Musical Borrowing is a lot more common than you might think

Thursday 21st June, 2022

When I began writing my MMus dissertation on the subject of Musical Borrowing (a musicological field pioneered by J.P. Burkholder), I expected I would be looking at something idiosyncratic and fairly unique to a few compositions by many composers and many compositions by a few composers. For instance, Beethoven seems on first glance to rarely make use of references to other compositions but, in works such as the 22nd Variation in the Diabelli variations, he does occasionally engage in quotation and allusion. Meanwhile, Charles Ives weaves quotation, allusion and reference through many of his of his works to the extent that it is a stylistic hallmark of his. I felt I could categorise composers by the frequency with which they borrowed, e.g. Ives and Schnittke borrowed very frequently, Stockhausen borrowed sometimes, Beethoven and Mozart borrowed rarely, Yoko Ono and Morton Feldman borrowed almost never (I do not claim that this categorisation is accurate, simply that it is an example of how such a categorisation might be organised).

The lines got a little muddy when talking about allusion to a style of music otherwise alien to the genre of the piece (for instance, the baroque-style theme of the 2nd Mvt of Schnittke’s first symphony) as this was both an original piece by Schnittke but also a reference to a category of pieces not by Schnittke. Furthermore, what of Pierre Boulez, who admitted that early in his career he was working in line with classical conceptions of form before he made a break with this following his 2nd Sonata. In both instances, Schnittke and Boulez, both are deliberately using ideas from older music, but only one of the pieces (the Schnittke) is attempting to sound like its model, while the other works very hard to avoid sounding like anything familiar. If these are both examples of musical borrowing, then we must look at other musical works with fresh eyes: whether a piece sounds like an older piece or not, if the newer uses some aspect of the older then it is an example of musical borrowing. Thus, pop songs which use familiar chord patterns, classical-era sonatas which build upon a shared model of “sonata”, folk-tunes which use a structure from an earlier folk-tune; these are all examples of musical borrowing.

In my dissertation, I propose this new typology for musical borrowing:

1. Music is borrowed when elements which can clearly be identified with an earlier work or composer appear in later work by another composer
2. Music is borrowed when elements which are associated with a particular musical tradition appear in a new work
3. Music is borrowed when shared cultural ideas appear in a piece of music
4. Music is borrowed when it makes use of a shared musical language

My suggestion is that musical borrowing, far from being a strange and idiosyncratic style, is actually a necessary fact of musical composition which extends as deeply as the shared musical language which all musicians use.

I hope soon to publish my dissertation here on my website, but I hope that in the meantime this will serve as a taster of some of the thought-processes which went into writing it.