Musical Borrowing
An Annotated Bibliography

Contributions by Sarah Kirkman

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[+] Adams, Kyle. “What Did Danger Mouse Do?: The Grey Album and Musical Composition in Configurable Culture.” Music Theory Spectrum 37 (Spring 2015): 7-24.

Danger Mouse (producer Brian Burton) recorded a performance of Jay-Z’s The Black Album in his 2004 The Grey Album, which challenges traditional notions of individual authorship. He produced The Grey Album by taking an a cappella recording of Jay-Z’s The Black Album and remixing portions of The Beatles’ The White Album as the instrumental backing. Because a mashup is a combination of two or more recordings onto a single track, it can be difficult to decide what type of art the mashup actually is, or what its creator has really done in making it. The Grey Album differs from A+B mash-ups such as Smells Like Booty (which combines Nirvana’s Smells Like Teen Spirit with Destiny’s Child’s Bootylicious) in multiple ways. First, unlike A+B mash-ups, The Grey Album is unequal in its borrowing. The entirety of Jay-Z’s lyrics are preserved, while The Beatles’ music is cut up and reconfigured to fit the lyrics. Second, The Grey Album deliberately obscures the incongruity of its sources. The aim of the album is to reinforce or reinterpret the lyrics, not to use them for comedic effect, and as a result, this borrowing has more in common with art music techniques than with existing popular mash-ups. Because the lyrics are clearly the focus of the album, it is not an independent composition, but rather a performance of The Black Album. Burton’s creative process connects him to the larger tradition of musical borrowing as The Beatles’s music served as Burton’s interpretative tool for his performance of Jay-Z’s album.

Works: Danger Mouse: The Grey Album; Soulwax: Smells Like Booty (8-9); Anonymous: Oops... The Real Slim Shady Did It Again (9); Berio: Sinfonia (11); Greg Gillis/Girl Talk: Feed the Animals (11); John Oswald: Plunderphonic (12).

Sources: Destiny’s Child: Bootylicious (8-9); Nirvana: Smells like Teen Spirit (8-9); Eminem: The Real Slim Shady (9); Britney Spears: Oops! I Did It Again (9); Jay-Z: The Black Album (10-23); The Beatles: The White Album (10-23).

Index Classifications: 2000s, Popular

Contributed by: Sarah Kirkman, Matthew Van Vleet

[+] Allsup, Randall Everett. “Sequoias, Mavericks, Open Doors... Composing Joan Tower.” Philosophy of Music Education Review 19, no. 1 (Spring 2011): 24-36.

Joan Tower demonstrates how a composer can remake traditions to carve out a space for her own voice. Tower comes out of the Western art music tradition with Beethoven as her strongest influence. “I couldn’t get [Beethoven] out of my head!” she says, “So I decided to invite him in.” Tower wrestles with Beethoven and allows him to become part of her music rather than an outside antagonist. Beethoven’s most obvious influence on Tower’s wider musical output is the technique of small motivic units organically developing, which can be seen in Tower’s Sequoia for orchestra. Tower claims Beethoven as part of her musical inheritance, but instead of feeling burdened by tradition, she uses it as the impetus for new ideas that are completely her own. Creativity in the arts does not happen in a vacuum free from tradition and cultural influences, but rather it takes place in dialogue with the past and future. In other words, a creative individual recognizes her inheritance and the tradition of which she is a member and makes something new out of older materials.

Works: Joan Tower: Sequoia (26-27, 30-31, 35).

Index Classifications: 1900s, 2000s

Contributed by: Sarah Kirkman

[+] Cutler, Chris. “Plunderphonia.” In Audio Culture: Readings in Modern Music, edited by Christoph Cox and Daniel Warner, 138-56. New York: Continuum International Publishing Group, 2004.

