Ostinato
Pachelbel’s Canon in D is built on eight notes in the bass that repeat, unchanged, fifty-four times. Above them, three violins weave a structure of ascending complexity that has made the piece nearly impossible to escape at weddings. The trick of the piece is in the bass. Remove the eight notes and the violins become wandering. Keep them, and every variation above them inherits a meaning it could not have generated on its own. The fixed thing is what licenses the moving things.
The Italian word is ostinato. Obstinate. The figure that refuses to change.
Ostinato is older and stranger than Pachelbel. Bach’s Passacaglia in C minor: a twenty-bar bass theme repeated twenty times, with a fugue stacked on top. Arvo Pärt’s tintinnabuli style: triadic patterns rung against stepwise melody, the same bell-like figure reappearing for fifteen minutes while the piece walks in slow circles around it. Steve Reich’s Music for 18 Musicians: pulsing ostinati holding the piece together for an hour while everything above them drifts in and out. African drumming is built on it. So is most of what your phone calls “ambient.”
What ostinato makes audible is something usually invisible: that variation requires constancy to be variation. Without the repeating ground, the changes above it are just noise — they have nothing to be different from. Music figured this out three centuries before the cognitive scientists started saying the same thing about perception.
The principle leaves the music. A practice has an ostinato — the daily walk, the morning page, the hour at the workbench, the same coffee at the same time — and the practice’s content is the variation playing above it. Lose the ostinato and the variation collapses, even if the variation was the part you cared about. This is why writers who break their morning routine often can’t write that day, and why the broken routine matters more than its content. The point of the routine isn’t the routine. The point of the routine is to be the still ground beneath the work.
Ritual does this for cultures. Maintenance does it for objects. Mise en place does it for the kitchen: the salt in the same place every night is the kitchen’s ostinato, freeing the cook to vary above it. Homeostasis is biology’s version — the steady internal milieu that lets the organism do everything else.
The temptation is to vary the ostinato. It’s the part that gets boring, because nothing happens in it; that is what it is for. The composer who decides on bar forty to do something interesting with the bass usually destroys the piece. The practitioner who decides his routine has become rote and breaks it for novelty often destroys the practice. What looked like the boring part was the part holding everything else up. The interest was the violins. The marriage was the bass.