Musical Borrowing Research Articles

Musical Borrowings in Songs about the Holocaust by the Jews of Greece


 
 
 This article deals with songs about the Holocaust. Most of these songs have remained almost unknown until today, and this article aims to bring them out and to highlight the fact that they serve as evidence to the sufferings of the Greek people during World War II. All songs were written in Greece, and the practice of contrafactum (borrowing melodies and changing the lyrics) was applied to all of them. The borrowed melodies originate from Western music (e.g., operas), Western and Greek popular songs of the time, and from Greek folk and urban folk music. The variety of musical borrowings reveals cultural interactions between the ethnic and religious groups of the Greek land. It is also indicative of the increasing role of the mass media (radio, cinema) at that time. The lyrics of the songs are usually written in Greek and, in some cases, in Ladino (Judeo-Spanish of the Eastern Mediterranean area). Apart from having musicological interest, the songs are also important from the historical point of view. They were written either before the transportations to the extermination camps, or in the camps, or after the Holocaust. Their lyrics depict aspects of the living conditions of Jews during World War II. Moreover, these songs acted as a way of expressing feelings and thoughts.
 
 

Detection of Musical Borrowing Using Data Science

ABSTRACTData science may be used to determine similarities between musical scores. Programs are written in C++ to capture note progressions from musical scores and to compare progressions from different songs to identify overlapping areas. These tools enable the study of musical borrowing across musical genres and may assist in copyright violation cases. Results indicate that within the Celtic music genre, borrowing occurs across greater than 10% of the songs.

A Melody and Its Afterlives in Piano Music by the Schumanns and Brahms

In the 1830s, Robert Schumann wrote Impromptus on a Romance by Clara Wieck (op. 5), a set of variations on the theme from Wieck’s Romance variée (op. 3). In the 1850s, Clara Schumann wrote variations (op. 20) on an “Albumblatt” from Robert Schumann’s Bunte Blätter (op. 99), which stimulated Brahms to write his own variations (op. 9) on the same theme. Clara and Brahms linked the two temporal nodes together by quoting the melody shared by Clara and Robert’s youthful ops. 3 and 5 in their later ops. 20 and 9. These borrowings have stimulated interpretations that revolve around representations of people through such means as ciphers, quotations, allusions, and motives. Yet documentary and circumstantial evidence—diary entries and correspondence, private forms of music making (sight-reading and practicing in solo and chamber settings), material culture in the form of giving and receiving flowers, and a little-discussed yet remarkable piano arrangement of Robert’s Piano Quintet, op. 44, by Brahms—suggest that Brahms’s op. 9 quotation of the Schumanns’ melody was meant to recall a shared experience during a poignant moment in the year 1854. Not only to be read and recognized on paper, musical borrowings can gain expressive value as performative acts creating an open-ended field of meaning.

Legal Scenarios for Borrowing in Electronic Music

This article refers to various intertextual strategies in the field of electronic music and their legal categorization. The main part of the article is devoted to the problem of sampling, widely discussed in the literature and jurisprudence. Possible legal qualifications are discussed, as well as controversies related to the different scope of protection of works, artistic performances, and phonograms. The article also refers to other phenomena in the electronic field, including reedit, remix, or mash-up. In the summary, the general rules for making a legal assessment of musical borrowing strategies, interpretative guidelines in relation to a musical quotation, as well as de lege ferenda postulates are outlined.

The Pen as Camera

The photographic effect of overexposure is analogous to Michael Finnissy’s technique of selective musical borrowing. Just as a photographer uses the camera to allow an overabundance of light to wash out pictorial details, Finnissy uses his transcriptive pen to allow an overabundance of silence to alter and fragment his borrowed sources. Case studies demonstrate Finnissy’s borrowing of cadential phrases by J. S. Bach, Beethoven, and Bruckner in his solo piano works Wenn wir in höchsten Nöthen sind (1992) and The History of Photography in Sound (1995–2001). Comparing original sources, unpublished sketches, and published autographs reveals the composer’s precise transcriptive mechanisms. Measuring the alteration of tonal function enacted by specific harmonic and rhythmic distortions illuminates Finnissy’s pre-compositional practice while celebrating the sonic experience of his music on its own terms.

