ABSTRACT
This chapter explores extra-musical signification of repetition in postminimal music, the validity of associating specific topics, or tropes, with the music will be demonstrated. It seeks to identify various examples of minimalist or postminimal music that relate to Rebecca Leydon's categories. Certain examples from Philip Glass's soundtrack to the film Powaqqatsi demonstrate his idiosyncratic approach to musical time. Leydon's motoric' trope forms one component of her typology of minimalist tropes' a theoretic framework that offers an affective vocabulary of specific forms of repetition, arguing that repetitive music can indeed express specific cognitive meanings. The concept of a topic in music is comparable to the musical trope, as employed within a minimalist context by Leydon. Eero Tarasti argues that repetitive processes employed in minimalist music halt temporal progress, while Wim Mertens considers repetitive music as having an a-teleological function in other words lacking in a final purpose, or a goal.
