First—a few addenda to the previous post.
“Finding the tonic” in rap songs presupposes that people have at least some vague sense of what tonic is—it’s a very Western European way of listening. I’m not convinced that it’s a useful activity: while it can be done, is it something we should (or need to) do?
There are lots of ways that music can be centric; that is, have some kind of focal pitch but not be functionally tonal. Joe Straus’ work on prolongation in post-tonal music suggests that music could be pandiatonic, centric, axial, etc. Just because a piece has a focal pitch or a repeated chord does not make it tonal.
Now on to part III…
Richard Middleton suggests that we can understand repetition as points along a continuum. One end of the continuum represents maximum repetition; the other end represents maximum differentiation. Music is more likely to be repetitive because it is information-poor (there are only a few notes in any given scale, and they are typically grouped into a small number of recognizable chords). As a result, music has a difficult time denoting anything but itself, and even there, it can do so only in the most abstract way. Language is information-rich, and thus relies on maximum differentiation to facilitate communication (imagine a language that had only a few words: Groot from the Guardians of the Galaxy and the Avengers stories can only say “I am Groot,” which makes for some very challenging conversations).
Fundamentally, when we think about repetition, we can ask the following question: “Having just performed/heard/written this musical thing, do I want to do that same thing again?” If the answer is yes, then we have repetition: {A, A}. If the answer is no, then we have either variation {A, A’} or contrast {A, B}. Middleton argues that the more times we answer the question with “yes,” the more likely we are moving toward what he refers to as the “monad” (maximum repetition) end of the continuum: {A, A, A, A, A, A, …}. If we answer “no,” we start to move toward the other end of the continuum, with maximum differentiation: {A, B, C, D, E, F, G, …}.
John Rahn calls our attention to the change in context that repetition provokes. Rahn contends that the example above--{A, A}--is more accurately {A, then-A}. The second item in the series, the copy, may be constructed identically to the first term, the original, but the way in which we experience the copy makes it different from the original: we hear the copy with respect to the original, whereas we heard the original on its own terms. (It’s more complicated than that, but let’s leave it there for the time being.) The copy also might cause us to reconsider how we heard the original: perhaps we missed a detail in the original that we noticed in the copy. We could make an analogy to printmaking here: each print is more or less identical, since they came from the same matrix or stencil, but there will always be subtle variations among the prints as a result of paint distribution, differences in paper, and the eventual degradation of the stencil.
Middelton proposes two levels of repetition: musematic and discursive. Musematic repetition involves small but meaningful musical units: think of motives or riffs, not individual pitches. Discursive repetition operates at larger formal levels, like the phrase, or the verse. It is possible to nest musematic repetition inside of discursive repetition. We can use lower-case letters from the end of the alphabet (w, x, y, z) to indicate musematic repetition, and we will use capital letters from the end of the alphabet (A, B, C, D) to indicate discursive repetition.
All of these kinds of repetition create a sense of expectation in the listener. The closer we are to the monad end of the continuum, the more likely we are to expect—to predict—(more or less) exact repetition. To bring this into conversation with hip hop scholarship, we might say that this is what Rose refers to as “flow:” the fact that repetition breeds predictability and/or expectation. When something about the repetition changes, that could be Rose’s “rupture.” These flows and ruptures are layered on top of one another (as Dr. Kjell commented on my Twitter post and many others have noted elsewhere) create the interest in rap. The same general sense of expectation and confirmation or denial of that expectation are fundamentally what drives tonal music, and I would argue that loops work in a very similar way in terms of how they create expectations.
I had some stuff about MF DOOM’s “All Caps” that was supposed to go in here somewhere. Maybe that’s another post…