Music is built, to varying degrees, on repetition. With few exceptions, this is true not only of music’s structure and form, but of the way we interact with it, whether we’re practicing musicians or just listeners.
For most of us, there is a point in our younger lives when we watch the same movies and TV shows again and again, read through the same books until we almost know them by heart, and listen to the same songs hundreds of times.
We do this kind of thing to help us form our identities, to discover who we are, and at a certain point—believe it or not teenagers and college students—those sorts of questions start to get boring.
But aside from an annual tradition or two, as we get older, most of us tend to give up the practice of reading the same books and watching the same movies and TV episodes again and again. Music is a bit different. No matter how old we get, the music we love almost always bears repeating.
To me, a truly great piece of music is almost impossible to understand completely on the first listen. (And in the rare case that is, it just begs to be heard a thousand more times because of it.) Great movies, in my opinion, are different. Almost the opposite.
I saw There Will Be Blood once, and from that single viewing it is, and will always remain, one of my favorite movies. I don’t really need to see it again. I can think about it anytime I want. The moments of that film sit as part of my soul, almost like a personal memory of an event that I have lived. To see it again would only change that relationship.
I know that I’m not alone in this kind of thing. As an adult, Roger Ebert rarely ever watched a movie twice. Neither did The New Yorker‘s film critic Pauline Kael, who once said to an interviewer:
“I still don’t look at movies twice. It’s funny, I just feel I got it the first time. With music it’s different, although I realize that sometimes with classical works, I listen to them with great enthusiasm and excitement the first time, but I’m not drawn to listen to them again and again. Whereas with pop, it’s just the reverse. Give me Aretha singing “A Rose Is Just a Rose,” and I can play it all day long. And I can’t explain that.”