Geoff > Status Update

Yo I go to work and do the same thing every day. Same desk, same pb&j, same commute, same everything!

Can I come watch?

Sure, but what's the rush?

For subtle texture, I use a complicated Bernoulli scheme to determine when I go to Chipotle for lunch.

Joshua wrote: "Sure, but what's the rush?"

Coordinating my leave time at work- if I watch you live your life for a week or two I have to work that out with my bosses. The sooner I can start planning the better.

Fear and Trembling/Repetition--the edition titling effaces a bit of the effect ; but a little Kierkegaard wouldn't hurt. And of course the Deleuze book too.

Oh wait, I have that Deleuze on the shelf!

Well, Minimalism of course - particularly Reich's early experiments, but I presume you're already familiar with those.

The godfather of that approach, however, is a piece by Satie in the 19th century - the Vexations. This comprises a short passage, repeated slowly 840 times (performances last 15-35 hours depending on tempo). It's not clear whether Satie ever intended the piece to be performed publically, but it was brought to public notice by Cage, and has developed quite a following (there have been a couple of perfomances near me, even; I've never bothered sitting through it, though).

To a considerable extent, the classical music tradition, at least up until the mid-19th century, is all about the obsessive repeition of elements, hidden by variation in other elements. Think of how Beethoven builds the entire first movement of his 5th out of a 4-note pattern, for instance - or how the 2nd of his 7th is one repeating rhythm, and most of it is one repeating melody too (with a few contrasting passages). Something like the finale of Schubert's Great is an exercise in interweaving repeitions - the famous hysteria of the violins, for instance (which the original violinists refused to play as it was considered too ridiculous), and at one stage a section in which the same harmonic progression is repeated 22 times in succession.

But a good, extreme example of this from some time later is Ravel's Bolero. The Bolero is a snare drum banging out the same two-bar rhythm for 17 minutes. Over that drum, two melodies are played - each similar to the other and built from repeating elements. Each melody is played twice, then the other takes over for two outings - then it cycles back to the first. There are 18 cycles of this repetition. So it's 17 minutes of a two-bar drum pattern, and two lots of 36 repetitions of melodies that are themselves repetitive. And other than a bit at the end it's all in the same key with basically the same harmony. But it doesn't SEEM repetitive in the way that, say, minimalism does - in this case because Ravel is continually altering the timbre and the dynamics.

That's an extreme case. But things were just as extreme, if a little more subtle, in the 18th century. Many Mozart pieces are built out of dozens of repetitions of the same short themes, with minor and repetitive alterations in pitch or key or timbre, or the addition of embellishments. Indeed, in the gallante era, it was said that some genres, particularly dance music, could be built by total amateurs (kits were sold for the purpose!) out of the random selection of established tropes followed by repetitions and established alterations and embellishments.

In the Baroque, canons and fugues show another side of repetition. Entire fugues can be constructed out of repetitions, with overlapping repeititons providing their own harmonisation (the extreme case are stretti, in which the repetitions enter rapidly, so that earlier repetitions have barely started yet). This can become quite overwhelming, as in something like Mozart's short Kyrie double fugue from the Requiem.

For more exact repetition: the ostinato has been common throughout history, but particularly in the baroque in the form of the ground bass, a continually repeating sequence of notes in the bass accompanied by varied embellishments. The most famous example may be Pachelbel's canon.

Going further back, a really extreme example: Gregorian recitative. Almost the whole of the music is repetition of a single note, only occasionally broken up by stylised cadence patterns. The most extreme form is accentus immutabilis, in which the entire piece is sung consisting entirely of the same note repeated throughout.

On a wider scale: you could say that western monasticism, with its repetitive rituals, is effectively a larger performance art piece. In particular, monks are effectively embedded in ongoing musical performances, through such practices as the repetition of the marian antiphons at the conclusion of every compline - every single day, for centuries and centuries.

