Musical Repetition Quotes

Once I started working with generative music in the 1970s, I was flirting with ideas of making a kind of endless music - not like a record that you'd put on, which would play for a while and finish.

I think you can't repeat beats. If you're doing something in one book, you can't do the exact same thing in another book.

You listen to Handel operas, right? And there are a thousand of them, right? And they all sound alike. If I look back on my work, maybe it's the same thing.

It's work to play the same songs the same way for 70 shows.

...."the sound of a barrel organ rising from the deepest golden vein of the day; two or three bars of a chorus, played on a distant piano over and over again, melting in the sun on the white pavement, lost in the fire of high noon.

I love the immediacy of those old analog machines; it's really inspiring. You just set them up to play, and they go, playing the same thing until you switch the pattern.

Film scores are often based on short themes, and it helps if you've got some way of developing these themes and making them sometimes last 4 minutes and sometimes last 40 seconds. One ends up doing it subconsciously.

You know, there are times when you play a song over and over and over and you get a little tired of it and you let it sit for a while. It's like, you may love eating sushi, but if you eat it every single day, you're going to get a little tired of it.

People expect me to do the classics, and it is a lot like playing a favorite song.

Most game music is based on loops effectively.

Here's how I understand music. If you can play the same bunch of noise twice, it's music. To go beyond that is supercilious and pontificating.

There is nothing like a Bach fugue to remove me from a discordant moment... only Bach hold up fresh and strong after repeated playing. I can always return to Bach when the other records weary me.

The process of repeating a rhythm while it gently evolves has an incredible effect on the brain, or on mine anyway.

The way I see it, there's only one melody for any song.

So when I wrote 'Down' - when I sang the melody, I sung the word 'Down' for no reason. I don't know why. That's how I came up with the medley. I was like, 'I don't know why I said down, but we got to write a song around it.'

Let echo, too, perform her part, Prolonging every note with art; And in a low expiring strain, Play all the comfort o'er again.

I always think it's important to choose your initial theme very carefully because you're going to be married to it for a long time. You might have to generate an hour's worth of music from a very short, little piece of theme.

Musical themes developing is a lot of what classical music is based on, and exposition and recapitulation - these kinds of things I find oppressive.

There's so many ways you can play one chord progression that the repetition isn't ever exactly the same.

The seven white notes on the piano - each section of the piece (there are 12 sections) is five of those seven white notes. If you calculate it, there are 21 groups of five notes in any group of seven notes. And although there are 12 sections, this piece actually uses nine of those groups because some of the sections repeat earlier ones. So that's the formula. It's very simple as a way of generating something. It's my inner minimalist.

When you're listening to radio and hear the same 20 songs over and over and over, you want a break from it. Sometimes you don't want to hear something that sounds just like everything else on the radio. Eventually, if you hear the same sounds and the same musicians and the same mixes and all of that, it will start to sound like elevator music.

The whole trouble with a folk song is that once you have played it through there is nothing much you can do except play it over again and play it rather louder. Most Russian music, indeed, consists in ringing changes on this device, skilfully disguised though the fact may be.

After 15 years of singing the same 12 to 15 songs every night, it can become monotonous.

I'm not a studio rat. I do find sitting around playing the same song 12 times kind of tedious. I like to get in and get out.

I don't wanna keep playing the same song over and over again. It's just thinking about "what's going to be the coolest thing to play on this particular show?" The easiest thing to do is to play the single over and over again.