This work, a single 18-minute movement, begins with the piano playing a murmuring, repetitive figure and softly chiming chords.
Just as the fog began to lift, Mr. Rutner struck up a repetitive figure, on clarinet, in quintuple meter: the ostinato behind "Angels and Demons at Play," a seductive Sun Ra anthem.
In an era that rejected repetition of any kind, Feldman used repetitive figures as early as his "Structures" for string quartet, of 1951, long before Terry Riley, Steve Reich and Philip Glass created a splash with tape loops and repeated phrases in the mid-60's.
Much of it used repetitive figures.
Typically, in groups, Mr. Iyer builds two-handed, cycling, repetitive figures, wall-to-wall carpets of melodic rhythm; it's his identity in sound.
The composer offers a long list of entertainments: stomps, yips, yells and sighs from the players, pizzicato and hand-slaps to imitate the dry resonance of Eastern instruments and pounding repetitive figures.
Another player might have rendered the repetitive figures of "Solo Observed" (1982) with a stronger sense of beat; Mr. Foss, by contrast, communicated, more than anything else, an organic, vital sense of the music.
The transition from the shimmering, repetitive figures that open the piece to the angular counterpoint that follows sounded smoother, and the first movement's journey had an inexorable quality — a combination of tension and drive — that suggested a temperamental kinship with the late Beethoven quartets.
What's more, the glowing, urgent performance that Mr. Gilbert drew from the Philharmonic brought out all of the music's modernist touches, with whole-tone scales that recall late Debussy; modal melodic writing that evokes Moravian folk music; and the extensive use of repetitive figures that lend the score a ritualistic strangeness.
She continued, "It fulfills its purpose of underscoring the emotion of the story by being moody and slow to change melodically and harmonically, and by using many pregnant pauses and minimalist-leaning repetitive figures".
If we colour for growing values the elements of the matrix, we get a repetitive pattern in both Figures 3 and 4. The values on the main diagonal VN3 i,i) show the aggregation of equal LC6's, the values of VN3 i,j) with j close to i show the aggregation between different but close BLC's having the same vorticity (the proximity should be interpreted on the winds cube).
