Kathryn Brickell Music is proud to offer drum lessons to our students in Brooklyn. We will be posting informative articles relating to drum instruction and drum lessons.

The following article helps distinguish between the importance of repetition vs. contrast.

We hope you will enjoy your drum lessons with our wonderful, experienced and dedicated local drum teachers.

Repetition and Contrast

When constructing pieces of music, two basic structural elements are key: repetition and contrast. The element of repetition is rather straightforward. Composers repeat interesting elements of the music which satisfies the listener’s psychological requirement for the familiar. Contrast, on the other hand, fulfills a secondary psychological requirement, that of the interest in change. The beauty of a particular piece of music can often be attributed to the interplay between the repeated elements and the contrasting ones. One particular form of music, the strophic form, is marked by the repetition of a melody in each stanza. The music within the particular stanzas fulfills the requirement of contrast, but the repetition of the melody creates the repetition we desire. Variation falls somewhere in between repetition. This element satisfies both requirements, having altered familiar pieces of music, making it both repetitive and unfamiliar. This may be done by a performer on a whim as they are performing, or planned by a composer, who might compose a new arrangement of a familiar song. 

Kathryn Brickell Music is proud to offer drum lessons to our students in Queens. We will be posting informative articles relating to drum instruction and drum lessons.

The following article helps relates music to memory.

We hope you will enjoy your drum lessons with our wonderful, experienced and dedicated local drum teachers.

 Personal Taste in Music

It is very difficult to figure out what makes a song good: especially since there are so many kinds of songs out there and so many different kinds of people who like all these different kinds of songs.  How can punk music and Chopin even exist on the same planet? and both be so overwhelmingly popular?  The mere fact that there are so many different types of music out there and that appreciation of a type of music is often central to membership in a social circle has led groups of people to believe that the act of enjoying a song can basically be boiled down to an esoteric initiation ritual into some kind of masonic order.  This seems like a strong opinion to have about the role of music in our culture.  I don’t think it’s completely right.  If I’m right about its being wrong, then a direct consequence of this is that certain songs have more intrinsic merit than others – that it is not just a matter of personal taste and social initiation rituals.  The Oxford Companion suggests that musical taste is not something we are born with, but something that we develop over the course of a life; it is something that is cultivated by listening to more music.  Reportedly Goethe, to cultivate his sense of music, had the young Mendelssohn play through all the important works of Bach, Handel, and Haydn in one sitting for just such a reason.