Plunderphonics—the technique of sampling and then dramatically editing those samples of existing music—challenges traditional notions of property rights, individual creativity, and originality, and thus calls for news modes of discourse. When recorded music becomes the sole source material for a new composition (the re-edited work), the concept of origination no longer matters; this radically subverts art music narratives of creative geniuses and autonomous artworks. Instead, plundering is a form of positive plagiarism that does not fit into the current modes of discourse on originality and property rights or existing copyright laws that emphasize the creation of a work by one author from nothing. Recording undermines the core of the classical art tradition because it bypasses notation, allowing the finished music itself to become the raw material of a re-edited work. Instead of creativity being the sole province of the composer in the art music tradition, recorded sounds and plundering place the impetus of creativity on the listener as new art can be made solely through listening without the constraints of notation. In order to better understand how musical plundering operates within popular and, more rarely, art music, we need to develop new frameworks of engaging with these issues of copyright and creativity.

Works: John Oswald: The Great Pretender (139), Plexure (153); Michael Jackson: Will You Be There? (139); John Coltrane (performer): My Favorite Things (142); John Cage: Imaginary Landscape No. 1 (145), Imaginary Landscape No. 4 (145), Imaginary Landscape No. 5 (145); Ottorino Respighi: Pina di Roma (145); Pierre Schaeffer: Etude aux tourniquets (145); James Tenney: Collage No. 1 (145), Viet Flakes (147); Frank Zappa: Absolutely Free, Lumpy Gravy, We’re Only in it for the Money (148); The Beatles: Tomorrow Never Knows (148), Revolution 9 (148); Stockhausen: Opus 1970 (148); The Residents: Third Reich and Roll (148), Beyond the Valley of a Day in the Life: The Residents Play The Beatles/The Beatles Play The Residents (149); Richard Tryhall: Omaggio a Jerry Lee Lewis (148).

Sources: Dolly Parton (performer): The Great Pretender; Beethoven: Symphony No. 9 in D Minor, Op. 125 (139); Richard Rodgers (composer), Oscar Hammerstein II (lyricist): My Favorite Things from The Sound of Music (142); Elvis Presley (performer): Blue Suede Shoes (145); Jerry Lee Lewis: Whole Lotta Shakin’ Goin’ On (148).

Index Classifications: 1900s, Popular

Contributed by: Sarah Kirkman

[+] DoHaeng, Jung. “Joan Tower’s Piano Concertos Homage to Beethoven (1985), Rapids (1996), and Still/Rapids (2013): A Style Study.” DMA diss., University of Cincinnati, 2014.

Joan Tower blends borrowed material wither her own compositional voice in her piano concertos Homage to Beethoven (1985) and Rapids (1996), which was later revised in 2013 and renamed Still/Rapids. These works are representative of Tower’s mature compositional style beginning in the 1970s as she turned away from a serial techniques towards a more accessible, energy-driven style. Tower characterizes the influences of older composers on her work as fingerprints and states that her most important musical model is Beethoven. J. Peter Burkholder’s categories of borrowing, particularly modeling, paraphrase, and setting, illuminate how Tower manipulates existing material in Homage to Beethoven. Tower acknowledges that her Homage to Beethoven does not sound like the Beethoven piano sonatas it borrows from, but rather shares their same core idea.

Works: Joan Tower: Homage to Beethoven (1, 4, 12, 14-15, 17-51, 78, 93, 95-98, 100-101, 121-23, 125, 127), Still/Rapids (1-2, 12, 15, 104-121, 123, 125, 127), Rapids (1, 3, 12, 14-15, 52-91, 94-106, 125-27), Black Topaz (9, 13, 94, 100), Petruschkates (12, 39, 78, 93, 97), Breakfast Rhythms I and II (13, 50, 92), Tres Lent (93), Fanfare for the Uncommon Woman (93), Fascinating Ribbons (93), Big Steps (93), Fantasy for Clarinet and Piano (101).

