Scholars have distinguished between two mutually exclusive categories of sixteenth- century instrumental compositions: (1) those that are more or less elaborated versions of vocal models such as masses, motets, madrigals, and chansons and (2) fantasias or ricercares that are independent of vocal models. This distinction is imprecise and misleading because many fantasias and ricercares contain musical material derived from vocal models, usually without attribution. In comparatively rare instances a fantasia or ricercare names the title of its model, such as lute music composer Jean-Paul Paladin's Fantasia sopra Quand'io penso al martir', a fantasia based on Arcadelt's madrigal Quand'io penso al martir', or Paladin's Fantasia sopra Ave sanctissima, based on Sermisy's motet Ave sanctissima. These two works demonstrate the wide variety of compositional techniques used by fantasia composers in their approach to borrowing from vocal models, ranging from brief oblique references to lengthy passages of exact quotation. They also demonstrate that fantasia composers often mixed (apparently) original with borrowed material. It is thus not reasonable to view sixteenth century instrumental music as forming only two categories (derived from vocal music or "free"), because most of it lies somewhere between these two extremes.

Works: Paladin: Fantasia sopra Quand'io penso al martir' (20-29), Fantasia sopra Ave sanctissima (32-35).

Sources: Arcadelt: Quand'io penso al martir' (20-29); Sermisy: Ave sanctissima (32-35).

Index Classifications: 1500s

Contributed by: Scott Grieb

In his First Serenade, Brahms artfully uses genre as a rhetorical technique, blending conventions of the serenade and symphony to craft his image as a progressive and historicist composer. Brahms’s rehabilitation of the late-eighteenth century serenade serves as a challenge to the radical modernism of the New German School. Throughout the composition process, Brahms was concerned with the implications of the work’s genre and considered reworking the serenade into a symphony, but ultimately declined to do so. The retrospective gesture of composing in the serenade genre was a significant aspect of the work’s reception, as was Brahms’s hybrid approach to the genre. The pastoral topics and conventions traditional to the serenade genre are present in each of the six movements and contribute to the work’s critical reception as a tonic for Liszt’s and Wagner’s excesses. Brahms also employs frequent melodic allusions to works by Beethoven, Haydn, Schubert, and others. These allusions are often located at structurally relevant points, preserving the function of the earlier material. Brahms frequently combines references; the fifth movement of the serenade famously combines tunes from Beethoven’s Septet, “Spring” Sonata, and Symphony No. 2 with the finale of Haydn’s Symphony No. 104. By composing in a historical genre and alluding to several classical composers, Brahms musically articulates his return to composing and his new stylistic direction within the tradition of Viennese Classicism.

Works: Brahms: Serenade No. 1 in D Major, Op. 11 (397-403)

Sources: Beethoven: Symphony No. 2 in D Major, Op. 36 (397, 399-400), Septet in E-flat Major, Op. 20 (399), Violin Sonata No. 5 in F Major, Op. 24 (399-400), Haydn: Symphony No. 104 in D Major (398-99); Robert Schumann: Symphony No. 2 in C Major, Op. 61 (398-99), Carnaval, Op. 9 (400-401)

Index Classifications: 1800s

Contributed by: Matthew Van Vleet

The complexity of musical meaning in Moulin Rouge demands detailed analysis and a better understanding of how director Baz Luhrmann uses music both literally and figuratively, in order to provide a more well-rounded assessment of the film and its relationship to postmodernism and the Hollywood musical. Luhrmann borrows the complete melody and lyrics of The Sound of Music, but re-orchestrates the accompaniment. In doing so, he relies on listeners’ recognition of this familiar tune to portray Christian as a creative talent. Smells Like Teen Spirit constitutes one of the most daring quotations throughout the entire film. Luhrmann keeps the melody and lyrics intact but endows the quotation with a new contextual meaning, effectively creating a mocking contradiction and parodic simplification of the original’s more complex meaning. Luhrmann’s borrowing of Diamonds Are a Girl’s Best Friend is specially tailored for the leading lady, Satine, and invites comparison to Lorelei Lee in Gentlemen Prefer Blondes. Both Satine and Lorelei are beautiful entertainers who depend on their beauty and sexuality to manipulate men, but Satine aspires to be a true actress instead of a prostitute-like figure, so Luhrmann turns the original show-within-a-show production to an entire production based on Satine’s number. Other modifications include changing the original lyrics and singing them more slowly and intentionally than Lorelei’s version. Luhrmann’s borrowing of Elton John’s Your Song once again defines Christian as a man with creative musical talents, as he successfully wins the heart of Satine when he began setting the lyrics to music. It also represents a communicative channel for Christian as he is able to express his thoughts and emotions more clearly using music. Luhrmann’s exaggerated staging of Like a Virgin offers comic relief, and Christian’s musical genius is contrasted with the lack of singing lines on the Duke’s part.

