“It is a principle of music to repeat the theme. Repeat and repeat again as the pace mounts.” William Carlos Williams had it right, in words later set by one of music’s most repetition-obsessed composers, Steve Reich in his The Desert Music.

But it’s not just the minimalists, the likes of Reich or Philip Glass. Repetition is a musical fundamental that connects every culture on Earth. And it’s not just the songs, symphonies or operas we love that are so often built on patterns that repeat – drumbeats, rhythms, melodies, harmonic cycles – it’s also that we love to listen to the same music, the same recording, again and again. And instead of being bored by the fact that we know that particular moment of achingly expressive vibrato is coming up on Billie Holliday’s recording of Summertime; or that the fugue in the Kyrie from Bach’s B-minor Mass is going to resolve in its final bar so radiantly into the major key from the minor; or that, despite our fondest hopes, Violetta is always going to die to those morbidly delicious strains of Verdi’s La Traviata, our enjoyment increases the more we hear them. Far from diluting our pleasure, repeating them only seems to amplify our involvement in these musical experiences.

It’s an odd phenomenon that has little crossover in other art forms. As Elizabeth Hellmuth Margulis’s work has revealed in On Repeat: How Music Plays the Mind, her book on precisely this phenomenon, it’s certainly not the same with words. If you say a phrase – a collection of words – over and over again it starts to become simply a collection of sounds rather than “meaning” anything. (Gertrude Stein and other avant garde writers made a new kind of literature from this fertile borderland where words are carriers of sound instead of signifiers of meaning.) It’s called “semantic satiation” – that moment when a phrase is overloaded through so much repetition that it slips out of the meaning-processing part of our brains.

This emptying out of the semantic dimension is the point where musical meaning starts to be made. Reich has always known that: two of his works from the 1960s, Come Out and It’s Gonna Rain, feature a single phrase or sentence repeated against versions of itself, looped at different speeds. Using the technology of the time, Reich creates a dense web of sound from these tape-loops to a point at which the original sentences have given up their semantic meaning completely to create a hugely rich texture of musical experience.

Reich is only an extreme example of what composers have always done with repetition: everything from Pachelbel’s Canon, with its hypnotically repeated bass line, to Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony, made and propelled by the manipulation of a repeated four-note cell, to the vast majority of songs ever written, with their carousels of verses and choruses, are made to work with the pleasure centres of musical repetition that seem to exist in our brains.

Patterns of repetition aren’t just musical techniques. They’re invitations for listeners to participate

The exceptions to music’s repetitive rule only prove it by default: Joseph Haydn’s music so often works by setting up a pattern of predictability before breaking it with an unexpected musical punchline; but he’s dependent on our existing love of repetitive structures for his tricks to work. Pieces composed expressly with as little repetition at possible – the brave new worlds of works by Karlheinz Stockhausen or Pierre Boulez, say, create a new kind of musical experience in which the thrilling sense of discombobulation and alienation comes as much from the music’s lack of repetitive moorings as the visceral dissonance and rhythmic unpredictability of their new musical idioms.

But patterns of repetition aren’t just musical techniques for composers to play with. They’re invitations for listeners to participate. As Margulis puts it: “Repetitiveness actually gives rise to the kind of listening that we think of as musical. It carves out a familiar, rewarding path in our minds, allowing us at once to anticipate and participate in each phrase as we listen. That experience of being played by the music is what creates a sense of shared subjectivity with the sound, and – when we unplug our earbuds, anyway – with each other, a transcendent connection that lasts at least as long as a favourite song.”

I love that idea of being “played by the music”: it resonantly captures why it is that we want to return again and again to the music we love the most – the music we repeat, the music that plays with and on us the most.

In music, exact repetition simply doesn’t exist

But part of that play is an acknowledgement of an existential truth: that there’s no such thing as exact repetition.



Composer Thomas Adès describes what I mean: “Music is in motion all the time … with each note it’s either closer or further away, it’s not in the same place that it was before. It can’t be. If you play one note twice, it’s going to have different implications, because you will have been altered by the first one. I don’t really think exact repetition is possible, especially in performance: it’s simply a different kind of movement … you’ve got a little older since it was first played, and you’ve probably started to think about something more, as we do when we get older. So the second time it comes, it has more urgency.” As we’re listening to the music – listening along with the music, as Margulis would put it – we’re changed by it, just as we are changing in time ourselves.

That’s something that Schubert understood and used as a fundamental musical truth. He often repeats whole sections of movements in his sonatas, string quartets, symphonies, and songs, but he makes the same music mean something utterly different on its return. The slow movement of the A major piano sonata, D959, is a case in point. The piece starts with a lulling, melancholy melody, which is blown apart by some of the darkest and most violently explosive music he ever wrote. When the tune returns after this outburst, it has scarcely been altered, but its expressive effect has been profoundly transformed. Previously an innocent if soft-focused tune, it’s now obliterated, desolate, a tragic revenant.

As Arnold Schoenberg said: “Intelligibility in music seems to be impossible without repetition.” Yet exact repetition, where everything stays the same? Well: just as our heartbeats are similar but different in time, pulse after pulse, each older than the last – in music, exact repetition simply doesn’t exist.

• Tom Service’s new programme The Listening Service begins on BBC Radio 3 on Sunday 1 May at 5pm and weekly thereafter. Each programme asks a different musical question; the first three shows are on beginnings, repetition, and what is it about Mozart?