Liking the smoked bluefish salad I had at an organically-sourced Brooklyn eatery, I made something like it at home.
In preparation for shooting a video last week, I practiced again a piece that I practiced last year for summer concerts, and two years before that to play in Michigan, and thirteen years earlier still…
Passing by a store on Broadway that had four identical (mass-produced) lamps hanging in a row, I was prompted to tweet this tweet. “Repetition gives an appearance of order,” tweeted I.
Musicians are accustomed to repetition. Even music that isn’t especially repetitive is subject to considerable repeating in most professional musical lives.
That’s our practice, a structuring of time. And for the player, a structuring of a life.
The balance between repeating material and exploring the new is struck differently by musicians. Some pianists play a huge number of pieces. Others delve into a few.
How many times did Paderewski perform the “Moonlight” Sonata? Or Mick Jagger sing “Satisfaction”?
One of the Oblique Strategies of Brian Eno and Peter Schmidt is: “Repetition is a form of change.”
And how many times did Diebenkorn work the same images? – yet he is still one of my favourite painters.
Re-visiting the same pieces, re-working the same musical or artistic themes, can lead to a deeper understanding of the material. The audience sense this as well, there is a security and imagination in the insight achieved by continually re-working the same things.
Lee Konitz said in an interview that as he had been playing a standard for fifteen years, he was now really beginning to understand it, and play it better.
However is that repetition? After all each repetition goes deeper. So it may sound like repetition but is in fact, something much more enlightened.