Music, Complexity, Information

“Two impulses struggle with each other within man: the demand for repetition of pleasant stimuli, and the opposing desire for variety, for change, for a new stimulus.” With these words, Arnold Schoenberg introduced the two fundamental principles which cast musical form. Repetition of perceptual elements – melodic motifs, rhythmic patterns, harmonic progressions– brings coherence to the musical structure, which is the basis of its comprehensibility. Variation, in turn, is necessary to avoid monotony and dullness. “Variety is the mother of delight in Music,” as Schoenberg’s fellow composer Giovanni Maria Bononcini had put it three centuries earlier. In the search for a satisfactory combination of intelligibility and aesthetic substance, music conveys a subtle balance of reiteration and change, of redundancy and novelty, of recurrent shapes and fresh figures. Arnold Schoenberg (Selfportrait, 1925) conceptualized the complementary roles of repetition and variation in musical composition.