown, James 41, 44, 47–8, 49, 80 Payback, The 50 “Payback, The” 41, 47 “Get Up (I Fell Like Being a) Sex Machine” 44 BT 27–9, 31, 34 n.16, 34 n.17 Emergency (Stems), The 34 n.17 “2 Bar Granular Fill” 34 n.17 These Hopeful Machines 28 “Emergency, The” 28, 34 n.17 Buchla, Don 57 Buchler, Michael 113, 114 Burial 86 “Subtemple” 86–7

184 Burns, Gary 120 n.4 Butler, Mark J. 82 Cage, John 14, 60, 62 n.3 4′33″ 14 Imaginary Landscape No 5 62 n.3 Can 80 Carl, Robert 59 Carmichael, Hoagy 120 n.1, 130 “Skylark” 120 n.1 “Stardust” 130, 131 Carr, Michael 107 “South of the Border (Down Mexico Way)” 107 Carré, Michel xv Contes d’Hoffmann, Les xv Carter, Elliott 32 Carter, John 118 Certeau, Michel de xvi Chamberlin, Harry 72 Chaplin, Charlie xv, 74 n.7 Modern Times xv, 74 n.7 Chernoff, John Miller 48 “Child is Born, A” see Jones, Thad Christodoulou, Chris 84 Citron, Stephen 115 Colbert, Claudette 120 n.2 Colling, Ralph 55 Coltrane, John 47 Come Out see Reich, Steve “Complicated” see Lavigne, Avril Connolly brothers 55 Contes d’Hoffmann, Les see Barbier, Jules; Carré, Michel; Offenbach, Jacques Cook, Norman see Fatboy Slim Cooke, Sam 4 “Try a Little Tenderness” 4 Coons, Edgar 150 Cotten, Elizabeth 94–5 “Freight Train” 94 Coulthard, Lisa 4 Count Machuki 60 Cousino, Bernard 57 Covach, John 108, 111, 113, 115, 117, 121 n.7, 150 Cowell, Henry 17, 26, 27, 56 Cox, Christoph 59

Index “Crazy Train” see Osbourne, Ozzy “Creep” see Radiohead Crosby, Bing 4 “Try a Little Tenderness” 4 “Cruise” see Florida Georgia Line “Crying in the Rain” see Everly Brothers, The Cut Chemist 22–3 Cutler, Chris 7 D’Angelo 50 n.5 Voodoo 50 n.5 Danielsen, Anne 5, 6, 7, 84 Davies, Hugh 61, 62 n.1 Davis, Jon 89 De Buysser, Pieter 31 Stutter Opera 31 de Clercq, Trevor 9, 111, 113 Debussy, Claude 54 Deleuze, Gilles xvii n.1, 6, 15, 18, 23, 28, 33, 37, 42–3, 44, 77, 81 Deutsch, Diana 148 Diliberto, John 60 Doll, Christopher 158 “Downbound Train” see Springsteen, Bruce Duane, Benjamin 160 Eagle, Chris 33 n.8, 33 n.9 Eash, George 57 “Eau à la Bouche, L’ ” see Gainsbourg, Serge Edison, Thomas A. 53, 54, 63 n.6 Edwards, Todd 27 Eliot, T. S. 69 Family Reunion, The 69 Ellington, Duke 143 “Emergency, The” see BT Emergency (Stems), The see BT Emmerson, Simon 63 n.4 Empedocles 71 Eno, Brian 74 n.6, 86 Eshun, Kowdo 77 Etüde see Stockhausen, Karlheinz Everett, Walter 114, 157 Everly Brothers, The 111 “Crying in the Rain” 111 Exercise Yard see van Gogh, Vincent Fabbri, Franco 8, 112, 113, 114, 116, 120 n.4 Family Reunion, The see Eliot, T. S.

Index Fatboy Slim 23 “Rockafeller Skank, The” 23 Fields, Dorothy 120 n.1 “Way You Look Tonight, The” 120 n.1 Fikentscher, Kai 81, 82 Fink, Robert 4, 5–6, 60, 78, 79, 81–2 Fisher, Mark 84 Fitzgerald, Jon 111 Florida Georgia Line 148 “Cruise” 148 Floyd, Samuel A. 92 “Fly Me to the Moon” 132 Forrest, Jimmy 94 “Night Train” 94 Forte, Allen 108, 113 Franklin, Aretha 4 “Try a Little Tenderness” 4 Frei-Hauenschild, Markus 115, 159 “Freight Train” see Cotten, Elizabeth “Friendship Train” see Knight, Gladys and the Pips; Temptations, The Full Moon see Brandy Furia, Philip 108 Gablik, Suzi 14 Gainsbourg, Serge 111 “Eau à la Bouche, L’ ” 111 Garcia, Luis-Manuel 33 n.2, 33 n.4 Gates, Henry Louis, Jr 41 “Gee Whiz” see Thomas, Carla Gershwin, George 54, 112 Gershwin, Ira 120 n.1 “My Ship” 120 n.1 “Get Up (I Fell Like Being a) Sex Machine” see Brown, James Gilroy, Paul 77 Girard, Johan 59 Glass, Philip xiv, 14 Goa Gill 81 “Golden Gate Gospel Train” see Golden Gate Quartet, The Golden Gate Quartet, The 93 “Golden Gate Gospel Train” 93 Goodman, Benny 145 n.13 “Lullaby in Rhythm” 145 n.13 Goodman, Steve see Kode9 Gould, Jonathan 114 Graakjær, Nicolai 4