Works: Baz Luhrmann: Moulin Rouge (31-37).

Sources: Rodgers and Hammerstein: The Sound of Music (32-33); Kurt Cobain: Smells Like Teen Spirit (33-34); Jule Styne and Leo Robin: Diamonds Are a Girl’s Best Friend (34-35); Elton John: Your Song (35); Billy Steinberg and Tom Kelly: Like a Virgin (35-36); Gordon Matthew Sumner: El Tango de Roxanne (36-37).

Index Classifications: 2000s, Film

Contributed by: Jingyi Zhang

Index Classifications: 1800s

Index Classifications: 1800s

A complex of musical and textual riddles, as well as biographical evidence, points to Thomas Arne's Rule, Britannia! as the hidden theme of Elgar's Enigma Variations, and thus to Britannia as the "enigma" figure. Alexander Pope's To a Lady may have served as a model for Elgar in its general conception, and specific passages from Pope's Epistle to Dr. Arbuthnot correspond with individual variations.

Works: Elgar: Enigma Variations (130-42).

Sources: Thomas Arne: Rule, Britannia! from Alfred (130, 132-33, 135, 139-40); Mendelssohn: Meeresstille und glückliche Fahrt (132).

Index Classifications: 1800s

Contributed by: Virginia Whealton

Bruckner may have had in mind a motive in Wagner's Tristan und Isolde for part of his melody in his song Ave Maria. This article includes musical examples and some historical background.

Index Classifications: 1800s

Contributed by: Paula Ring Zerkle

Index Classifications: 1900s, Film

Aaron Copland and Martha Graham’s Appalachian Spring is noteworthy for popularizing the Shaker hymn Simple Gifts, but the ballet’s appropriation of the religious sect and its history in American folk discourse is more complex than initial assessments of the piece let on. The Shakers’ cultural identity through American history is closely tied to the needs of the present discourse. In the early twentieth century, Van Wyck Brooks called for the creation of a “usable past” in American arts. The Shakers became an important source of a usable past, especially for the visual arts. Exhibits of Shaker decorative arts and “Shaker rooms” became popular museum fixtures. In assessing American art and design culture in the 1930s, scholars such as Constance Rourke deemed the Shakers an American folk culture, unattached to the vestiges of European culture. Starting in the late 1920s, Edward Deming Andrews and Faith Andrews promoted Shaker culture and commodified their perceived authenticity by selling Shaker furniture. Per the Andrews’ marketing, by purchasing Shaker furniture (or a songbook), one could come in contact with its aura of authenticity. Appalachian Spring premiered in the middle of this Shaker craze. Copland even took Simple Gifts from a 1940 Andrews publication on Shaker music. The song’s position in Appalachian Spring heightens its reaffirmation of American values as represented by the simple, primitive—but white and Christian—popular image of Shaker culture. Copland’s appropriation of Shaker music relied on an existing culture that positioned Shakers as primitive outsiders, using them to create an idealized American past. The issues of appropriation and commodification are still difficult questions facing us today, and Appalachian Spring should serve as a reminder of this tendency in American culture.

Works: Aaron Copland: Appalachian Spring (518-21)

Sources: Elder Joseph Brackett: Simple Gifts (518-21)

Index Classifications: 1900s

Contributed by: Matthew Van Vleet

Index Classifications: 1500s

Liszt's transcription of Schubert's Der Wanderer shows how the features Liszt introduces that change Schubert's song help to convey a preexisting narrative in an instrumental language, reflecting his awareness of Schubert's interpretation of the text. Each feature Liszt deployed to elaborate the model has a correspondence with a narrative device. For instance, before the narrator's recitative from the model he adds a measure that prolongs the dominant with an extended arpeggio, then he inserts a "rhetorical pause"; both of these devices increase the rhetorical tension until the declamatory passage begins and thus create more contrast than the model. As another example, Liszt explores keyboard registers to create an echo-like imitation for the line "wo bist du?," lending a sense of "interrogation." Liszt's distinctive features transformed Schubert's song; at the same time, they contribute to transcription in the way the composer transfers the literary spirit of the original song to the piano.

Works: Liszt: Der Wanderer (56-65).

Sources: Schubert: Der Wanderer (56-63).

Index Classifications: 1800s

Contributed by: Hyun Joo Kim

Vaughan Williams was influenced by a number of composers as mentors and contemporaries, and mentions many of them in this essay. He had no conscience about musical borrowing--which he calls "cribbing"--and engaged in it quite frequently.

