Music and Hermeneutics

Bach’s little Minuet in G ends, not surprisingly, on G, while the bass plays a descending series of notes that are part of the G-major chord: G, D, and G. With the G, and the fragments of the chord, the Minuet comes to rest. The next to last note in the melody of the hymn “Come Thou Almighty King,” is also a G, but the G here does not bring rest and resolution, but sounds incomplete without the following F. The difference in the two Gs, of course, has to do with context – the immediate context of the surrounding notes, and more generally what Jeremy Begbie calls the “dynamic field” of key. The very same note sounds different, is experienced differently, “means” something different in a different melodic and harmonic context. In this, music and language, especially literary uses of language, are quite similar. The same word in two contexts means something quite different; and the same motif or image in different narrative and historical contexts sounds different.

Bach’s Minuet also illustrates the kinds of repetitions that can exist in a narrative. Again, Begbie’s analysis is very helpful. There are multiple sorts of repetitions going on. Most simply, there is the repeated rhythm of the beat (in ¾ time). Some phrases are almost exactly repeated. The first phrase, consisting of two measures, is almost exactly repeated in the second phrase of two measures (the only difference is a change in the bass, as a G moves an octave lower). These same four measures are repeated a short time later, but at that point they feel like a return to familiar territory after a brief departure.

The following two measures display a different sort of repetition. The notes are not repeated exactly. Instead, there is a rhythmic repetition (2 dotted quarters followed by two eighths), and a similarity in the “shape” of the melodic phrase. In the first measure, the quarter notes and the first eighth are on the same tone (E), then the melody reaches up to a G, and returns a step lower to D, which is the beginning of the next measure. Then the melodic fragment begins again: Two quarter notes and an eighth on D, then up to G, and back down to C.

Again, these types of repetitions are similar to the kinds of repetition in language. Like music, literature has multiple rhythmic patterns going on simultaneously at various levels. Each event is discrete, but they form patterns of events. At another level, a similar pattern might be repeated, and form a “rhythmic” relation with the original pattern.

Rarely, though sometimes, the very same words are repeated at different points in a narrative, or the very same event can take place. But they do not mean the same thing in their different contexts (think of the different “meaning” attached to the alarm clock scene each time it recurs in Groundhog Day). The repetition can have the feel of a home-coming (as in a chiastically organized text, or in a simply inclusion). Or, the repeated words can have an ironic relation to the original use – since the situation has been wholly reversed and inverted by the intervening development.

More often, narrative repetition is a matter of two events having a similar “melodic” shape, though at different keys or at different pitches. The exodus story is told and retold throughout the Bible, with different characters, at different places, with some variation in the specifics of the events. But it is recognizably the “same” sequence of events, the same melody. Good reading involves increasing sensitivity to such recurrences in their similarities and variations.