185

Graffiti Bridge see Prince Grand Wizard Theodore 22 Grandmaster Flash 22 “Great Pretender, The” see Platters, The Green, Johnny 108 “Body and Soul” 109 “I Cover the Waterfront” 109, 115–17, 119 “I Wanna Be Loved” 109 “Out of Nowhere” 109 “Halo” see Beyoncé Hamm, Charles 120 n.3 Harbach, Otto 120 n.1 “Smoke Gets in Your Eyes” 120 n.1 Hart, Lorenz 121 n.6 “Blue Moon” 121 n.6 Haynes, Joe 109 Hemment, Drew 77, 81 Henry, Pierre 60 Heraclitus of Ephesus 68 Herman’s Hermits 118 Herzog, Werner 69 Strozzek 69 Heyman, Edward 108 “Body and Soul” 109 “I Cover the Waterfront” 109, 115–17, 119 “I Wanna Be Loved” 109 “Out of Nowhere” 109 Holiday, Billie 109, 119 Holmes, Tom 63 n.4 Horn, David 1 “How Could We Be Wrong?” see Porter, Cole Hugoniot, Charles-Emile 55 Hume, David 42 Huron, David 143, 150, 151, 153 I Am Sitting in a Room see Lucier, Alvin “I Cover the Waterfront” see Green, Johnny; Heyman, Edward I Cover the Waterfront (film) 109 “I Feel Fine” see Beatles, The “I Only Want to Be with You” see Springfield, Dusty “I Wanna Be Loved” see Green, Johnny; Heyman, Edward

186 “I’m in the Mood for Love” 130 Imaginary Landscape No 5 see Cage, John In C see Riley, Terry Ink Spots, The 109, 119 It’s Gonna Rain see Reich, Steve “It’s Only a Paper Moon” 133 Ivy League, The 118 Jakobovits, Leon A. 154 Jameson, Fredric 84 Jane’s Addiction 149 “Jane Says” 149 “Jane Says” see Jane’s Addiction “Janie’s Got a Gun” see Aerosmith Jasen, David 120 n.2 “Jeanie with the Light Brown Hair” 108 Jimi Hendrix Experience, The 158 “Little Miss Lover” 158 Joel, Billy 157 “She’s Always a Woman” 157 Johnny Got His Gun see Trumbo, Dalton Jones, Thad 144 n.2 “Child is Born, A” 144 n.2 “Joy in Repetition” see Prince Julien, Olivier 8–9 Jurassic 5 22 Jurassic 5 22 “Lesson 6: The Lecture” 22 Jurassic 5 see Jurassic 5 “Just a Gigolo” see Armstrong, Louis; Prima, Louis “Just Friends” see Klenner, John; Lewis, Sam “Just You, Just Me” 136 Kahn, Douglas 61 Kane, Brian 63 n.4 Kennedy, Jimmy 107 “South of the Border (Down Mexico Way)” 107 Kern, Jerome 120 n.1 “Smoke Gets in Your Eyes” 120 n.1 “Way You Look Tonight, The” 120 n.1 Kierkegaard, Søren 50 n.10 Kircher, Athanasius 54 Klenner, John 138 “Just Friends” 138, 139, 140

Index Knight, Gladys and the Pips 92 “Friendship Train” 92 Knuckles, Frankie 82 Kode9 84–5 Kool Herc 60 Kraehenbuehl, David 150 Kraftwerk 80 “Trans-Europe Express” 80 Kramer, Jonathan 38, 48 Laidback Luke 17, 24 Lang, Fritz xv Metropolis xv Lasser, Michael 108 Latour, Bruno 52, 61 Lavigne, Avril 151 “Complicated” 151 Lee, Brenda 118 Lennon, John 114 “Lesson 6: The Lecture” see Jurassic 5 Levaux, Christophe 5, 6 Lewis, Ken 119 Lewis, Sam 138 “Just Friends” 138, 139, 140 Leydon, Rebecca 4 Lichtenstein, Roy 14 Lidov, David 38–9 “Little Miss Lover” see Jimi Hendrix Experience, The Luca, Gherasim 28 Lucier, Alvin 16, 21, 32, 72 I Am Sitting in a Room 16–17, 21, 72 Luening, Otto 53 “Lullaby in Rhythm” see Goodman, Benny Lyon, Ben 120 n.2 Lyotard, Jean-François 85 McAdams, Stephen 149 McCartney, Paul 114, 119 MacDonald, Ian 114 McFadden, Lucas see Cut Chemist McIntyre, Philip 114 McNeill, William H. 74 n.5 Maderna, Bruno 53 Mahler, Gustav 54 Malevich, Kazimir xiv White on White xiv