Works: Vaughan Williams: A London Symphony (188), "Satan's Dance" from Job (190), Symphony in F Minor, A Sea Symphony (188, 190).

Index Classifications: 1900s

Contributed by: Rob Lamborn

Bax and Vaughan Williams were friends and supported and helped each other musically. In a conversation about borrowed pieces, Bax is said to have noted that all of Vaughan Williams's "best sellers are not his own." An editor's note points out that Vaughan Williams quoted Bax's Third Symphony in his Piano Concerto.

Works: Vaughan Williams: Fantasia on Christmas Carols (244), Fantasia on a Theme of Thomas Tallis (244), Piano Concerto (244).

Index Classifications: 1900s

Contributed by: Rob Lamborn

Among the ways music is made is by the re-use of similar ideas. Three fugue subjects by J. S. Bach, Handel, and Mozart, are each built on the same phrase.

Works: Bach: Fugue No. 20 from the Well-Tempered Clavier, Book II (218); Handel: "And with His Stripes" from Messiah (217); Mozart: "Kyrie" from the Requiem (218).

Index Classifications: 1700s

Contributed by: Rob Lamborn

Folk song has evolved as an oral tradition, a tradition known in Vaughan Williams's day to have been remarkably strong and accurate. Elements common or borrowed in folk music have been the norm, because folk music was written not by one composer but by several, and over a considerable period of time.

Index Classifications: General, 1900s

Contributed by: Rob Lamborn

The use of folk song by Russian and other nationalist composers is nothing new. The music of the Austro-German tradition is just as similar to Teutonic folk song as that of other traditions is to their folk origins, but because of its dominance of the classical music scene, does not sound folklike to the general audience.

Index Classifications: General, 1800s, 1900s

Contributed by: Rob Lamborn

Some have considered musical borrowing and the "cult of archaism" to be wrong on moral grounds, but this is a protest by the establishment which profits by maintenance of the musical status quo.

Index Classifications: General, 1900s

Contributed by: Rob Lamborn

The history of church music includes many borrowed folk tunes and contrafactions, from the Tonus peregrinus (foreign tune) of the Roman church to the use of popular tunes as hymns or chorales well past the Reformation.

Works: Tonus peregrinus (Gregorian chant) (76); Valet will ich dir geben (German chorale); O Filii et Filiae (Sequence) (77); Thomas Oliver: Helmsley (hymn tune) (77); Louis Bourgeois: Old Hundredth (hymn tune) (77), Old 113th (hymn tune).

Index Classifications: General

Contributed by: Rob Lamborn

Music has undergone a complex evolution beginning with the inflection patterns of speech. Teschner's chorale Valet will ich is apparently based on the English dance tune Sellinger's Round, and Edmund Gurney rhythmically distorts Ein feste Burg into a jig tune in his The Power of Sound.

Works: Edmund Gurney: The Power of Sound (209); Teschner: Valet will ich (209).

Index Classifications: 1800s

Contributed by: Rob Lamborn

By using borrowed folk tunes in this opera, Vaughan Williams was intending to flatter his colleague Gustav Holst. As was the practice of Holst, the titles of folk songs used are not generally of programmatic significance.

Works: Vaughan Williams: Sir John in Love.

Index Classifications: 1900s

Contributed by: Rob Lamborn

Index Classifications: 1900s

A brief survey of the history of borrowing starts from borrowing as an everyday method of composing in the sixteenth century to transcriptions and arrangement of the sixteenth century up to Ives and Stravinsky. Both Ives and Stravinsky are the key composers for the output of Louis Andriessen, the latter for some time, the former for a relatively short time. A discussion of Andriessen's Anachrony I to the memory of Ives and Contra Tempus notes the simultaneous use of different musical languages, orchestral clichés, and hidden quotations and notes Stravinsky's influence in the borrowings from different periods. Despite quotations, Andriessen's works are original, for he orders and processes all the materials in a creative way. A brief discussion of Peter Schat's On Escalation notes the uses of specific quotations, stylistic quotations, and counterfeit stylistic quotations.

Works: Andriessen: Anachrony I (7), Contra Tempus (9); Hindemith: Der Schwanendreher (5); Ives: Concord Sonata (4); Ravel: Bolero (8); Rossini: Le Comte Ory (4), Andremo a Parigi (4); Schat: On Escalation (11).