Chopin's Album Leaves and the Aesthetics of Musical Album Inscription

Abstract During the nineteenth century, major composers—such as Schubert, Schumann, Wieck Schumann, Mendelssohn, Mendelssohn Hensel, Liszt, and Chopin—contributed musical compositions to a kind of volume known as a friendship album (also keepsake album, album amicorum, or Stammbüch). Album inscriptions penned by Fryderyk Chopin provide a lens through which we can study these compositions, thereby gaining an understanding of the ways in which musical meaning, genre, and text were governed by conventions of gift exchange. Complete compositions, musical fragments, and performative flourishes left in albums by music lovers as well as professional composers and performers took on the function of secular relics that were understood to preserve metaphysical traces of the inscribers, while handwriting was believed to represent the writer's character or momentary state of mind. These ideas intersect with a broader Romantic culture of collectorship. To invoke experiences and memories shared by the inscriber and the dedicatee, some composers engaged in dialogic relationships with mementos inscribed by others or employed intertextual references. An examination of these forms of interplay adds to our knowledge of the way context can shape the use and meaning of musical borrowing and allusion. The authors of inscriptions also employed intrinsically musical vocabulary to impart the sense distortions that neuroscientists and scholars of memory describe as typical of a recalled experience. Moreover, albums provided a censorship-free private venue for political and national discourses. These musical texts constitute a separate class of presentation manuscripts that serve a specific social function and audience.

The Human Still Lives? Technology, Borrowing and Agency in the Music of Nicolas Collins

This paper considers aspects of late 20th Century experimental music in a post-digital era, where DIY approaches of hacking now outdated digital technology have enabled new forms of artistic expression – namely, glitch and aesthetics of failure. More specifically, it will examine American composer Nicolas Collins’ approach to hacking portable CD players as a means to imitate sound production methods of turntable artists from the 1980s, in such works as Still Lives (1992). The paper will then explore Collins’ attempt to orchestrate this work for acoustic instruments using open musical notation in Still (After) Lives (1997). This discussion is viewed through the lens of musical borrowing, tracing Collins’ material – a canzone by Giuseppe Guami – through its varying mediums and guises, highlighting the limitations of technology and notation as a means to rearticulate a musical fragment and the fruitful artistic avenues this opens. Through the examination of a musical material, the paper goes on to scrutinize the entanglement between human, material and machine agents. I propose that understandings of such practices might be extended from the post-digital to the post-human: a collaborative network of agentic ‘things’.

