The physical world is built through repetitive acts. It’s a simple statement, but look to the ocean, for example, and you’ll see shorelines shaped by the repeated lapping of the ocean’s waves, shells whittled down over time into sand, and islands formed by repeated volcanic eruptions. In the same way, place is built through repetition. People come to a space for a purpose and return, and return again, and within time this purpose becomes reinforced by tradition — a place validated by repetition.
Repetition casts a large shadow over presence and meaning in the act of placemaking. Archaeological and anthropological perspective offers a distinct view in relation to this, with much research focused deeply on the importance of recursion to place and the balance of existence which makes place. Place is validated and built by repetition, but this also necessitates contextualization within the spectrum of repetition and change. Maxime Lamoureux-St-Hilaire and Scott Macrae’s research on settlement abandonment and historical precedent for placemaking-focused thinking provides some context for this perspective:
Entanglement with place — as part and parcel of sedentism — often is perceived as occupying one end of a continuum of movement that ranges from highly mobile on a seasonal or annual basis to highly sedentary or fixed in place. Often, the fixed-in-place end of the continuum is valued by researchers over the highly mobile end…Such differential valorization leads us to ask why we — as humans of the Anthropocene — so value rootedness and disdain uprootedness when the history of our species is primarily a story of movement and migration. We value stasis when, in light of the longue durée, it might be more accurate to think of periods of stasis as highly unstable (and unsustainable) moments that punctuate more prevalent periods of movement. It is rootedness in place that creates the (often painful) experience of uprooting from place.1
This notion of the “rooted” and the “uprooted” is key; the element of movement and mobility — musically, erring more towards complexity — is as important as the element of repetition itself to building this connection to placemaking as an artistic practice.
Composer and performer Caterina Barbieri touches on this with her work and consideration of repetition, as well, noting that a key aspect of the experience of repetition in music is what change occurs outside of the repetition itself — this balance between the rooted and the uprooted in relation to what “makes place”:
“Repetition changes nothing in the object repeated, but does change something in the mind that contemplates it,” says Gilles Deleuze. I love this quote…I use repetition and other recursive musical elements as a media to create a specific psychic state, similar to trance or hypnosis. It’s an altered state of consciousness, where it’s easier to become receptive and present in the moment. A state of hyper focus, that exists beyond binary thinking: dualities between subject and object, inner and outer, physical and spiritual seem to crash all at once…it’s more about the changes we, as listeners, undergo rather than the changes the material itself undergoes.2
As Barbieri states, there is a deeper nature to repetition in art than simply recursion of a sound, gesture, or other such elements. Exploration of place and placemaking can come directly from the way in which the conventions of repetition — this “rootedness” — can be explored and stretched, providing a useful avenue for interaction with an object and a legitimate basis for considering repetition at proportions beyond that of short forms. The state of repeating or not repeating — rooting or uprooting — and its consistent push and pull is a foundational element of how we make place as humans, but as Barbieri notes, recursion spurs us to change as listeners in ways that are less tangible.
This mindset provides a foundational basis for form and structure in the process of translating placemaking into an artistic practice. These previously-outlined methods of sound gathering work hand-in-hand with this; material is gathered from a place out of time, and repetition gives this material a structure that builds the material into something which allows us to engage in the previously-mentioned concept of “depiction.” Visual artist Bridget Riley noted that repetition "on the one hand…acts as a sort of amplifier: making active events that might otherwise go by barely unnoticed."3 This relationship has its counterpart: As composer Bryn Harrison has noted, one “can make music present simply by being reiterative.”4 Older composers, such as Morton Feldman, brought this to the forefront of their process, saying that such an approach as “[having] the same thing come back again, but...just [adding] one note”5 was a manner of "formalizing a disorientation of memory"6 — an act which provides a framework for music to be centered around this process of deterioration and reinvention, stasis and movement.
This also plays into the feeling of the manipulation of time and space that can occur with changes in individual repetitions, a primary goal for Harrison (and a driving force in his analysis of other works). Even with lengthy periods in music, such as those in the late works of Feldman, direct repetition is not always the goal, as small and nuanced changes to repetitive patterns can govern the way that the sense of time is distorted:
Feldman’s penchant for pattern extension by near repetition poses a distinct cognitive challenge: the proliferation of near repetitions frustrates attempts to prioritize events by distinctive features, and thereby to categorize, or even remember, individual instances.7
My interest in this phenomenon is not focused on its organic deployment, like that of the works of composers like Harrison and Feldman, which utilize significant periods of time — instead, my focus is more on how we can manipulate time without relying on significant length and the distortion that can come from long-term listening experiences, exploring how this balance of ‘rootedness’ and “uprootedness” can be engaged as a structural element of shorter-form works. It is perhaps most important that this process can be both practically and conceptually focused on what Feldman calls “a conscious attempt at ‘formalizing’ a disorientation of memory”8 regardless of its actual length or conceptual timescale. Interacting with places and physical spaces in music directly involves an imperfect recreation of a memory or view of something, with these techniques of repetition providing a way of building a structure to represent them.
Within this broad mindset around repetition, I also aimed to explore the extent to which the success of repetition lies in its immediate digestibility. Common convention in previous years focused on clear, short-form repetitions as those with the most weight (as shown by the staying power of the New York minimalists of the 1970s and 1980s, from Phillip Glass and Steve Reich to the founding composers of the Bang on a Can collective, as well as European giants like The Hague’s own Louis Andriessen). But others have looked to different forms of repetition entirely while engaging in a noisier and more sonically complex aesthetic. Bryn Harrison’s work is focused on layers of repetition in differing timescales, while others, such as Alex Mincek, Eric Wubbels, and Scott Wollschleger, have latched onto repetition with a major focus on Feldman-esque “disorientation,” with heavily complex textures getting stuck in detailed loops. The music of Sarah Hennies provides an example of both approaches combined, creating environments that are both constantly shifting in the short term and locked in long-form repetition, with a balance of the complexity of texture and simplicity of pattern. The focus on repetition shared by these composers establishes something which is not as easily digestible, showing a blueprint for how composition within sonic placemaking can explore a tense balance between the rooted and uprooted, using form and structure to both establish and question notions of “place” in art.