Sources: Beethoven: Piano Sonata No. 17 in D Minor, Op. 31, No. 2 (“Tempest”) (20-23), Piano Sonata No. 21 in C Major, Op. 53 (“Waldstein”) (23-24, 26, 28, 30-31, 40-42, 95, 101), Piano Sonata No. 32 in C Minor, Op. 111 (31-33, 101), Piano Sonata No. 13 in E-flat Major, Op. 27, No. 1 (102); Messiaen: Quatuor pour la fin du temps (50, 93); George Crumb: Vox Balaenae (50); Stravinsky: Petrushka (93); Copland: Fanfare for the Common Man (93); George Gershwin: Fascinatin’ Rhythm (93); Debussy: Préludes, Livre 1, Des pas sur la neige (93); Hugh Williams and Jimmy Kennedy: Harbor Lights (101).

Index Classifications: 1900s, 2000s

Contributed by: Sarah Kirkman

[+] Gioia, Ted. “Freedom and Fusion.” In The History of Jazz, 2nd ed., 309-343. New York: Oxford University Press, 2011.

Jazz has always been a music of mixture that borrows from other traditions, encompassing both free and fusion styles. Examples of musical borrowing and reworking are more overt in jazz fusion which draws on references from rock, popular, ethnic, and classical traditions, creating hybrid jazz styles that appealed to wider audiences. Miles Davis played an important role in propagating jazz fusion with his commercially successful album Bitches Brew (1970), which combined rock and jazz idioms. Davis continued the fusion aesthetic in his work for the film Jack Johnson, in which his producer producer Teo Macero spliced bits from Davis’s performance of Shh/Peaceful and inserted them into Davis’s Yesternow for the score to achieve a new and disjunct sound. Sampling proved a commercially viable technique for other groups as well, including A Tribe Called Quest and Us3. However, these bands were more parasitical than fusion (unlike Miles Davis) because they stole catchy licks and grooves from older jazz styles to use as raw material, rather than sources of style or new ideas.

Works: Miles Davis: Yesternow (327); Jaco Pastorius (performer): Donna Lee (330), God Bless the Child (332); A Tribe Called Quest: The Low End Theory (334); Bill Laswell: Panthalassa: The Music of Miles Davis 1969-1974 (335).

Sources: Miles Davis: Shh/Peaceful (327); Charlie Parker: Donna Lee (330); Billie Holiday and Arthur Herzog, Jr.: God Bless the Child (332).

Index Classifications: 1900s, Jazz

Contributed by: Sarah Kirkman

[+] Green, Stuart. “The Musical Routes of the Spanish Black Atlantic: The Performance of Identities in the Rap of Frank T and El Chojín.” Popular Music and Society 36, no. 4 (2013): 505-22.

Spain’s rap music scene was influenced by the dramatic increase of immigrants who settled in the country at the beginning of the twenty-first century, particularly immigrants from Africa. Because music is widely considered the most important medium for articulating black identities, the music of Spanish MCs Frank T and El Chojín are effective case studies for us to examine how rap artists carve out identities for themselves and others. Paul Gilroy explores such diasporic trends from Africa across the Atlantic, but his model is not broad enough to include other routes of cultural exchange or non-Anglo-Saxon experiences. Therefore, a more nuanced reading of Gilroy’s idea of a Black Atlantic as the Spanish Black Atlantic makes room for nationality beyond race. The hip-hop performed within this Spanish-black conceptual space is less about creating new texts than about creating new meanings and interpretations of existing texts.

Works: Frank T: An Optimist and a Dreamer (516), To Timeless Music (516), Humor Negro (516), Better Than You, Worse Than You (516), Afrika (517); El Chojín: Things That Happen, That Don’t Happen and That Should Happen (516), He’s Crazy (516), N.E.G.R.O. (516), Sólo para adultos (517), No More (Málaga version) (518); Violadores del Verso: Only Solace Remains (517).

Sources: Louis Armstrong: We Have All the Time in the World (515); Eddie Bo: On Work (516); Anonymous: Damn, Bro’/Bad Luck (516), Skills (516), Things that Happen (516); Jimi Hendrix: Voodoo Child (Slight Return) (516); The Spinners: It’s a Shame (516); David Axelrod: The Warning Talk (Pt. 4) (516); Galt MacDermot: Harlem by Day (516); Riz Ortolani: Teresa L’illusa (516); Bob Cranshaw and Donald Byrd: House of the Rising Sun (517); Baro´n Ya bu´ k-lu and Frank T: Mama Afreeka (517); Charlie Parker: Cosmic Rays (517); Raphael: No Matter What They Say (518).

