Ostinato

The omnipresence, especially in popular music, of this form of obstinate repetition, which has kept its traditional name of ostinato, makes it one of the least contestable universals. However, this probable archetype is not without its problems. In her thesis on the technique, Flender-Schnapper analysed all the forms it has taken in European music. However, she believed that she could exclude from the ostinato the independent periodicities combined in the Middle Ages as color (melodic ostinato on varied rhythms) or talea (rhythmic ostinato on varied melodies), because of their very independence, and above all because of the small number of melodic repetitions. As for the simple repetition of an isochronous pulse, following Simha Arom she also excluded it from the ostinati family. It is likely, however, that the ostinato often merely diversifies the elementary repetition of a single pulse, and that the latter must be regarded as a simple minimal variant in the same kind of context. The toucan calls with which I introduced my work Rituel d’oubli (Ritual of Forgetting), the Polynesian story stick, or the isochronous scansion of Amerindian songs, already belong to its domain.