Index Mallarmé, Stéphane 34 n.18 Margulis, Elizabeth Hellmuth 4, 5, 9, 13, 32 n.1, 152 Martin, George 118 Maxile, Horace J. 92 Mayer, Alfred M. 55 Mellers, Wilfrid 1 Melodica see Reich, Steve Mercer, Johnny 120 n.1 “Skylark” 120 n.1 Mescalin Mix see Riley, Terry Messiaen, Olivier 52 Metallica 99–101 “One” 99–101 Metropolis see Lang, Fritz Meyer, Leonard B. 91, 94, 97 Middleton, Richard 1–5, 7, 8, 9, 40, 91, 93, 102, 107, 108, 110, 111–12, 113, 115, 116, 117–18, 121 n.7, 148 Mighty Paris, The 25–6 Mihánovich, Sergio 144 n.2 “Sometime Ago” 144 n.2 Miles, Barry 119 Minchen, Mark “MK” 27 Modern Times see Chaplin, Charles Monk, Thelonious 143 “Moonlight Becomes You” 134 Moore, Allan F. 91, 94, 112, 113, 115, 116, 121 n.7 Morgan, Elizabeth 98 Mumbo Jumbo see Reed, Ishmael Music Explosion, The 118 Music for the Gift see Riley, Terry “My Ship” see Gershwin, Ira; Weill, Kurt Nattiez, Jean-Jacques 8, 90, 118 “Nature Boy” 134 Neal, Jocelyn R. 152 “Needed Me” see Rihanna Neu! 80 “Night Train” see Forrest, Jimmy; Washington, Oscar Nirvana 154–5, 160 “Smells Like Teen Spirit” 154–5 Nobile, Drew 111, 149 Noys, Benjamin 7, 76, 85

187

O’Day, Anita 109, 119 O’Grady, Terence J. 114 Offenbach, Jacques xv Contes d’Hoffmann, Les xv “Ol’ Man River” 108 Ollen, Joy 150 “On (Your Name)” see Swedish House Mafia feat. Pharrell “One” see Metallica “One Boy, One Girl” see Raye, Collin Osborne, Richard 63 n.4 Osbourne, Ozzy 95 “Crazy Train” 95–6 Osunlade 82 “Out of Nowhere” see Green, Johnny; Heyman, Edward Papenburg, Jens Gerrit 58 Paris, Derrick see Mighty Paris, The Parker, Charlie 143 Patrick, Jonathan 58 “Payback, The” see Brown, James Payback, The see Brown, James Pekke 86 Peter and Gordon 118 Peterson, Oscar 94 Pfleumer, Fritz 56 Pickow, Peter 115 Plato 70 Platters, The 111 “Great Pretender, The” 111 Pollack, Alan 114, 119 Porter, Cole 108, 112, 143, 145 n.20 “How Could We Be Wrong?” 108 “Why Shouldn’t I?” 108 “You’d Be So Nice to Come Home To” 135, 145 n.20 Poulsen, Valdemar 56 Prima, Louis 145 n.13 “Just a Gigolo” 145 n.13 Prince 50 n.9 Graffiti Bridge 50 n.9 “Joy in Repetition” 50 n.9 Radiohead 160 “Creep” 160 Railroad Study see Schaeffer, Pierre Rancière, Jacques 31, 35 n.20

188 Raye, Collin 152 “One Boy, One Girl” 152 Redding, Otis 4 “Try a Little Tenderness” 4 Reed, Ishmael 48 Mumbo Jumbo 48 Reich, Steve xiv, 14, 24, 39, 51, 58, 59–60, 62, 72 Come Out 24 It’s Gonna Rain 58 Melodica 59 Reynolds, Simon 76, 80, 83 Rhythm & Gangsta see Snoop Dogg Rietveld, Hillegonda 7 Rihanna 45 Anti 45 “Needed Me” 45, 46 Riley, Terry 51, 58, 59–60, 62, 72 In C 59 Mescalin Mix 59 Music for the Gift 58, 59 Riley, Tim 114 Roads, Randy 95 “Rockafeller Skank, The” see Fatboy Slim Rodgers, Richard 112, 121 n.6 “Blue Moon” 121 n.6 Rouget, Gilbert 7, 77–8, 82 Rusch, René 149 Russolo, Luigi 63 n.9 Salley, Keith 8–9 Sangla, Raoul 34 n.18 Satie, Erik 60 Vexations 60 Schaeffer, Pierre 6, 51, 52–3, 57, 58–9, 60, 68 Railroad Study 59 Scheurer, Timothy 111 Schoenberg, Arnold 13, 33 n.2 “Schöner Gigolo” see Béla, Dajos Schulze, Holger 58 Scott, Derek B. 112, 115 Shanahan, Daniel T. 8–9, 143 Shapiro, Peter 59, 80 Shaw, Arnold 120 n.4 “She’s Always a Woman” see Joel, Billy Sheehan, Joseph 19, 28, 33 n.10, 34 n.12 Shepherd, John 120 n.4