Index Classifications: 2000s, Popular

Contributed by: Sarah Kirkman

[+] Johnson, Julian. “The Precarious Present.” In Out of Time: Music and the Making of Modernity, 82-116. New York: Oxford University Press, 2015.

Modernity is characterized by simultaneous pulling between two opposing directions, the lost past and the unlived future, which leaves the individual in an unstable and unsatisfying present. Because of this bifurcation, one experiences the present as fragmented. Music is especially apt at embodying this tension of past, present, and future, as can be seen in nineteenth- and twentieth-century composers’ appropriation of older styles into new idioms, and a renewed interest in those older forms. For example, Mendelssohn’s Preludes and Fugues, Op. 35 combines the general structure and style of Bach’s preludes and fugues with Romantic soloistic virtuosity that is anathema to Baroque aesthetics. The 1920s also saw increased activity in the transcription of works by J. S. Bach, Handel, and Palestrina, among others, with an emphasis on Classical and Baroque forms. Such examples of composers mixing older styles and forms into modern works suggests that we should resist dividing composers into conservative and progressive camps because musical modernity itself occurs in the precarious space between the past and present.

Works: Berg: Wozzeck (86); Bernd Alois Zimmermann: Die Soldaten (86); Camille Saint-Saëns: Le Carnaval des Animaux (97); Hans Pfitzner: Palestrina (105); Schoenberg: Concerto for Cello and Orchestra after a Harpsichord Concerto by G. M. Monn (107), Concerto for String Quartet and Orchestra in B-flat (107); Webern: Ricercare (107); Mendelssohn: Preludes and Fugues, Op. 35 (111); Fauré: Nocturne in E-flat Minor (111-12); Beethoven: Diabelli Variations, Op. 120 (113); Mozart: String Quartet in E-flat Major, K.171 (113), String Quartet in G Major, K.387 (113).

Sources: Offenbach: Orphée aux Enfers (97); G. M. Monn: Harpsichord Concerto (107); Handel: Concerto Grosso in B-flat Major, Op. 6, No. 7 (107); Johann Sebastian Bach: Musical Offering (107), Goldberg Variations (113); Chopin: Prelude in E Minor, Op. 28, No. 4 (111-12).

Index Classifications: General, 1900s

Contributed by: Sarah Kirkman

[+] Oja, Carol. “Crossover Composition: The Musical Identities of On The Town.” In Bernstein Meets Broadway: Collaborative Art in a Time of War, 221-69. New York: Oxford University Press, 2014.

Leonard Bernstein’s first Broadway musical, On the Town, establishes his characteristic use of a wide variety of musical styles following the models of Blitzstein, Gershwin, and Weill. To achieve such stylistic diversity, Bernstein utilizes small tidbits of contrasting sound worlds and re-contextualized them in new sound worlds, resulting in musical montages. Parody is one of Bernstein’s most effective techniques in On the Town for incorporating musical material from diverse styles. For example, in the number “Presentation of Miss Turnstiles,” Bernstein mimics and references Tchaikovsky’s ballets, cartoon music, vaudeville, and other idioms. Bernstein also relies strongly on common tropes to elicit particular associations and moods; for instance, using tone clusters in the opening of “New York, New York” to depict a busy morning in an urban area, connecting the song to Gershwin’s An American in Paris. Songs from Bernstein’s On the Town became borrowed material themselves, as jazz musicians appropriated them as “standards” to be improved upon. On the Town thus features a wide range of influences that in turn moved beyond the musical to leave a mark on Bernstein’s later style and, more broadly, the Broadway musical genre.

Works: Leonard Bernstein: On the Town (222-69), West Side Story (259); The Revuers: Three Little Psychopaths Are We (231).

