Hostname: page-component-78c5997874-g7gxr Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-03T08:36:20.616Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

Towards a Phenomenology of Musical Borrowing

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  24 September 2019

Sean Russell Hallowell*
Affiliation:
Stanford University, 590 Escondido Mall, Stanford CA 94305

Abstract

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.

Type
Articles
Copyright
© Cambridge University Press, 2019 

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

REFERENCES

Battier, M. 2007. What the GRM Brought to Music: From Musique Concrète to Acousmatic Music. Organised Sound 12(3): 189202.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Beirens, M. 2014. Voices, Violence and Meaning: Transformations of Speech Samples in Works by David Byrne, Brian Eno and Steve Reich. Contemporary Music Review 33(2): 210–22.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Brown, H. M. 1982. Emulation, Competition, and Homage: Imitation and Theories of Imitation in the Renaissance. Journal of the American Musicological Society 35(1): 148.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Burkholder, J. P. 1994. The Uses of Existing Music: Musical Borrowing as a Field. Notes 50: 851–70.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Burkholder, J. P. 2018. Musical Borrowing or Curious Coincidence? Testing the Evidence. The Journal of Musicology 35(2): 223–66.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Burstyn, S. 1976. Power’s ‘Anima mea’ and Binchois’ ‘De plus en plus’: A Study in Musical Relationships. Musica Disciplina 30: 5572.Google Scholar
Carroll, C. M. 1978. Musical Borrowing-Grand Larceny or Great Art? College Music Symposium 18(1): 1118.Google Scholar
Chion, M. 2012. The Three Listening Modes. In Sterne, J. (ed.) The Sound Studies Reader. New York: Routledge.Google Scholar
Demers, J. 2009. Field Recording, Sound Art and Objecthood. Organised Sound 14(1): 3945.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Derrida, J. 1979. Speech and Phenomena. Evanston: Northwestern University Press.Google Scholar
Eco, U. 2002. Art and Beauty in the Middle Ages. New Haven: Yale University Press.Google Scholar
Falck, R. 1979. Parody and Contrafactum: A Terminological Clarification. The Musical Quarterly 65(1): 121.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Hallowell, S. 2013. The Déploration as Musical Idea. PhD dissertation, Columbia University.Google Scholar
Husserl, E. 1991. On the Phenomenology of the Consciousness of Internal Time. Dordrecht: Springer Science+Business Media, B.V.Google Scholar
Jeppesen, K. 1992. Counterpoint: The Polyphonic Vocal Style of the Sixteenth Century. New York: Dover.Google Scholar
Kane, B. 2007. L’Objet Sonore Maintenant: Pierre Schaeffer, sound objects and the phenomenological reduction. Organised Sound 12(1): 1524.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Kane, B. 2012. Sound Unseen: Acousmatic Sound in Theory and Practice. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Kane, B. 2013. Schaeffer Pierre, In Search of a Concrete Music, translated by Christine North and John Dack (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2012) ISBN 9780520265745. Organised Sound 18(3): 346–8.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Karp, T. 1962. Borrowed Material in Trouvère Music. Acta Musicologica 34(3): 87101.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Knyt, E. 2010. ‘How I Compose’: Ferruccio Busoni’s Views about Invention, Quotation, and the Compositional Process. The Journal of Musicology 27(2): 224–64.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Losada, C. 2009. Between Modernism and Postmodernism: Strands of Continuity in Collage Compositions by Rochberg, Berio, and Zimmermann. Music Theory Spectrum 31(1): 57100.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Manning, P. 2006. The significance of techné in understanding the art and practice of electroacoustic composition. Organised Sound 11(1): 8190.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Meconi, H. 1994. Does Imitatio Exist? The Journal of Musicology 12(2): 152–78.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Murail, T. 2005. The Revolution of Complex Sounds. Contemporary Music Review 24(2–3): 121–35.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Oswald, J. 1985. Plunderphonics, or Audio Piracy as a Compositional Prerogative. www.plunderphonics.com/xhtml/xplunder.html (accessed 5 July 2018).Google Scholar
Plumley, Y. 2003. Intertextuality in the Fourteenth-Century Chanson. Music & Letters 84(3): 355–77.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Schaeffer, P. 2012. In Search of a Concrete Music, trans. North, C. and Dack, J.. Berkeley: University of California Press.Google Scholar
Schloss, J. G. 2004. Making Beats: The Art of Sample-Based Hip-Hop. Middletown: Wesleyan University Press.Google Scholar
Sewell, A. 2014. How Copyright Affected the Musical Style and Critical Reception of Sample-Based Hip-Hop. Journal of Popular Music Studies 26(2–3): 295320.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Sherr, R. 2010. Thoughts on Ockeghem’s Missa De plus en plus: Anxiety and proportion in the late 15th century. Early Music 38(3): 335–46.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Sinnreich, A. 2010. Mashed Up: Music, Technology, and the Rise of Configurable Culture. Amhsert: University of Massachusetts Press.Google Scholar
Steib, M. 1996. A Composer Looks at His Model: Polyphonic Borrowing in Masses from the Late Fifteenth Century. Tijdschrift Van De Koninklijke Vereniging Voor Nederlandse Muziekgeschiedenis 46(1): 541.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Taruskin, R. 1980. Russian Folk Melodies in The Rite of Spring. Journal of the American Musicological Society 33(3): 501–43.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Thomas, J. 2007. Nature and the GRM. Organised Sound 12(3): 259–65.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Vaidhyanathan, S. 2001. Copyrights and Copywrongs: The Rise of Intellectual Property and How it Threatens Creativity. New York: New York University Press.Google Scholar
Varèse, E. and Wen-Chung, C. 1966. The Liberation of Sound. Perspectives of New Music 5(1): 1119.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Williams, J. A. 2013. Rhymin’ and Stealin’: Musical Borrowing in Hip-Hop. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Zimmerman, F. B. 1966. Musical Borrowings in the English Baroque. The Musical Quarterly 52(4): 483–95.CrossRefGoogle Scholar