6 - Repetition and Eucharist

Summary

Our understanding of musical technique would have advanced much further if only someone had asked: Where, when, and how did music first develop its most striking and distinctive characteristic – repetition?

Heinrich Schenker

The topic of repetition has attracted an enormous quantity of interest in the last few decades, especially in postmodern cultural theory. The perceived tilt towards ‘sameness’ and homogenisation in some currents of late modernity has raised critical questions about what constitutes an ‘original’ reality. It is said that with the proliferation of processes for the replication of products, texts and information, we are witnessing a diminution in the authority of ideas of originality. Music is sometimes alluded to in this discussion: of what does the ‘original’ consist when the vast majority of music heard today is multiply processed by an increasingly sophisticated technology of reproduction?

However, it is relatively rare to find attention given to repetitive processes within pieces of music. Even Theodor Adorno, who had so much to say about the dangers of musical repetition in mass culture, devoted little sustained work to repetitive processes within particular pieces and forms of music. It is this latter kind of repetition we examine in this chapter.

In doing so, we draw extensively upon material from previous chapters. The argument culminates with a discussion of the Eucharist, which (perhaps not surprisingly) serves to pull together most of the major strands of the foregoing pages.