Arvo Pärt's Resonant Texts: Choral and Organ Music 1956–2015 by Andrew Shenton

Reviewed by: Arvo Pärt's Resonant Texts: Choral and Organ Music 1956–2015 by Andrew Shenton Thomas Robinson Arvo Pärt's Resonant Texts: Choral and Organ Music 1956–2015. By Andrew Shenton. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018. [xxi, 288 p. ISBN 9781107082458, $99.99; ISBN 9781107442894 (paperback), $29.99; ISBN 9781108514866, $80.] Figures, tables, music examples, two appendices, bibliography, index. [End Page 462] While its subtitle implies a targeted niche, this latest contribution to Arvo Pärt scholarship aims for more and succeeds. Andrew Shenton, an organist and choral conductor, includes "at least a brief description of every piece that is written for, or can be played on the organ and every work that includes one or more singers" (p. xvi). But Shenton, also a scholar of music and theology, considers compositional technique and the spiritual implications of the composer's entire oeuvre. He addresses Pärt's works not covered anywhere else, and the entries for virtually every piece discussed make some reference to the most recent research available. For twenty years, Paul Hillier's Arvo Pärt (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997) has been the principal monograph on Pärt's music. Now, subtitle notwithstanding, Arvo Pärt's Resonant Texts stands as the go-to reference for performers, scholars, concert curators, and fans, as Pärt's prominence continues to rise. Of the book's ten chapters, five constitute a compositional timeline that divides Pärt's output into five distinct eras, each named for a major, representative work. The remaining are standalone essays: a brief prelude, a primer on Pärt's "tintinnabuli" technique (pp. 30–47), a look into Pärt's theology and spirituality, a discussion of performance practice, and a short postlude situating the composer in Timotheus Vermeulen and Robin van den Akker's "metamodernism" (p. 267). These perceptive essay chapters are smartly interspersed among the matter-of-fact timeline chapters, assisting the flow of a front-to-back reading. A straight read-through, however, may conceal the book's true value as a reference work that provides specific data and discussion. The data includes details of commissions and dedications, dates of composition and premieres, alternate titles and translations, texts, instrumentations, lengths, recordings, and publications. Shenton establishes the provenance of the works but also manages their numerous revisions, arrangements, re-orchestrations, and even the musical borrowings between them. While some users might prefer the efficacy of a tabular listing in an appendix, Shenton's smooth integration of this information into the prose might more deeply engage the researcher originally seeking a quick reference. The discussion is a mix of description, analysis, and commentary. At some points, it reads as a straightforward, measure-by-measure account of the music. Its real strength, however, lies in Shenton's description of a composition's "core," or "what Pärt called the 'nucleus'" (p. xvi). Pärt's tintinnabuli works often can be summarized by a small excerpt and a figure outlining the compositional plan (see his quasi-Stravinskian rotational array for Summa [p. 68] and his tintinnabular plan for Spiegel im Spiegel [p. 70]). Where this is impractical, Shenton usually includes an excerpt that shows the musical flavor and texture. He finds reasonable similarities to other composers (Benjamin Britten, Philip Glass, Leoš Janáček, Carl Orff, Franz Schubert) but sometimes uses a more critical, subjective ear, deeming certain pieces "(un)successful" or "(un)remarkable." Some researchers may balk at this, but a performer assembling a concert program likely will appreciate Shenton's expert opinion. The first of the book's major topics is the development of tintinnabuli, the technique whose foundation is the interaction of an arpeggiating (tintinnabular) "T-voice" and a melodic "M-voice," indeed a "whole new species of counterpoint" (p. 34). The essay [End Page 463] chapter on the topic reviews the existing analytical literature and intriguingly proposes analysis by "dissonance values" (p. 45), something Shenton has explored in prior research but does not pursue much further here. He hints at its potential in analysis of text-setting, but one supposes it has implications in rhythmic analysis too. Music theorists (Paul Hindemith, Ernst Krenek, and others) have long proposed rankings of...

European Travelers on Music of the East: Religion, Musical Works, and the Otherness of the Ottomans

As historical documents,1 the fragmentary reports of local music witnessed by scores of Western Europeans traveling in the Ottoman Balkans, the Middle East, and North Africa between the fifteenth century and the First World War are a motley collection. More often than not, musical observations within the very large and widely read literature of travel arise only in passing—a sentence or paragraph in a letter or diary by a merchant, cleric, embassy attaché, or consular spouse more focused on trade, or on the inconveniences of travel. For this reason, much of what the travelers have to say about music does not obviously intersect with the usual concerns of scholars about historical musical practice. Relatively few of the reports represent attempts at empiricism by persons educated in music.2 It is these writings—like those of Giovanni Battista Donado (1627–99), Charles-Henri de Blainville (1711–71), Franz-Josef Sulzer (1727–91), Charles Fonton (1725–93), Giambattista Toderini (1728–99), and Guillaume André Villoteau (1759–1839)—which tend to be the longest and most detailed of the musical accounts available and which have received the bulk of scholarly attention since the 1950s. What we can learn from a fuller range of travelers’ observations, the offhand no less than the systematic, is not limited to the use to which they have been put most often by ethnomusicologists—that is, to provide valuable corroboration for the details of organology, history, and musical practice in areas east of Vienna and south of the Mediterranean found in other sources.3 In historical musicology, when effort has been made to use these travel accounts to explore the links between European and Ottoman musical culture, such efforts have tended to focus on musical borrowings, on critiques of orientalist and imperialist ideologies, and on the Turkish craze of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. In music studies, the alla turca phenomenon has been the centerpiece of most discussions of what European travelers saw and heard.4

Sound Appropriation and Musical Borrowing as a Compositional Tool in New Electroacoustic Music

This text presents a compact historical survey of musical borrowing and sound appropriation from medieval chant through the latest digital experiments outside popular music involving extensive use of sampling. It then describes two artistic research projects consisting of a series of pieces that digitally reimagine selected works from the classical music repertoire, including thoughts about the contemporary relevance of giving new life to classical music through the perspective of new media.