Sources: George Gershwin: Porgy and Bess (223), An American in Paris (227); Jerome Kern and Oscar Hammerstein II: Show Boat (223); Anonymous: I Feel Like a Motherless Child (223), Sleep, Sleep in Jesus’s Arms (223); Gilbert and Sullivan: Mikado (231); Leonard Bernstein: On the Town (234), Symphony No. 1 (Jeremiah) (259); Rodgers and Hammerstein: Oklahoma! (238, 267).

Index Classifications: 1900s

Contributed by: Sarah Kirkman

[+] Oja, Carol. “On the Town After Dark: The Nightclub Scene.” In Bernstein Meets Broadway: Collaborative Art in a Time of War, 270-92. New York: Oxford University Press, 2014.

The Nightclub scene from Bernstein’s On the Town encapsulates in microcosm the musical’s themes and overall montage aesthetic. Critics who espoused a “high-modernist ideology” that emphasized the originality of a single composer disapproved of Bernstein’s liberal borrowing of existing sounds, styles, and music. While not strictly a musical borrowing, this scene’s construction is itself a parody of real clubs in New York City and the established theatrical club scene tradition, as it subverts the traditional trope of danger associated with night clubs. For example, the music and text of “So Long” mimic and poke fun at Billy Rose’s club Diamond Horseshoe through the song’s use of showgirl “ooing” that was common to Rose’s establishment.

Works: Leonard Bernstein: On the Town (270-92), Mass (294).

Sources: Leonard Bernstein: On the Town (278-79); Anonymous: Come Up to My Place (280), I Can Cook Too (280); Judy Tuvim: The World’s Fair is Unfair (275-76); Gilbert and Sullivan: The Pirates of Penzance (289-90).

Index Classifications: 1900s

Contributed by: Sarah Kirkman

[+] Oja, Carol. “Youthful Celebrity and Personal Freedom: Breaking Out with Fancy Free.” In Bernstein Meets Broadway: Collaborative Art in a Time of War, 11-51. New York: Oxford University Press, 2014.

Leonard Bernstein and Jerome Robbins’s ballet Fancy Free relies on compositional montage and collage to simultaneously cross musical, racial, and sexual borders. Bernstein’s technique of alluding to different styles is similar to later practices of sampling in the way he stitches references together, quickly changing the character of the music to reflect the onstage action. Unlike sampling, however, all of Bernstein’s music for Fancy Free is newly composed, and he simulates different genres and styles such as big band jazz, solo piano improvisation, melodrama, cartoons, and film, among others, through parody and mimicry rather than direct quotation. Bernstein’s primary evocations are Billie Holiday and Aaron Copland. Bernstein wrote the opening song of Fancy Free, “Big Stuff,” for Holiday, although it ended up being recorded by another singer. “Big Stuff” not only embodies Holiday’s style of singing, but it also is saturated with George Gershwin and Harold Arlen’s accompaniment and melodic techniques. Copland’s allusive presence in Fancy Free is the ballet’s most obvious outside reference, particularly in the movements “Enter Three Sailors,” “Scene at the Bar,” and “Finale.” Copland also noticed how similar Bernstein’s music was to his own and commented that he was worried that critics would claim that Bernstein was his primary influence in his own forthcoming Appalachian Spring. Bernstein also incorporates Central and South American elements in the number “Danzón,” which directly quotes a Cuban Danzón. In “Danzón,” Bernstein employs a Cuban bass line that incorporates a “cinquillo” rhythm within a commercial Cuban music aesthetic and ensemble. The above examples are only three of the many layers of influence and reference in Bernstein and Robbins’s Fancy Free, a ballet that is grounded in border crossing that would come to define both Bernstein’s and Robbins’s identities.

Works: Leonard Bernstein: Fancy Free (11-51).

Sources: George Gershwin: Concerto in F (37); Stravinsky: Petrushka (39); Tchaikovsky: The Nutcracker (40); Aaron Copland: Two Pieces for String Quartet (42), Piano Concerto (44); Leonard Bernstein: Conch Town (from an unfinished ballet) (45).

