Review: The Art of Grafted Song: Citation and Allusion in the Age of Machaut by Yolanda Plumley

Abstract

The Art of Grafted Song: Citation and Allusion in the Age of Machaut , by Yolanda Plumley. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2013. xxiv, 460 pp. Citation and allusion in songs are currently on the minds of the American public to a greater extent than usual. A legal battle was won in March 2015 by the family of Marvin Gaye against the authors of the 2013 hit “Blurred Lines,” Robin Thicke and Pharrell Williams, who were found to be in infringement of copyright with regard to Gaye's 1977 “Got to Give It Up.” What made the ruling particularly noteworthy is that the two songs do not share any actual words or notes; their bass lines are distinct, and their chord progressions differ. They do both use cowbells, and what similarities there are are of sound, of groove—the kind of subjectively experienced phenomena that make for excellent debates over the dinner table. Those who hear a resemblance swear they heard it the first time they encountered “Blurred Lines”; those who do not rail indignantly about the relative similarity of all pop songs. Exactly this kind of divisiveness is generated by many studies with “citation” and “allusion” in their titles. “Do you hear it?” we find ourselves asking our colleagues and students; “could these two lines have been written independently of each other?” Yolanda Plumley's The Art of Grafted Song: Citation and Allusion in the Age of Machaut steers clear of such pitfalls. The book's stated goal is to draw attention to “quotation, citation, allusion, and other forms of modeling (loose or more pervasive) undertaken consciously by authors” (p. 6).1 The similarities with which Plumley is concerned are demonstrated through the painstaking comparison of lyrics, with highlighting and italics showing exact and approximate matches of words, and with music examples lined up to reveal melodic similarities.2 These allusions are, for the most part, beyond dispute. Some of them have been noted before, while others are the …