Spring 2021 | Harvard University
Repetition and Novelty. Together, these two terms pose a question or problem – how can something can be the same and also change? If we wish to address the question of Repetition from a fully temporal perspective, the question of Novelty (newness, nowness) can’t be denied.
We begin with a set of readings (among which, Repetition and Difference by Deleuze) to lay groundwork for asking how repetition is used in music and music-like activities.
There are many ways, and these ways can bring up interesting questions of style, fashion, craft and work. Portions of Bach’s Goldberg Variations and Lachenmann’s Serynade for piano will provide illuminating instances as we explore these works, their craft, their style and fashion.
General
Readings
IA. Repetition/Novelty
Week 1: January 28
Greetings and introduction to the seminar.
Preparation for Week 2 – an introduction to Gendlin’s theme and an overview of Bach’s Goldberg Variations theme.
Repetition and Novelty as Theme and Variation (Thema – literally, “something set down”; Variación – change, difference, divergence)
Week 2: February 4
1a. Eugene Gendlin, “How Philosophy Cannot Appeal to Experience, and How It Can,” from Language Beyond Postmodernism: Saying and Thinking in Gendlin’s Philosophy (General and methodological focus)
1b. Leo Cabranes-Grant, “To Repeat or Not to Repeat: That Is the Question” (Specific focus – on Kierkegaard’s Repetition)
- Goldberg Theme
Week 3: February 11
Review of Gendlin
I. Repetition in General and Specific Contexts
Kierkegaard, Bergson, Deleuze – explained by artist specialists:
A. Performance Studies (Theater and Dance)
Leo Cabranes-Grant, “To Repeat or Not to Repeat: That Is the Question”
B. Musicology
Tim Howell, “Brahms, Kierkegaard, and Repetition: Three Intermezzi,” Nineteenth-Century Music Review, June 2012 (10/1)
C. Literary Studies
Sarah Posman, “Time as a Simple/Multiple Melody in Henri Bergson’s Duration and Simultaneity and Gertrude Stein's Landscape Writing," Mosaic: An Interdisciplinary Critical Journal, March 2012 (45/1) - Note the journal’s title change: now titled R&N.
Reading Gertrude Stein’s “Portraits and Repetition” (1935) and Four Saints in Three Acts could be especially rewarding for its provocative connection with music—even apart from the Gertrude Stein/Virgil Thomson opera of the same name. (This could be a rewarding research topic.)
II. Repetition in Music: The Theme and the first repetition/variation. For now, don’t worry about detail—there will be time for that later. Thinking about/feeling Bach can now be general enough to engage with the upcoming challenge of Lachemann.
Week 4: February 18
Lachenmann as contrast, as difference (or repetition?); and the questions this radical (or not?) difference can raise - style, fashion, musical-historical narrative, etc. Discontinuity and continuity as ways of representing or feeling change. Novelty and repetition. Tradition, craft?
To be continued in IB.
IIA. The Topic of Repetition in Recent Musicology/Theory
Week 5: February 25
Elizabeth Margulis, On Repeat: How Music Plays the Mind (2014)
Robert Fink, Repeating Ourselves: American Minimal Music as Cultural Practice (2005)
Bach
Week 6: March 4
Bob Snyder, Music and Memory: An Introduction (2000)
Eugene Gendlin, “The Primacy of the Body, Not the Primacy of Perception: How the Body Knows the Situation and Philosophy,” Man and World, Vol. 25, Nos. 3–4 (1992)
Gerald Edelman, “Consciousness: The Remembered Present,” Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences, Vol. 929 (April 2001)
Hermann Ebbinghaus, “Memory: A Contribution to Experimental Psychology” (1885); reprinted in Annals of Neurosciences, Vol. 20, No. 4 (October 2013)
Lachenmann
IB. Back to the General – Philosophy, Time, and the Human Process
Week 7: March 11
Christopher Hasty, “Time,” in The Oxford Handbook of Western Music and Philosophy (2020)
Michael Polanyi: “Knowing and Being” (1961); “The Logic of Tacit Inference” (1964) - a brilliant, provocative vision of human-skilled process that takes “time” as a topic for granted and
at the same time offers a subtle vision of Time in a specifically human way, and with a studied
avoidance of Repetition. A challenge or an opening?
Back to Bach with a focus Style and Fashion (Repetition and Novelty)
Week 8: March 18
Gilles Deleuze, Repetition and Difference (1968), selected excerpts
James Williams, Repetition and Difference: A Critical Introduction, selected excerpts
Prepare for a turn back to the basics with an eye to Style and Fashion
Roland Barthes, The Language of Fashion
IIB. Back to Specifics – Focus on Music
Week 9: March 25
Back to Bach
Week 10: April 1
Back to Lachenmann