Index Classifications: 1900s

Contributed by: Sarah Kirkman

[+] Oswald, John. “Bettered by the Borrower: The Ethics of Musical Debt.” In Audio Culture: Readings in Modern Music, edited by Christoph Cox and Daniel Warner, 131-37. New York: Continuum International Publishing Group, 2004.

Recorded sound and its attendant technologies muddy the distinction between sound producers and sound reproducers, broaden the scope of musical instruments, and challenge traditional approaches to copyright laws. Analog and digital reproduction technologies have also changed what can be borrowed from music. Melody was once the principal material that could be taken from one piece and reworked, but recordings allowed for sound itself to be used as the actual raw material for new compositions, especially by amateur musicians. It was not until 1976 that copyright laws offered any protection for recorded music; prior to this point music had to exist as a score in order to be copyrighted. However, the increased restrictions on the use of existing recorded music and sound makes it more difficult for artists to create works that reference or quote other music. This not only limits what can be created, but what materials make it into the open field of public domain. Unfortunately, the discourse surrounding how people use existing music is predominantly negative, framing such uses as robbery, poaching, and brainless mistakes. Instead, we should think of reworking existing material as creative composition that turns an everyday song or sound into something entirely different and invites passive listeners to take on active roles in musical creation.

Works: Ives: Symphony No. 3 (132), 114 Songs (132); George Harrison: My Sweet Lord (133); Herbie Hancock: Rockit (135); Michael Jackson: Hard Rock (135); Jim Tenney: Collage 1 (136).

Sources: Chiffons: He’s So Fine (133); Led Zeppelin: Whole Lotta Love (135); Elvis Presley (performer): Blue Suede Shoes (136).

Index Classifications: 1900s, Popular

Contributed by: Sarah Kirkman

[+] Plasketes, George. “Like a Version: Cover Songs and their Tribute Trend in Popular Music.” Studies in Popular Culture 15, no. 2 (1992): 1-18.

American popular music in the 1980s and 1990s underwent a critical redefinition of what it meant to be original and creative, as cover songs and tribute albums flooded the market. Quotation, homage, apprenticeship, parody, allusion, and other forms of appropriationist techniques characterize this repertoire and give us a way to examine how culture and history are expressed and passed on. Cover songs grew from a shared cultural repertoire of secular and sacred tunes to the business of songwriting pairs such as Carole King and Gerry Goffin to tribute projects across different genres such as rock and avant-garde bands. Cover songs can be seen as a manifestation of cultural excess that prioritizes the reworking and repetition of existing songs over innovation. We can trace genealogies of performers and songwriters through a series of re-recordings, turning cover songs into living artifacts. This new wave of covers and tribute albums at the end of the twentieth century created a new standard for American popular music, supplanting the older generation of Cole Porter, Irving Berlin, and George Gershwin with Bob Dylan, Woody Guthrie, Paul Simon, and Elton John, among others.

Works: DNA: Oh Suzanne (8); Dread Zeppelin: Un-Led Ed, 5,000,000 (9); Tom Petty: I’ll Feel a Whole Lot Better (10); Roger McGuinn: American Girl (10).

Sources: Suzanne Vega: Solitude Standing (8-9); Byrds (performers): I’ll Feel a Whole Lot Better (10); Tom Petty: American Girl (10).

Index Classifications: 1900s, Popular

Contributed by: Sarah Kirkman

[+] Reynolds, Christopher Alan. “Transformations.” In Motives for Allusion: Context and Content in Nineteenth-Century Music, 23-43. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003.

