A Bibliography on Musical Borrowing

Abstract

This article gives a brief account of an ongoing project whose ultimate aim is to create a comprehensive, indexed, and annotated bibliography of published materials and theses relating to the use of existing music in the tradition of Western art music.(1) As a work in progress, it is obviously not yet comprehensive; it now contains about 350 annotated and another 550 unannotated entries. It is also not yet indexed. This project has been a collaborative undertaking from the start. In 1988, J. Peter Burkholder and David C. Birchler initiated the bibliography at the University of Wisconsin--Madison. The former now supervises the project, which has been continued at Indiana University, first by students in a seminar on musical borrowings and since 1990 by me, with other assistants. My work has included (1) editing existing entries, (2) finding new items, (3) annotating entries, and (4) searching for criteria according to which we should include or exclude certain items. During weekly meetings, we gradually refined our procedures and policies. But many questions remain open. This account summarizes both what we have decided so far and what still needs clarification. We intend to cover all periods of music history and all types of borrowing. Nevertheless, we did choose to exclude popular music since about 1700 from the current bibliography. We had collected dozens of items related to popular music, but decided that they would appear most usefully in a separate volume dedicated to popular music. The reasons are practical rather than ideological: different issues seem to be involved, particularly in a tradition preserved in sound rather than on paper; the resulting work would have a different potential readership; and the journals, magazines, and papers that deal with popular music often differ from those that address art music. More obviously, concentrating on art music cuts the number of items we must examine by more than half. We continue to be interested in collecting citations for items on popular music and will keep them in our files, but we are not currently seeking them out. We plan to include in the bibliography items that consider the reworking of one or more particular musical works in new compositions; those that present a substantial list or catalogue of borrowings, even if no discussion is provided; or those that consider some aspect of the field as a whole. We do not include sources that discuss only allusions to musical styles or archetypes or that do no more than mention in passing the relation of a newer work to an earlier one, without exploring the connection to some extent. To be included, an article or book need not necessarily refer to borrowing in the title, nor must a major portion deal with a particular borrowing technique, if it otherwise satisfies the abovementioned criteria. One special category needs mentioning here. We decided to include articles that deny the existence of borrowing in a piece or of a particular relationship between a work and its supposed source. Such an argument usually includes useful interpretation, and it may respond to other items in our bibliography, making it of interest as an alternative point of view. We can find such a case in Hans Heinrich Eggebrecht's Die Musik Gustav Mahlers, where he discusses those melodies in Mahler's symphonies that sound so familiar to us that we may try to trace their origins.(2) Eggebrecht argues, however, that there is no point in trying to find their sources, because these seemingly borrowed passages reflect instead Mahler's attempt to evoke a colloquial sound (umgangssprachlicher Ton) or the impression of deja vu. For a better sense of the bibliography and what it seeks to accomplish, let us turn to a specific example. The excerpt printed below shows an annotation of an article by Friedrich Gennrich, in which the author refers to the development of the motet ente, a type of motet that at least in one of its parts is framed by a refrain, whose first half appears at the beginning of the part, the other half at its end. …