Musical Borrowing in Sonification

Sonification presents some challenges in communicating information, particularly because of the large difference between possible data to sound mappings and cognitively valid mappings. It is an information transmission process which can be described through the Shannon-Weaver Theory of Mathematical Communication. Musical borrowing is proposed as a method in sonification which can aid the information transmission process as the composer’s and listener’s shared musical knowledge is used. This article describes the compositional process of Wasgiischwashäsch (2017) which uses Rossini’s William Tell Overture (1829) to sonify datasets relating to climate change in Switzerland. It concludes that the familiarity of audiences with the original piece, and the humorous effect produced by the distortion of a well-known piece, contribute to a more effective transmission process.

The Terminology of Borrowing

This article specifically addresses electroacoustic music compositions that borrow from existing musical and sound resources. Investigating works that borrow and thrive upon existing sound sources presents an array of issues regarding terminology, authorship and creativity. Embedding borrowed elements into new electroacoustic music goes beyond the simplicity of ‘cut and paste’ as composers approach this practice with new and novel techniques. Musical borrowings have been widely studied in fields of popular and classical music, from cover songs to quotations and from pastiches to theme and variations; however, borrowings that take place within the field of electroacoustic music can be less clear or defined, and demand a closer look. Because the components and building blocks of electroacoustic music are often recorded sound, the categories of borrowing become vast; thus incidences of borrowing, in some shape or form, can appear inevitable or unavoidable when composing. The author takes on this issue and proposes a new framework for categorising borrowings as a helpful aid for others looking to sample in new compositional work, as well as for further musicological study. The article will consider the compositional process of integration and reworking of borrowed material, using a repertoire study to showcase the variety of techniques in play when sound materials change hands, composer to composer. Terminology already in use by others to describe sound borrowing in electroacoustic music will be investigated in an effort to show the multitude of considerations and components in action when borrowing takes place. Motivations for borrowing, borrowing types, borrowing durations, copying as imitation, and composers’ reflections upon borrowing will all be considered within the article, along with discussions on programmatic development and embedding techniques. At the heart of this article, the author aims to show how widespread and pervasive borrowing is within the electroacoustic repertoire by drawing attention to varieties of sound transplants, all considered as acts of borrowing.

Towards a Phenomenology of Musical Borrowing

In discourse on the topic, the question of what constitutes a musical ‘borrowing’, if raised at all, is usually restricted in scope and framed as one of terminology – that is, of determining the right term to characterise a particular borrowing act. In this way has arisen a welter of terms that, however expressive of nuance, have precluded evaluation of the phenomenon as such. This is in part a consequence of general disregard for the fact that to conceive of musical borrowing entails correlative concepts, all of which precondition it, yet none self-evidently. Further preclusive of clarity, the musico-analytic lens of borrowing is typically invoked only in counterpoint to a quintessentially Western aesthetic category of composition ex nihilo. As a consequence, the fundamental role played by borrowing in musical domains situated at the periphery of the Western art music tradition, specifically pre-modern polyphony and twentieth-century musique concrète, has been overlooked. This article seeks to bridge such lacunae in our understanding of musical borrowing via phenomenological investigation into its conceptual and historical foundations. A more comprehensive evaluation of musical borrowing, one capable of accounting for its diverse instantiations while simultaneously disclosing what makes all of them ‘borrowings’ in the first place, is thereby attainable.

Some Reflections of Borrowing in Acousmatic Music

This article begins with an outline of the Manovich general definition of borrowing followed by an introduction to the theme of borrowing in music, particularly within the context of acousmatic music. Two scenarios proposed by Navas in his taxonomy of borrowing are used to further the discussion in relation to material sampling and cultural citation. With reference to material sampling, some examples of remix, appropriation and quoting/sampling taking place within acousmatic music are highlighted. With regards to cultural citation, two levels of reference will be considered: cultural citation from sound arts, that is, intertextuality, and cultural citation from other media, that is, intermediality. The article closes with some reflections a posteriori about my own composition,Variation of Evan Parker’s Saxophone Solos, and how this relates to wider notions of musical borrowing.