Some examples:
Reich's Come Out (with accompanying ballet)
Reich's Violin Phase (also with ballet!)
Part II of Reich's Different Trains
Vexations (excerpt!)
Bolero
Kyrie Eleison a revival by Mozart of the fugue form, building awe and chaos out of the constant repetition of two little themes.
Ricercar a 6 from the Musical Offering. A more austere and complex take on the form by Bach.
Pachelbel's Canon
A motet by Dunstable - this is a form of extreme repetition, in which each voice repeats the same melody and the same rhythm. This may not be apparent, however, because the repeated rhythmic passage and the repeated melodic passage are not of the same duration, which means that the rhythm and the melody continually phase through one another. (This is called 'isorhythm', a common technique between the eras of Machaut and du Fay). The other complication here is that the singers are singing three different songs simultaneously (Veni Creator Spiritus/Veni Sancte Spiritus/Albanus Roseo Rutilat).
an example of Gregorian accentus. OK, technically it's a skit from Monty Python, but take out the self-abuse and it gives you an idea of the form (which, oddly, seems quite hard to find on youtube...)
Godowsky's Passacaglia. A modern passacaglia (set of embellishments of a continually repeated theme in the bass). Godowsky simply repeats the opening bars from the Unfinished continually for 20 minutes. Well, OK, he adds a couple of notes in the right hand along the way, to be fair...

You probably already know "Last Year in Marienbad".

Erm. I'm the wrong person to help with this because repetition makes me want to claw my eyes/ears out. Yayoi Kusama?

Yo I go to work and do the same thing every day. Same desk, same pb&j, same commute, same everything!

Joshua wrote: "Yo I go to work and do the same thing every day. Same desk, same pb&j, same commute, same everything!"

Yes! Again!

Sure, but what's the rush?

Not sure if these are extreme enough for you, but Gertrude Stein, Thomas Bernhard, Lisa Jarnot, Caroline Bergvall, animated GIFs...

Joshua wrote: "Sure, but what's the rush?"

You are making me so happy

Jimmy wrote: "Not sure if these are extreme enough for you, but Gertrude Stein, Thomas Bernhard, Lisa Jarnot, Caroline Bergvall, animated GIFs..."

Oh I forgot about GIFs. Kinda turned off this idea now.

I'm surprised no one's mentioned early Philip Glass, but I assume you're already familiar. [By the way, they FINALLY filmed Einstein on the Beach and it's now available on BluRay and DVD. Hooray for 4.5 hours of numbers and nonsense!]

Vrixton wrote: "I'm surprised no one's mentioned early Philip Glass, but I assume you're already familiar. [By the way, they FINALLY filmed Einstein on the Beach and it's now available on BluRay and DVD. Hooray fo..."

Yeah, love Glass. Didn't know about EOTB, sweet!

Wastrel wrote: "Well, Minimalism of course - particularly Reich's early experiments, but I presume you're already familiar with those.

The godfather of that approach, however, is a piece by Satie in the 19th cent..."

Thanks Wastrel, tons of stuff to explore here - thanks for taking the time to give recs

Christopher wrote: "+1 for Einstein on the Beach. I forget if I've mentioned Bohren & der Club of Gore. But they certainly do interesting stuff with repetition."

Don't know them, will definitely check it out.

In what way does Thomas Bernhard use repetition?

Hmm - if nothing is jumping out at you, you could set up your own extreme repetition piece... Read a short passage over and over for a set time or in different places/environments and record any changes/reactions. Put some sounds on repeat and go about your business with it as a constant background or else listen intently to it for a long duration. I remember letting an Erik Satie piano tape play on auto-reverse for a weekend. Other folks have early repetitive minimalism pretty well covered – glass/reich, etc. Some other ideas: Tony Conrad may be of interest – for a nice grinding droney repetition https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=td4N0... or Jim O’Rourke’s Happy Days https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ktqji... Also LaMonte Young’s long duration well tuned piano https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c3eN4... (extremely long and repetitive as there are a limited number of notes but with lots of minor variations) or his dream house project. I don’t know how extreme it is but there’s also a great Gene Davis show on at the Smithsonian American Art Museum to check out. Stripes! Also definitely check out William Basinski's Disintegration Loops if you haven't already - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mjnAE...

Richard wrote: "Hmm - if nothing is jumping out at you, you could set up your own extreme repetition piece... Read a short passage over and over for a set time or in different places/environments and record any ch..."

