The Uses of Existing Music: Musical Borrowing as a Field

Abstract

in memory of Howard Mayer Brown, teacher and friend Musicologists have studied borrowings for over a century, writing on every aspect from cantus firmus and variation to less overt procedures such as allusion and structural modeling. Typically, the use of existing music in new compositions or improvisations is treated as an issue within a particular historical period, genre, composer, or performer, whether that be the bebop era, the Renaissance Mass, or the symphonies of Mahler. Yet there is much to be gained by approaching the uses of existing music as a field that crosses periods and traditions. Encountering research in other repertoires can raise important issues that we might otherwise never consider for the music we study. Familiarity with tools that have been developed for music of other eras or kinds can facilitate our work and keep us from reinventing the wheel. Knowing the variety of ways a composer or improviser can use ideas taken from another may alert us to kinds of borrowing we might otherwise overlook and can sharpen our ability to distinguish between practices we might otherwise confuse. Comparing practices among many different repertoires and composers may allow us to create a typology of borrowing procedures that is of general application. This may in turn make us aware of historical trends, as various practices wax and wane in popularity or return in altered form. Knowledge of the ways existing music has been reworked in other times and by other composers can clarify the historical place of those we focus on, helping us recognize what is unusual or innovative in their approach to the uses of existing music and, just as important, what has long-established precedent. In all of these ways, our view of borrowing within a particular body of music is brought into sharper focus by our broad understanding of the field as a whole. This article presents a preliminary overview of borrowing as a field. The first part offers a personal perspective, drawing on my own experience of the subject to suggest some general conclusions about the study of borrowing in any repertoire and as a field. The second part delineates the field and outlines a tentative typology of procedures for using existing music in new works. I My experiences in this area illustrate the advantages of studying the uses of existing music as a field that crosses historical periods and traditions, rather than as a problem within any one era or type of music. My first in-depth study of borrowing came in a seminar with Howard Mayer Brown on the Mass in the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries, building on his seminal article on imitation in the Renaissance chanson. Out of that study, I developed a paper on the uses of borrowed material in the Masses of Johannes Martini, which was eventually published. About a year after the seminar, I began writing a dissertation on Charles Ives, tracing the development of his aims and procedures.(1) When I tackled what were then known as Ives's quotations, I discovered that my recent experiences with Martini and other Renaissance composers gave me a perspective about Ives's uses of existing music in his own that was different from the prevailing view, which was to see all of Ives's references to existing music as examples of what John Kirkpatrick called his habit of musical quotation.(2) The most frustrating moments came in looking at a number of places where scholars had identified a passage as a quotation, when the melody involved differed significantly from the supposed source. But when I remembered the sly ways Renaissance composers reworked their sources, I began to see that Ives did the same, in a number of ways. Some passages in Ives used existing works as structural models with occasional melodic allusions, as in several chansons Brown had described; others set existing tunes against new, often elaborate accompaniments, as in numerous chansons, or in cantus firmus style, as in a cantus firmus Mass; others resembled melodic paraphrase as practiced by Dufay, Martini, and Josquin. …

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