Manuel de Falla' s <em>Siete canciones populares españolas</em>: The composer's personal library, folksong models and the creative process

La biblioteca personal de Manuel de Falla proporciona una fuente única para el estudio de la asimilación de ideas del compositor, y su hábito de toda la vida de anotar su material de lectura y partituras elevan la utilidad de la biblioteca a una comprensión de su proceso creativo. El uso de música preexistente en varias composiciones de Falla da más relevancia al estudio de las partituras impresas en su biblioteca es un trabajo que puede aclarar las fuentes empleadas por Falla y el desarrollo de sus ideas musicales. La magnitud limitada del trabajo del campo de Falla en el reino de música folclórica hace esta fuente aun más valiosa para el estudio de trabajos inspirados en el folclore como las Siete canciones populares españolas. La procedencia de las melodías empleadas por Falla en ese trabajo ha sido el centro de artículos de Manuel García Matos y Josep Crivillé i Bargalló. Basado en sus investigaciones, este estudio sostiene que en las Siete canciones populares españolas todas las lineas melódicas de Falla y algunos de los acompañamientos están basados, con variaciones, en la asimilación de materiales tomada de las publicaciones específicas de su propiedad. La incorporación de música folclórica en las partituras de Falla también es examinada, y las Siete canciones populares españolas se sitúan dentro del contexto creativo de su entorno parisiense. Finalmente, se compara el uso que hace Falla de fuentes folclóricas y el proceso a través de que la música antigua estaba incorporada en sus partituras neoclásicas de los años veinte.

“We Get the Job Done”: Immigrant Discourse and Mixtape Authenticity inThe Hamilton Mixtape

Research Article| December 01 2018 “We Get the Job Done”: Immigrant Discourse and Mixtape Authenticity in The Hamilton Mixtape Justin A. Williams Justin A. Williams Justin A. Williams is senior lecturer in music at the University of Bristol, UK. He is the author of Rhymin’ and Stealin’: Musical Borrowing in Hip-Hop (University of Michigan Press, 2013), editor of The Cambridge Companion to Hip-Hop (Cambridge University Press, 2015), and coeditor (with Katherine Williams) of The Cambridge Companion to the Singer-Songwriter (Cambridge University Press, 2016) and The Singer-Songwriter Handbook (Bloomsbury Academic, 2017). In 2017 he was awarded a Leadership Fellowship from the Arts and Humanities Research Council (UK) for a project on regional rap in the United Kingdom. Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google American Music (2018) 36 (4): 487–506. https://doi.org/10.5406/americanmusic.36.4.0487 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Permissions Search Site Citation Justin A. Williams; “We Get the Job Done”: Immigrant Discourse and Mixtape Authenticity in The Hamilton Mixtape. American Music 1 January 2018; 36 (4): 487–506. doi: https://doi.org/10.5406/americanmusic.36.4.0487 Download citation file: Zotero Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search All Scholarly Publishing CollectiveUniversity of Illinois PressAmerican Music Search Advanced Search The text of this article is only available as a PDF. Copyright 2019 by the Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois2019 Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.

Composing in Theory: Busnoys, Tinctoris, and the L'homme armé Tradition

Antoine Busnoys's Missa L'homme armé commits one notational error after another—at least according to Johannes Tinctoris. As several scathing passages in his Proportionale musices attest, Tinctoris abhors Busnoys's mensural innovations. And yet Busnoys's notational choices, while certainly idiosyncratic, are also arguably justifiable: the composer was merely finding ways of recording novel musical ideas that had no agreed-upon notational solutions. In this article I argue that Tinctoris's response to Busnoys is not limited to the criticisms in his theoretical treatises. Tinctoris the composer responds far more comprehensively, and at times with far greater sympathy for Busnoys's practice, in his own Missa L'homme armé. He echoes Busnoys's mass notationally, in that he treats it as an example of what not to do; his response is also deeply musical, in that he tackles similar technical problems as a means of achieving analogous contrapuntal effects. Tinctoris's and Busnoys's settings need to be understood in the context of fifteenth-century masses, one in which composers were not necessarily content to work within the system but invented new ways of writing in order to create new sounds. In doing so, mere “composers” could sometimes achieve significance as “theorists.” Taken together, the L'homme armé masses of Busnoys and Tinctoris raise a range of historiographical issues that invite us to reassess the figure of the “theorist-composer.” This article thus not only contributes to the discourse on musical borrowing but also opens out to a broader framework, asking what it means for a late medieval musician to theorize—in music as well as in prose.

