movements,and so on,and this is a basic structuring element (see Meyer
1956;Bernstein 1976;Keil and Feld 1994).But this way of looking at it
as structure is too static,and merely touches on music as a product,an
already-made thing.
In music as a continuing process that people listen to or participate in,
repetition is just one of three main redundancy devices.The other two
are,first,music’s high level of formulaicness,the storehouse of preexist-
ing formulas,riffs,themes,motifs,and rhythms that people bring to music
making (and vary and play around with),and second,the high sense of
expectancyof exactly what is going to come next and fill the upcoming
temporal slot, and this expectancy itself is produced by all this
repetitiveness.
When we listen to or try to join some music,individual sequences
become recognizable,become definite somethings,because we rely on
these three redundancy factors.Either we recognize right off a melody
or riff or rhythm as a familiar formula,or repetition over and over again
of an unfamiliar pattern makes it familiar for a while,or the powerful
expectancies created by the process of music let us have a pretty good
sense of exactly what is going to come up next,and lo and behold,there
it is! But our ancient ancestors,at the beginnings of music,familiar with
only a few fixed formulas,must have depended hugely on the other two
redundancy factors.They needed much constant repetition by everyone
and a lot of expectancy of what was to follow to hear sequences as rec-
ognizable and hence repeatable.
The other crucial thing about music making is that it is inherently a
group activity in which many voices and many people participate.This
inherently social and group-participation aspect is clear from the role it
plays in hunter-gatherer and other tribal societies today (Turnbull 1966;
Seeger 1987;Feld 1994).Once a formula is fixed it can easily spread to
the entire group,since involvement by all is essential to music making.I
think that the repetition and expectancy created by music making is the
best model we have of how early sound sequences first became fixed and
then could spread to entire groups.
It is,however,not only music that gives us a clear model of how early
people first fixed formulas.Today,spread widely throughout many
diverse cultures,forms of talking exist that have a lot of the same
expectancy and repetition features that are so prominent in making.
Lively,high-involvement-style (Tannen 1989),many-voiced,overlapping,
and collaborative (Marshall 1976;Feld 1994;Coates 1996) kinds of
talking with huge amounts of repetition and a lively interactive rhyth-
mic drive are typical of a lot of conversation in many different cultures
today.Only with study of actual real-time conversations have the promi-
nence and importance of this kind of talking become clear.304 Bruce Richman