Motivic allusions are often dependent on motivic transformations, the most common of which are alterations in rhythm, meter, and intervallic relationships. But a more nuanced exploration of musical allusion requires additional forms of transformation, namely motivic combination, octave displacement, and transformation by genre. Such transformations can occur at different levels—from large-scale formal structures to local phrases and motives—and vary in the obviousness of their presentation, which relies heavily on genre. Musical ideas taken from one genre and recontextualized in another do not have to be as disguised as allusions among pieces in the same genre. In fact, allusions across disparate genres are most effective when they are clear and an exact quotation. Genre was shaped by nineteenth-century audiences’ social and musical expectations, which composers could manipulate through allusions. Transformations through motivic combination, octave displacement, and genre play critical roles in Brahms’s and Schumann’s allusions to Beethoven and to each other, illustrating how nineteenth-century composers were in dialogue with themselves and tradition as they sought to distance their own ideas from preexisting ones. Source material and the allusive motive should share, as a general rule, at least three features for it to be an actual borrowing and not a coincidence. Allusions and formal modeling can be both assimilative and contrastive, and both characteristics are exemplified in Brahms’s Sonata No. 1 in C Major, Op. 1, which he models on Beethoven’s “Waldstein” Sonata, only to depart from it. It was important for nineteenth-century composers to establish distance from their models, as Brahms does with his Op. 1, because of the emphasis on originality.

Works: Brahms: Piano Concerto No. 1 in D Minor, Op. 15 (24, 26, 28), Horn Trio, Op. 40 (24), Piano Sonata No. 1 in C Major, Op. 1 (25-26, 34, 43), Variations on a Theme by Robert Schumann, Op. 9 (28), Vier ernste Gesange, Op. 121 (30), Symphony No. 3 in F Major, Op. 90 (33); Mozart: Symphony No. 41 in C Major, K.551 (“Jupiter”) (26-27); Robert Schumann: Carnaval, Op. 9 (29-30), Piano Quintet No. 1 in E-flat Major, Op. 44 (31-32), Symphony No. 3 in E-flat Major, Op. 97 (33, 40), Symphony No. 2 in C Major, Op. 61 (37, 41), Konzert-Allegro mit Introduktion, Op. 134 (38), Scenen aus Goethes Faust (38), Symphony No. 4 in D Minor, Op. 120 (42); Niels Gade: Drei kleine Clavierstucke (27-28, 30); Felix Mendelssohn: Elijah, Op. 70 (30), Symphony No. 5 in D Major / D Minor, Op. 107 (“Reformation”) (37); Joseph Eybler: Requiem (34-35); Clara Schumann: Piano Sonata in G Minor, Op. 22 (38).

Sources: Beethoven: Piano Sonata No. 21 in C Major, Op. 53 (“Waldstein”), (24-26, 43), Piano Concerto No. 3 in C Minor, Op. 37 (24), Piano Sonata No. 3 in D Major, Op. 10 (24), Piano Sonata No. 29 in B-flat Major, Op. 106 (“Hammerklavier”) (24, 34), Symphony No. 9 in D Minor, Op. 125 (27, 39-40), Symphony No. 5 in C Minor, Op. 67 (33), Symphony No. 7 in A Major, Op. 92 (40); Mozart: Symphony No. 41 in C Major, K.551 (“Jupiter”) (26-27), Piano Quartet No. 2 in E-flat Major, K.493 (31-32), Requiem, K.626 (34-35); Carl Maria von Weber: Der Freischütz (29-30), Koncertstucke in F Minor, Op. 79, J.282 (37-38, 40); Haydn: The Seasons (35), Symphony No. 104 in D Major (36-37); Schubert: Symphony No. 9 in C Major, D.944 (36-37); Bach: A Musical Offering, BWV 1079 (41): Johann Wenzel Kalliwoda: Symphony No. 1 in F Minor, Op. 7 (42); Ignaz Moscheles: Grande Sonate in E-flat Major, Op. 47 (42).

Index Classifications: 1800s

Contributed by: Sarah Kirkman

[+] Rodin, Jesse. “The L’homme Armé Tradition—And the Limits of Musical Borrowing.” In The Cambridge History of Fifteenth-Century Music, edited by Anna Maria Busse Berger and Jesse Rodin, 69–83. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015.