One of my goals with my modular synthesizer is to eventually compose pieces that slowly morph over days, and can repeat infinitely. It's definitely doable with the rig I'm building. I've considered talking to the Hirshhorn about possibly doing something like that there, or another gallery space. Along with that idea, with photo- and touch-sensitive sensors, I could even build a system where people's presence in different areas of the space could cause changes in parameters, so an audience could affect the parameters of the piece as it goes, but not disturb it's essential movements. I have other ideas too...

Conrad, O'Rourke, Young and esp. Basinski are certainly big influences on me here. I am definitely looking outside of music as well. Did you see Ragnar Kjartansson's exhibit that just left the Hirshhorn? It had a really deep impact on me. I'd love to get into long form public performance based on repetition and duration.

Your idea for the room piece sounds really cool! Building interactive physical/audio sculptures would be cool too - pressing or viewing certain areas changing parameters. Unfortunately I missed the Ragnar Kjartansson show - ugh.

Vrixton wrote: "I'm surprised no one's mentioned early Philip Glass, but I assume you're already familiar. [By the way, they FINALLY filmed Einstein on the Beach and it's now available on BluRay and DVD. Hooray fo..."

Well, I said "Minimalism"... (I know Glass doesn't call himself a Minimalist, but none of the big Minimalists do, that's how you can tell they're Minimalists...)

But if it needs to be specified: La Monte Young, Steve Reich, Terry Riley, Philip Glass, and John Adams. (probably in approximately descending order of minamalism and ascending order of closeness to traditional classical music).

Young is probably the king here, but obviously geoff knows about him. The 'installation' idea certainly reminds me of the Dream House, although sfaiaa Young didn't employ interactivity. I believe others have experimented with spatial interactivity, although I couldn't name names. Except Pepsi. I know one of the first experiments in this direction was Pepsi's "Pepsi Cola Pavilion" in 1970 where in addition to a fixed web of speakers and microphones, audience members could carry small handsets that picked up on the user's location and could modify what they heard accordingly - although only in a fairly blunt way (different areas of the dome (it was a giant mirror-dome) were associated with different environments, and the handsets played appropriate environment background tracks (water, animals, etc), over which the main music could play. The dome was conceived of as a "total instrument", incorporating sound and vision - there were lasers and mirrors and fog-sculptures - as well as interactivity (the visual interactivity came from everyone being under a giant geodesic mirror dome, which is kind of like being inside a david lynch nightmare - and the Fog interacted too, moving and changing in response to the heat and humidity and motion of the audience...). I'm sure the technology has improved considerably since those days.

You may also be interested in Cage's HPSCHD, (example here) from a year before. This plays harpsichord music, randomly altered by computers in accordance with the I Ching, through 50 different tracks at once, plus a bunch of live performances, to the point where result is just a sort of droning static of noise - but it was spatialised inside a dome, with images projected onto the walls and people free to wander in and around. It lasted 5 hours. Personally, I think it's just a giant epilepsy machine, but each to their own.

Anyway, I think this sort of stuff was all the rage in the sixties and seventies.

On the other hand, music spatialisation is also a feature of Protestant tradition in particular, as heard in Bach - and it was particularly a big thing in the renaissance. Composers back then also attempted to created what would now be called 'sound environments' through the sheer mass of polyphony (or 'tracks' today), relying as much on the pulse of the tracks as on conventional harmony or melody. The pinnacle of these experiments was Tallis' Spem in Alium: written for 40 singers arranged in 8 distinct choirs, it's believed to have been designed for an octagonal room (probably the banqueting hall at Nonesuch Palace), with the audience sitting in the middle, surrounded by the singers. In such a position the music passes over the listener from side to side, and also slowly rotates around them. Sadly youtube cannot quite convey this effect, but if you have appropriate 3D glasses that visualisation is designed to help give some idea of the aural density of the original (by arranging the visualisations for each choir behind one another in a third dimension).
If you want to get a sense of the piece, the National Gallery of Canada has an "art installation" that's just Spem in alium played through 40 speakers arranged around an old chapel. I'm not sure why this exactly qualifies as an art installation, rather than just, you know, a hi-fi system, but it probably gives a better sense of the piece than a CD can, and is probably easier to get to than an actual in-the-round intimate polychoral performance.