A Psychological Approach to Musical Form: The Habituation-Fluency Theory of Repetition

With the possible exception of dance and meditation, there appears to be nothing else in common human experience that is comparable to music in its repetitiveness (Kivy 1993; Ockelford 2005; Margulis 2013). Narrative artifacts like movies, novels, cartoon strips, stories, and speeches have much less internal repetition. Even poetry is less repetitive than music. Occasionally, architecture can approach music in repeating some elements, but only sometimes. There appears to be no visual analog to the sort of trance-inducing music that can engage listeners for hours. Although dance and meditation may be more repetitive than music, dance is rarely performed in the absence of music, and meditation tellingly relies on imagining a repeated sound or mantra (Huron 2006: 267). Repetition can be observed in music from all over the world (Nettl 2005). In much music, a simple "strophic" pattern is evident in which a single phrase or passage is repeated over and over. When sung, it is common for successive repetitions to employ different words, as in the case of strophic verses. However, it is also common to hear the same words used with each repetition. In the Western art-music tradition, internal patterns of repetition are commonly discussed under the rubric of form. Writing in The Oxford Companion to Music, Percy Scholes characterized musical form as "a series of strategies designed to find a successful mean between the opposite extremes of unrelieved repetition and unrelieved alteration" (1977: 289). Scholes's characterization notwithstanding, musical form entails much more than simply the pattern of repetition. Discussions of form also commonly specify certain kinds of passages or rhetorical treatments, such as distinguishing expository, developmental, transitional, or closing passages (see, e.g., Brown 1970; Caplin 1998; Dahlhaus 1978; Hepokoski and Darcy 2006; Kielian-Gilbert 1990; Koch 1793; McCredie 1983; Nattiez 1975, 1987; Root 1986; Sisman 1993). In addition, much music involves the concatenation of common patterns, such as partimenti, scripts, cliches, or licks (e.g., Gjerdingen 2007; Pressing 1988; Sanguinetti 2012; Sawyer 1998). Forms also frequently involve broad harmonic patterns, especially key- or modulation-related patterns (e.g., Salzer 1952; Schenker 1906; Schoenberg 1954). In the Western art-music tradition, examples of conventional forms include strophic songs, binary, rounded binary, and ternary forms, theme-and-variations, canons, chaconnes, passacaglias, fugues, rondos, medleys, overtures, suites, and sonata-allegro form. In Western music, the concept of form is historically and culturally situated. Although discussions of musical form can be found throughout the history of Western music, the concept rose to prominence in the nineteenth century and has remained a central topic in art-music scholarship. Form is often distinguished from the concept of genre, but the two concepts are intertwined (Greene 1992). For the purposes of this article, we will sidestep the conceptual issues. Although the title of this article includes the word "form," the focus here will be exclusively on patterns of exact or inexact repetition. That is, our sole concern will be with that aspect of musical form that has to do with the structure of repetitions. In considering musical forms, one might suppose that many repetition structures arise solely due to cultural convention. Theoretically, any arbitrary pattern might become established as a cultural norm that is replicated by successive generations of musicians. At the same time, one wonders if there exist deeper underlying principles. Over the centuries, various music scholars have proposed different theoretical accounts based on philosophical, metaphysical, or other premises. In this paper, we focus on empirically established psychological phenomena that might plausibly influence the patterning of musical repetitions. Specifically, we will focus on two psychological phenomena that relate directly to repetition. …