Musicians use a broad spectrum of practices to make new music out of old: performance, including everything from making performing choices to improvising variants or added material; creating a new version of a piece by arranging it, transcribing it for different media or setting it with a new accompaniment; borrowing material from one or more existing pieces to use in a new one; building a new piece out of schemas, shared routines that can be deployed in endless new combinations; using topics, references to familiar styles and types of music, to delineate form and create meaning through association; and other forms of intertextuality, which encompasses these and other kinds of relationships between and among pieces of music. Borrowing has been a subject of musical scholarship for centuries, and in the past four decades scholars have developed parallel fields of study focused on the others. Each of these approaches is useful, drawing our attention to significant and longstanding practices in our musical tradition and to ways creators shape music and listeners understand it. Moreover, all of these scholarly approaches and musical practices are related, serving to demonstrate how central to our tradition are our many ways of making old music new.

Works: Franz Liszt: William Tell Overture, S. 552 (72); Bob Rivers: Not So Silent Night (72-73, 78); Stravinsky: Pulcinella (73), The Fairy’s Kiss (73); Josquin Desprez: Missa Pange lingua (74); Charles Ives: Symphony No. 2 (74, 78)

Sources: Rossini: William Tell Overture (72); Franz Xaver Gruber (composer), John Freeman Young (English lyricist): Silent Night (72-73, 78); Henry Clay Work: Wake Nicodemus (74); David Walker (composer), Anonymous (lyricist): Where, O Where are the Verdant Freshmen? (78)

Index Classifications: 1500s, 1900s, Popular

Contributed by: J. Peter Burkholder, Matthew Van Vleet