Index Classifications: 1900s

Contributed by: Jean Pang

Index Classifications: 1900s

Vill's book, originally a Ph.D. dissertation (Frankfurt am Main, 1974), emphasizes the texts of songs and their changes as compared to the original. In a second part the author gives programmatic interpretations of the first four symphonies, in which quotations from folk songs and from Mahler's own songs are of major importance, even if the texts are not quoted with the tunes. The meaning given to these tunes by the original words and various statements by Mahler together with formal procedures--including transformation of the quoted material--allow two kinds of conclusions: either they lead to a concrete interpretation or reflect some of the musical ambiguity.

Works: Mahler: Symphony No. 1, Symphony No. 2, Symphony No. 3, Symphony No. 4.

Index Classifications: 1800s, 1900s

Contributed by: Andreas Giger

Index Classifications: 1800s, 1900s

Debussy alternates characteristic French and German themes, respectively La Marseillaise and Ein feste Burg, in the middle section of his En blanc et noir. These themes had become symbols of French and German nationalism, and Debussy uses them to portray the grimness of World War I. By using fragments of Martin Luther's chorale as a symbol of German aggression, Debussy subverts Luther's intentions of congregational unity. He disguises Luther's setting through omissions in both the Stollen and the Abgesang sections. Debussy also infuses programmatic features in the work by recalling warlike elements in the music of Clément Janequin's La Guerre, although he does not use quotation in the same manner as Ein feste Burg.

Works: Debussy: En blanc et noir (31-32, 35-42).

Sources: Luther: Ein feste Burg (32-35, 39-41); Rouget de Lisle: La Marseillaise (32, 35-38, 43); Janequin: La Guerre (45-46).

Index Classifications: 1900s

Contributed by: Katie Lundeen

Nineteen of the works now contained in the Turin manuscripts are works not by Vivaldi. The composers for most of these works are not known. Vivaldi plagiarized five of these compositions directly in order to copy an older style. Vivaldi seems to have obtained these manuscripts in an intentional attempt to learn the stile antico for choral works. The variety of works borrowed suggests he needed to learn the strict stile antico, the stile misto, and the brilliant concerto style. Borrowings from madrigals by Antonio Lotti also helped Vivaldi to gain fluency with traditional vocal styles. The lack of these sources and borrowings in other genres such as the instrumental concerto suggest that he was already comfortable with these styles.

Works: Vivaldi: Gloria, RV 588 (93), Gloria, RV 589 (93), Credidi, RV 605 (93), Dixit Dominus, RV 595 (94, 98, 103-107), Kyrie, RV 587 (99), Concerto madrigalesco, RV 129 (99), La Senna festeggiante (99-100).

Sources: Giovanni Maria Ruggieri: Gloria in due chori (93, 95-96); Anonymous: Lauda Jerusalem, RV Anh. 35 (93, 96), Dixit Dominus, RV Anh. 27 (94); Antonio Lotti: Inganni dell'umanità (98-99, 103-107), Moralità d'una perla (99-102).

Index Classifications: 1700s

Contributed by: Danielle Nelson

Index Classifications: 1700s

Understanding Bruckner's directional markings, such as feierlich and misterioso, is the key to interpreting Bruckner's music. It is these markings that form the main connection between his Masses and his symphonies, not quotation.

Index Classifications: 1800s

Contributed by: Bradley Jon Tucker

Index Classifications: 1800s

Index Classifications: 1700s

The passion oratorio La morte di Cristo is one of the most unusual works attributed to Johann Adolf Hasse. Previously, Reinhard Strohm had revealed that the oratorio is actually a pasticcio, with most of the arias borrowed from operas written around 1730 by Hasse, Leo, Porta, and others. Recently, a newly discovered libretto entitled La Vittima d’amore ossia la morte di Cristo confirms the work was originally created in Brno in 1741 and later performed in Prague in 1744. The Brno Kapellmeister Josef Umstatt likely compiled the work and adapted the arias, and he was probably responsible for composing the oratorio’s sinfonia, recitatives, and final chorus. The sources for three of the arias in La morte di Cristo still remain unidentified, either because the sources have been lost, or because Umstatt himself composed one or more of them specifically for the new oratorio.

Works: Josef Umstatt (attributed to Johann Adolf Hasse): La Vittima d’amore ossia la morte di Cristo.

Sources: Johann Adolf Hasse: Siroe (263, 266), Issipile (266-67); Giovanni Battista Pescetti: I tre difensori della patria (263-64, 266); Antonio Caldara: Morte e sepoltura di Cristo (265-66); Leonardo Leo: Argeno (266), Demetrio (266); Giovanni Porta: Farnace (266); Francesco Feo: Ipermestra (266).

Index Classifications: 1700s

Contributed by: Matthew G. Leone

Index Classifications: 1700s

Index Classifications: 1900s