Index Shirelles, The 111 “Will You Love Me Tomorrow” 111 Simchy-Gross, Rhimmon 152 Simon, Paul 118 Sinatra, Frank 109 “Skylark” see Carmichael, Hoagy; Mercer, Johnny Small, Christopher 47, 70 Smashing Pumpkins, The 160 “Smells Like Teen Spirit” see Nirvana Smith, Steven 120 n.4 “Smoke Gets in Your Eyes” see Harbach, Otto; Kern, Jerome Snead, James A. 35 n.21, 47–8 Snoop Dogg 50 n.5 Rhythm & Gangsta 50 n.5 “Sometime Ago” see Mihánovich, Sergio “Somewhere Over the Rainbow” 109 “South of the Border (Down Mexico Way)” see Carr, Michael; Kennedy, Jimmy Springfield, Dusty 111 “I Only Want to Be with You” 111 Springsteen, Bruce 95 “Downbound Train” 95 Stalpaert, Christel 31, 35 n.20 “Stardust” see Carmichael, Hoagy Starr, Larry 107, 108, 112, 113, 115 Stephenson, Ken 108, 112 Stockhausen, Karlheinz 17, 26, 27, 52 Etüde 53 Strozzek see Herzog, Werner Strunk, Steven 123 Stutter Opera see De Buysser, Pieter “Subtemple” see Burial Summach, Jay 112, 121 n.7 Swedish House Mafia feat. Pharrell 17 “On (Your Name)” 17 Swift, Taylor 159 “You Belong with Me” 159 Sylvan, Robin 80, 81 T. Rex 158 “20th Century Boy” 158 Tagg, Philip 7–8, 90, 91–2 Taher, Cecila 149 Tarantino, Quentin 4 Tatit, Luis 112, 115

Index Tchaikovsky, Pyotr Ilyich 98, 102 1812 Overture, Op. 49 98, 102 Temperley, David 33 n.9, 152 Temptations, The 92 “Friendship Train” 92 Teruggi, Daniel 52 Theremin, Leon 56 These Hopeful Machines see BT Thomas, Carla 111 “Gee Whiz” 111 Thompson, Gordon 119 Three’s a Crowd 109 Thurmaier, David 111 Toft, Robert 121 n.7 “Trans-Europe Express” see Kraftwerk Transeau, Brian see BT Trottier, Danick 7 Trumbo, Dalton 100 Johnny Got His Gun 100 “Try a Little Tenderness” see Cooke, Sam; Crosby, Bing; Franklin, Aretha; Redding, Otis Tyler, Steven 101 Ussachevsky, Vladimir 53 Valdez, Stephen 121 n.7 van der Bijl, Johannes 55 van Gogh, Vincent 69 Exercise Yard 69 Van Riper, Charles 22 van Scheppingen, Lucas Cornelis see Laidback Luke Varèse, Edgard 52 Vexations see Satie, Erik

189

Virilio, Paul 84 von Appen, Ralf 115 Voodoo see D’Angelo “War Pigs” see Black Sabbath Warhol, Andy 14 Warner, Daniel 59 Washburne, Chris 112 Washington, Oscar 94 “Night Train” 94 Waterman, Christopher 107, 108, 112, 113, 115 Waters, Keith 123, 144 n.4 “Way You Look Tonight, The” see Fields, Dorothy; Kennedy, Jimmy Weill, Kurt 120 n.1 “My Ship” 120 n.1 Welch, Bruce 119 “What About Us” see Brandy White on White see Malevitch, Kazimir “Why Shouldn’t I?” see Porter, Cole “Will You Love Me Tomorrow” see Shirelles, The Winstons, The 83 “Amen Brother” 83 Wittgenstein, Ludwig 69, 156 X for Henry Flynt see Young, La Monte “Yesterday” see Beatles, The “You Belong with Me” see Swift, Taylor “You’d Be So Nice to Come Home To” see Porter, Cole Young, La Monte 60 X for Henry Flynt 60