On Repeat
How Music Plays the Mind
Elizabeth Hellmuth Margulis
Reviews and Awards
Winner of the Wallace Berry Award, Society for Music Theory and the Deems Taylor/Virgil Thomson Award from the American Society for Composers, Authors and Publishers (ASCAP).
"Most music repeats itself a lot-an awful lot, actually. In On Repeat, Elizabeth Margulis takes a firm grasp of this obvious fact and moves it out from under our musical noses, giving it the thoughtful consideration it deserves. With knowledge and illustrations ranging from neuroscience to music analysis, and leavened with her personal experiences as a listener and pianist, Margulis shows that music's repetitiveness, far from being a flaw or lapse, is essential for us to hear, remember, move, feel, and delight in music, especially the music we know and love the best."-Justin London, Professor of Music, Carleton College, and author of Hearing in Time: Psychological Aspects of Musical Meter
"Cognitive music theorist Elizabeth Hellmuth Margulis addresses one of the great puzzles about music: why does it repeat so much? This simple question provides a wedge into a range of issues underlying musical understanding and appreciation. On Repeat is a consequential book written in engaging and non-technical language."-Fred Lerdahl, Fritz Reiner Professor of Music, Columbia University
"[H]ighly stimulating, if controversial. Recommended." --CHOICE
"[A] signal musical and intellectual achievement." -- Music and Letters
"A foundational study...The author has contributed a volume of overwhelming significance, originality, and rigor." --Society for Music Theory, in awarding the Wallace Berry Award
"The engaging, entertaining style of On Repeat makes it a pleasure to read... an important contribution to the field of music cognition, and should be of interest to scholars throughout the field." - Music Perception
"[A]n exciting new examination of a very old subject... eminently readable and intriguing, having much to offer the academic musician, the experimental psychologist, or the interested lay reader. The book represents a significant advance in our understanding of the deep questions behind the variegated phenomena of musical repetition." - Music Theory Online
"Margulis's On Repeat goes a long way toward explaining the sea change between two [repeated performances], as well as the earworm I had on the drive home." --Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism
"Margulis's project is an ambitious one and sets out in a clearly comprehensible way issues that need to be more carefully considered by music theorists and music psychologists alike." -- Music Theory Spectrum