The L’homme armé tradition is perhaps the best example of musical borrowing in Renaissance music, but we know very little about the reasoning behind most of the masses in the tradition. Cultural associations for L’homme armé are difficult to pick out and likely forgotten about by new generations of composers, leaving aesthetics, not politics, as the justification for compositional techniques. Three masses set the precedent for the L’homme armé tradition: the settings of Du Fay, Ockeghem, and Regis, all ca. 1460. Each setting caused a number of successive composers to imitate their musical devices. As more L’homme armé masses were written, composers looked to more recent models than the original three, or they set a unique path entirely. Fifteenth-century composers often attempted to outclass each other while simultaneously being part of the shared L’homme armé tradition. The term “borrowing” is problematic when it comes to these masses, as it implies intentionality, which cannot be firmly established in many instances. Caution must be taken when discussing this music in terms of borrowing because it was common for composers to memorize stock phrases and follow strict compositional rules in this era. Furthermore, masses with “borrowing” are not inherently more interesting than those without, and thus should not be privileged in critical discourse. With this ambiguity surrounding “borrowing,” “echo” might be a more neutral and encompassing way to describe the transformations of shared material in the L’homme armé tradition.

Works: Du Fay: Missa L’homme armé (71-72, 74-75); Ockeghem: Missa L’homme armé (71-72, 74-75); Regis: Missa L’homme armé (71-72, 74-75); Firminus Caron: Missa L’homme armé (74-75); Guillaume Faugues: Missa L’homme armé (74-75); Anonymous (Naples I-VI): Missa L’homme armé (74-75); Busnoys: Missa L’homme armé (72, 74-75); Anonymous (Bologna Q.16): Missa L’homme armé (74-75); Tinctoris: Missa L’homme armé (72, 74-75); Loyset Compére: Missa L’homme armé (74-75); Obrecht: Missa L’homme armé (72, 74-75); Philippe Basiron: Missa L’homme armé (72, 74-75); Marbrianus de Orto: Missa L’homme armé (74-75); Josquin: Missa L’homme armé super voces musicales (74-75), Missa L’homme armé sexti toni (72, 74-75); Brumel: Missa L’homme armé (74-75); La Rue: Missa L’homme armé (74-75); Matthaeus Pipelare: Missa L’homme armé (74-75); Bertrandus Vaqueras: Missa L’homme armé (72, 74-75).

Sources: Anonymous: L’homme armé (69-70); Du Fay: Missa L’homme armé (71-72, 74-75); Ockeghem: Missa L’homme armé (71-72, 74-75); Regis: Missa L’homme armé (71-72, 74-75).

Index Classifications: 1400s, 1500s

Contributed by: Sarah Kirkman, Matthew Van Vleet

[+] Toop, David. “Replicant: On Dub.” In Audio Culture: Readings in Modern Music, edited by Christoph Cox and Daniel Warner, 355-57. New York: Continuum International Publishing Group, 2004.

Dubbing treats music more as modeling clay than copyrightable material, rendering no mix original, as it extracts bits from existing music and places it in new contexts. Dub is both a genre of music and a technique that removes the vocal track away from its backing track. The remaining accompaniment track is then altered by the artist with a variety of methods, including drop-out, extreme equalisation, long and short delay, space echo, reverb, flange, phase, noise, gates, echo feedback, shotgun snare drums, rubber bass, zipping highs, and cavernous lows. These effects are generally used to enhance the existing track, but when they are deployed by a dubmaster they have the potential to create new moods and moments. In this way, the dubmaster is like a sculptor, as he directly manipulates existing material. Dub also anticipated the later remix culture in the 1970s with version albums such as Rupie Edwards’s Yamaha Skank, demonstrating that dub was more than a style but was a new way of thinking about music and creativity.

Works: William Gibson: Neuromancer (356); Joe Gibbs: African Dub All-Mighty; Augustus Pablo: King Tubbys Meets Rockers Uptown (356), Africa Must Be Free By 1983 (356), East of the River Nile (357); Lee Perry: Super Ape (357); Rupie Edwards: Yamaha Skank (357); Anonymous: My Conversation.

Index Classifications: 1900s, Popular

Contributed by: Sarah Kirkman



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