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Path: utzoo!watmath!clyde!burl!ulysses!mhuxr!mhuxt!houxm!ihnp4!laidbak!chris
From: chris@laidbak.UUCP (Chris Granner)
Newsgroups: net.music
Subject: Re: Instrumental vs. vocal popular music
Message-ID: <228@laidbak.UUCP>
Date: Sun, 29-Sep-85 13:06:55 EDT
Article-I.D.: laidbak.228
Posted: Sun Sep 29 13:06:55 1985
Date-Received: Mon, 30-Sep-85 02:30:51 EDT
Reply-To: chris@laidbak.UUCP (Chris Granner)
Distribution: net
Organization: LAI Chicago
Lines: 55

In article <1695@dciem.UUCP> jeff@dciem.UUCP (Jeff Richardson) writes:

>...But because vocals are so effective at diverting the listener's 
>attention from the repetitiveness of the music, a little bit of 
>repetition in an instrumental piece is much more noticeable than 
>a lot of repetition in a vocal piece.

(the above was extracted from a 45-line response; I hope I haven't destroyed
the context of an interesting posting, but the above caught my attention
in particular...)

The function of repetition (in any medium) is to re-enforce a message.  In
western classical music, a theme or phrase may be repeated several times
and still slip by the casual listener, since by and large at any given
point in such a piece there are several themes or phrases occurring
simultaneously, and the recombination and reconfiguration of the component
themes serves to stave off the redundancy.  In western popular music,
the "several-ness" of simultaneous themes is a rarity (exceptions?),
and so the redundancy threshold is reached far more quickly.

On the other side of the redundancy threshold, the repetition of a theme or
phrase can transform the musical unit into a component of a larger idea
or structure; at some point the redundancy threshold makes a quantum
leap when the listener becomes aware of this larger context.

And of course, far below the redundancy threshold (nice bit of jargon...
I just made it up), a musical event can occur, maybe only once in a piece,
and such an event serves to point to, or to "get" to, some central musical
event.

It's certainly the case that a vocal/lyric can serve (sociologically) the
same function as a large number of ideas -- in that the listener, by 
hearing a different lyric verse over the same music, may be distracted
from noticing that the redundancy threshold has been crossed.  However,
the same kinds of dynamics occur in the medium of text, with subject
matter substituted for theme/phrase/musical_idea.  There is, in music,
a much poorer history of lyrics which stave off the redundancy threshold,
than in the musical material itself.  I had a history teacher who explained
this phenomenon by saying something like, "A text can so easily overpower
a musical idea that composers for centuries have avoided setting the
most complex poetry of their day...it's simply a matter of unfair competition."
My opinion at the time was, "If that's really the case, then composers have
simply abdicated their response to the collaborative challenge of a complex
text."

But getting back to repetition, here's an axiom I made up while I was
teaching aural skills at the U of I in Urbana:

	If it happens once, it's a pointer.
	If it happens twice, it's an event.
	If it happens thrice or more, it's a component.

-cg (...!ihnp4!laidbak!chris )

hail eris						all hail discordia


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