Musical Borrowing or Curious Coincidence?

Studies of allusion, modeling, paraphrase, quotation, and other forms of musical borrowing hinge on the claim that the composer of one piece of music has used material or ideas from another. What evidence can be presented to support or refute this claim? How can we know that the material is borrowed from this particular piece and not from another source? How can we be sure that a similarity results from borrowing and is not a coincidence or the result of drawing on a shared fund of musical ideas? These questions can be addressed using a typology of evidence organized into three principal categories: analytical evidence gleaned from examining the pieces themselves, including extent of similarity, exactness of match, number of shared elements, and distinctiveness; biographical and historical evidence, including the composer’s knowledge of the alleged source, acknowledgment of the borrowing, sketches, compositional process, and typical practice; and evidence regarding the purpose of the borrowing, including structural or thematic functions, use as a model, extramusical associations, and humor. Ideally, an argument for borrowing should address all three categories. Exploring instances of borrowing or alleged borrowing by composers from Johannes Martini and Gombert through Mozart, Brahms, Debussy, Ives, Stravinsky, and Berg illustrates these types of evidence. The typology makes it possible to evaluate claims and test evidence for borrowing by considering alternative explanations, including the relative probability of coincidence. A particularly illuminating case is the famous resemblance between the opening themes of Mozart’s Bastien und Bastienne and Beethoven’s Eroica Symphony, discussed by hundreds of writers for more than 150 years. Bringing together all the types of evidence writers have offered for and against borrowing shows why the debate has proven so enduring and how it can be resolved.

Modelling the Public’s Taste: Local Habits, Ethnic Pluralism and European Music in Bucharest (1821–1862)

This article attempts to describe the shift in the Romanian public’s musical taste brought about by musical borrowings and imports from the West. It focuses on the period between the end of Phanariot rule (1821) and the establishment of Romania’s capital in Bucharest (1862). These decades of change yielded rich intercultural encounters and fusions, whereas the years that followed – from the 1870s to the outbreak of the First World War – show a more unified phase of assimilation of Western music.After looking at the boyar class and the bourgeoisie of Bucharest (the social segment from which an opera- and concert-going public emerged in the last quarter of the century), I move on to the everyday musical practices of the population of Bucharest, using musical examples and travellers’ accounts as a descriptive means. Finally, I analyse the shifts in musical tastes that took place in the upper layers of society as a complicated process of exclusion, inclusion and assimilation of various musical influences; as we shall see, the mixing and hybridization of musical practices not only shaped the tastes of music lovers, but also influenced the creation of Romanian music, which entered a new phase.

‘Sampling’ is freedom of art: The German Federal Constitutional Court deliberates on the acceptability of music sampling in the ‘Metall auf Metall’ case

In the ‘Metall auf Metall’ case, the German Federal Constitutional Court recently deliberated the permissibility of sampling, an essential tool of musical borrowing in pop music production. The court reiterated that the freedom of art stipulated in Article 5, Paragraph 3 of the German Constitution requires that the ‘sampling’ of bits of sound recordings be recognized as artistic expression and creation instead of an infringement of rights. Thereby, the ‘per se infringement rule’ applied by the German Federal Supreme Court in this case (2013) was rejected. The note argues that more careful consideration must be given to the extent to which musical borrowing can and has been a source of innovation within the music industry. Copyright law must recognize and incorporate musical borrowing by developing commercial practices, such as ‘sample clearing’, for music that samples existing works in its creation. Moreover, the judiciary in Germany and the EU must endeavour to develop conventional practices to balance the interests of rights holders and users in disputes resulting from the challenges of modern digital technology to the traditional copyright framework with an enumerative and exhaustive list of copyright exception and limitation rules.