Repetition and Pattern

Rise and Fall of Repetition

Vibration and regular repeating patterns are the foundation of matter and energy. On a scale more accessible to humans, rhythmic repetition, oscillation, and pulsation are dominant qualities of nature known to everyone: Waves on a shore, moon phases, day and night, the seasons.



There is pulsation and rhythm in our own body: Heartbeat, breathing; the steady rhythm of walking that was imprinted in our genetic memory during our life as nomads.

These basic experiences of life have long ago formed our love of rhythm. While developing a sense of rhythm, our ancestors found that it is fun to sing along with the rhythm. Our first melodies were taught to us by birds and other animals, all of whom also employ repetitions in their songs: Indonesian Ketjak is a complex rhythmic monkey chant; Pygmy melodies of the African rainforests cite the songs of tropical birds.

Repeating melodies - monotonous or based on simple harmonies - and repeating song structures became popular in all cultures, not only because their patterns were easy to memorize, but because performing them in combination with repeating rhythms had strong psychological effects and was sometimes meditative or potentially trance-inducing. (Man's ancient fondness of spirituality and altered states of consciousness is another fascinating story.)

Rhythmic, repetitive musical structures eventually reached high levels of sophistication in a number of world cultures (Javanese Gamelan, Ghanaese drumming, Indian tabla, Pygmy songs, to name but a few). Some early medieval European music also employed repetition as a basic formal element, but at some point in the middle ages, music in Europe began developing into a different direction.



The discovery and elaboration of the laws of harmony in the Renaissance pushed rhythm and repetition into the musical background. In the early 18th century, the well-tempered 12-tone equal temperament became the dominant tuning system which it still is. The great works of classical music were complex harmonic structures which needed rhythm and repetition primarily as a means to give them a form. Rhythmic, repetitive, modal music as practised elsewhere on the planet was not known or considered primitive.

Music Patterns



Edgar Varese once gave a definition of music as "organized sound", and this seems like a good place to start, more because of what information such a definition does not give than for what it does give. The definition is somewhat satisfying because it seems to embrace practically anything that is called music, that anyone could conceive of as music and further certainly anything that might be called music in the future. On the other hand it is unsatisfying because there are no clues in the definition as to how music is constructed. On mulling Varese's definition over, the first question that comes to mind is a compound one: what is organization, how is the sound organized? I'll try to consider an answer to that question by starting with the most historically primitive musical notions and moving through increasing complexities to complexities of modern atonal music. Here, I mean "atonal" in its technical sense, not in it's gutter sense of harsh and "dissonant".

Undoubtedly, the most primitive musical percept is that of pulse, recognized perhaps first in our own rhythmic pulse, heart beat. Imagine an Australopithicus, on his day off, picking some object up and banging it against another; the satisfaction obtained by simply 'beating out time', in a steady repeating unit of time. This sets the stage for a pulse to music as being a fundamental parameter that can be varied. Nowadays we are little more precise and sophisticated about such things and specify a pulse by giving a metronome value for and underlying note value that is tied to musical notation. For a given pulse one has simply a sequence of unaccented and undifferentiated beats separated by equal units of time.

One can overlay the with pulse with structural forms that give a pattern of various levels of accent. Within standard musical notation this is designated by grouping the primitive pulses into bars that create a meter. For certain evolved musical forms/types the meter is prescribed: A waltz usually is written in 3/4 meter so that there are 3 quarter notes to a bar. A short representative table:

waltz 3/4
polonaise 6/8
polka 2/4
gigue 6/8
sarabande 3/4
chaconne 3/4
passacaglia 3/4
allemande 4/4
tango 2/4, 4/4, 4/8 (before 1955)

These all happen to be or evolved from dance forms. It is the association of music with dance and also with the voice and with indigenous language that had provided given structure for many musical features.