Part One
Repetition as an Aesthetic Disposition
1
When the Music Stutters
Notes Toward A Symptomatology
Robert Fink
A culture of repetition arises when the extremely high level of repetitive structuring necessary to sustain capitalist modernity becomes salient in its own right, experienced directly as constituent of subjectivity.
Robert Fink, Repeating Ourselves (2005: 4)
It is no longer the character who stutters in speech; it is the writer who becomes a stutterer in language. He makes the language as such stutter: an affective and intensive language, and no longer an affectation of the one who speaks.
Gilles Deleuze, âHe Stutteredâ ([1993] 1997: 107)
As Elizabeth Margulis notes in On Repeat, her wide-ranging study of musical repetition, there is a âstubborn repeatabilityâ to music which sets it apart from language and the other arts (2013: 4). A taste for repetition seems to be one of the few genuine musical universals, according to a small but growing number of cross-cultural empirical studies (see Ollen and Huron 2003). Margulis observes that âmusical repetitiveness is so common as to be almost invisibleâ; the very fact that a stream of sound can be parsed into repeating units effectively musicalizes it, marking out the boundary between intelligibility and noise (1).1 Thus it is striking how ambivalent the post-Enlightenment tradition in the West has been about the subject. While even the most austere modernists have accepted, if grudgingly, the link between repetition and intelligibility (as Arnold Schoenberg puts it, âintelligibility in music seems to be impossible without repetitionâ (1967: 20), one of the defining characteristics of European musical culture has been a pervasive anxiety about the effects of âtoo muchâ repetition, especially at the increasingly porous boundary between art and popular music.2
The case of so-called âminimalâ music is instructive. Minimalism in the visual arts was genuinely reductionist but the music that caught peopleâs attention, of course, was not; 1960s pulse-pattern composers used just as many notes as their predecessors and contemporaries. What they reduced was the amount of difference in their music. From this angle, ârepetitive musicââused by composers such as Steve Reich and Philip Glassâis also a misnomer. This music is no more repetitive than any other: it simply refuses to disguise the incessant repetition that underpins all musical forms with the usual composing tricks of variation and development. Refusing to paper over the essential repetitiveness of our shared musical experiences, 1960s minimal music resembles nothing so much as contemporaneous Pop, the art most open to serial repetition and mechanical reproduction. Suzi Gablik once praised Andy Warhol and Roy Lichtenstein for having used chance operations and found images to âavoid tasteful choices,â which allowed them to achieve a âtougherâ art (Russell and Gablik 1969: 18). Minimalist repetition in music has this tough-minded quality, which Gablik raises to the level of a moral strategy: it reflects back to us the staggering levels of repetition (musical and otherwise) in our daily world, without the usual comforting veneer of artistic decoration. In this way, fully developed industrial modernity gives rise to a characteristic structure of feeling which one might call a âculture of repetitionâ (Fink 2005: 3â4) within which works of art engage in âexcessiveâ repetition to aestheticize the massive doses of experiential repetition which necessarily constitute subjectivity in an advanced consumer society. But the resulting relationship between repetition and teleology in music is never simply adversarial: it might be more productive to consider such excess of repetition as a breeding ground for exotic ârecombinant teleologies,â that is, for new, deliberately manufactured configurations of sound, repetition, time, and human desire.3
Donât stop âtil you get enough
As soon as one attempts to define an âexcessâ of repetition, especially in popular music, an epistemological roadblock arises. It was clear that minimalism in art music was a textbook culture of repetition, because âtoo much repetitionâ basically defined the style, especially when contrasted with the maximally non-redundant music which dominated imaginations in the avant-garde of that historical moment. But groove-based popular music is alreadyâhas always already beenâhighly redundant. In fact, no one who actually likes a particular style of electronic dance music (EDM) worries simultaneously that it is âtoo repetitive.â How does one even talk about a musical culture of repetition when, to take the most obvious example, the once-extreme levels of repetition pioneered by minimalism and techno have long since turned into a marker of the familiar, as normalized in contemporary pop music as guitar distortion in rock or saxophone screams in modern jazz?4
Is it possible to identify a repetitive musical gesture which resists normalization, which intrinsically signifies a culturally significant âexcessâ of repetition? I do believe such a gesture exists. Even in the most slowly evolving, cyclically repetitive musical environments, one finds arresting moments when the grooveâs ongoing orbital progression through time gets audibly âstuck,â enacting, through irregular complex submetrical repetitions of recorded slices, what producers and listeners call a âstutter editââor, simply, âa stutter.â My claim is that when we hear music metaphorically âstuttering,â whether or not the moment actually involves the slicing and rearranging of vocal samples, we invoke a particular, highly charged instance of communicative neurodiversityâdisfluent speech rhythmâprecisely as a sign of excessive repetition. However repetitious a given musical situation may be, a perceptual stutter makes it more repetitiousâmakes it, at least for a moment, too repetitious.
Musical repetition and stuttering have long been linked; delving into the medical literature, as we will do in some detail below, reveals that the repetitive structures of music have often been prescribed as an antidote for a wide range of speech disfluencies. They have also been used as a framework within which to understand the specifically temporal set of speech disfluencies researchers group together as stuttering. Turning speech into music is also one of the most effective ways to erase a vocal stutter. Butâand this is the real point of the comparisonâstutter edits in contemporary electronic popular music become a clear sign that music itself can also stutter, analogous in that moment to overloads of repetitions and blockages in poetic speech that trigger transcendent breakthroughs into the pure intensity of performative affect that Gilles Deleuze, perhaps the most consequential philosopher of âexcessiveâ repetition, has influentially called out as making âlanguage as such stutterâ ([1993] 1997: 107âmy emphasis).
Two âmoments of stutteringâ
I will begin by calling up two characteristic moments of musical stuttering; this chapter will then proceed as a provisional attempt to explore the aesthetic space between them. In 1969, Alvin Lucier created the elegant and simple piece of minimalist process music, I Am Sitting in a Room. The work proceeds by subjecting recorded speech to audio feedback over and overâa repetitive process in which, as the composer notes, âthe resonant frequencies of the room reinforce themselves so that any semblance of speech ⌠is destroyedâ (1995: 322). Over the course of forty minutes, looped repetition performs its âmagic,â musicalizing a bald statement of the composerâs process and goals into a haunting, fragile structure of extended tones.
One of those goals is self-directed, because the person sitting in the room different than the one we are in now is, of course, the composer himself; as he notes in the text, and as is obvious from early recordings of his recitation, his speech displays striking moments of temporal dysfluency (they cluster around his attempts to pronounce the postalveolar approximant [
] at the beginning of words like âresonantâ and ârhythmâ), and the repetition process is meant to deal, acoustically, with that fact.
I am sitting in a room different from the one you are in now. I am recording the sound of my speaking voice and I am going to play it back into the room again and again until the resonant frequencies of the room reinforce themselves so that any semblance of my speech, with perhaps the exception of rhythm, is destroyed. What you will hear, then, are the natural resonant frequencies of the room articulated by speech. I regard this activity not so much as a demonstration of a physical fact, but more as a way to smooth out any irregularities my speech might have.
(Lucier, quoted in Collins 1990âmy emphasis)
Let us take Lucier at ...