Musical Repetition - Detailseite

Repetition is fundamental to human experiences of music, as well as to its circulation and promotion. These claims are arguably even more true for popular music. Until recently, however, repetition has been largely neglected or even minimized in music studies. This course explores the implications and possibilities of repetition in music.  Particular attention will be given to repetitive phenomena that characterize popular music, such as groove, riffs, hooks, and earworms. The course will also consider how popular music studies, musicology, and music theory can address musical repetition, and the ways in which they have done so (or not) up until now. Material will be drawn  from a broad range of intellectual traditions and will touch upon a variety of musical styles, with groove-based popular music at the center.

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Attas, Robin. 2015. “Form as Process: The Buildup Introduction in Popular Music.” Music Theory Spectrum 37 (2): 275–96. https://doi.org/10.1093/mts/mtv020.

Benjamin, Walter. 1969 [1936]. “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction.” In Illuminations, ed. Hannah Arendt, 217–52. New York: Schocken.

Butterfield, Matthew W. 2006. “The Power of Anacrusis: Engendered Feeling in Groove-Based Musics.” Music Theory Online 12, no. 4.

Butler, Mark J. 2006. Unlocking the Groove: Rhythm, Meter, and Musical Design in Electronic Dance Music. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.

________. 2014. Playing with Something That Runs: Technology, Improvisation, and Composition in DJ and Laptop Performance. New York: Oxford University Press.

Danielsen, Anne. 2006. Presence and Pleasure: The Funk Grooves of James Brown. Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan University Press.

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———. 2011. “Goal-Directed Soul? Analyzing Rhythmic Teleology in African American Popular Music.” Journal of the American Musicological Society 64 (1): 179–238.

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Garcia, Luis-Manuel. 2005. “On and On: Repetition as Process and Pleasure in Electronic Dance Music.” Music Theory Online 11, no. 4 (accessed 3 January 2009).

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Hasty, Christopher. 1997. Meter as Rhythm. New York: Oxford University Press.

Hughes, Timothy. 2003. “Groove and Flow: Six Analytical Essays on the Music of Stevie Wonder.” Ph.D. dissertation, University of Washington.

Janata, Petr, Stefan T. Tomic, and Jason M. Haberman. 2012. “Sensorimotor Coupling in Music and the Psychology of the Groove.” Journal of Experimental Psychology: General 141 (1): 54–75.

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London, Justin. 2004. Hearing in Time: Psychological Aspects of Musical Meter. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Margulis, Elizabeth Hellmuth. 2013. On Repeat: How Music Plays the Mind. New York, NY: Oxford University Press.

McClary, Susan. 2004. “Rap, Minimalism, and Structures of Time in Twentieth-Century Music.” In Audio Culture: Readings in Modern Music, ed. Christopher Cox and Daniel Warner, 289–98. New York: Continuum.

Middleton, Richard. 1983. “‘Play It Again Sam’: Some Notes on the Productivity of Repetition in Popular Music.” Popular Music 3: 235–70.

Monson, Ingrid T. 1999. “Riffs, Repetition, and Theories of Globalization.” Ethnomusicology 43: 31–65.

Osborn, Brad. 2013. “Subverting the Verse—Chorus Paradigm: Terminally Climactic Forms in Recent Rock Music.” Music Theory Spectrum 35 (1): 23–47.

Pressing, Jeff. 2002. “Black Atlantic Rhythm: Its Computational and Transcultural Foundations.” Music Perception 19 (3): 285–310.

Russell, Potter. 1998. “Not the Same: Race, Repetition, and Difference in Hip-Hop and Dance Music.” In Mapping the Beat: Popular Music and Contemporary Theory, ed. Thomas Swiss, John Sloop, and Andrew Herman, 31–46. Oxford: Blackwell.

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Shelley, Braxton D. 2019. “Analyzing Gospel.” Journal of the American Musicological Society 72 (1): 181–243.

———. 2021. Healing for the Soul: Richard Smallwood, the Vamp, and the Gospel Imagination. AMS Studies in Music. New York: Oxford University Press.

Snead, James. 1981. “On Repetition in Black Culture.” Black American Literature Forum 15, no. 4: 146–54.

Spicer, Mark. 2004. “(Ac)Cumulative Form in Pop-Rock Music.” Twentieth-Century Music 1 (1): 29–64.

Witek, Maria A. G. 2017. “Filling In: Syncopation, Pleasure and Distributed Embodiment in Groove.” Music Analysis 36 (1): 138–60.

Klausur, 16.07.2024