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Musical Borrowing - MUS00139H

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  • Department: Music
  • Module co-ordinator: Dr. Mark Hutchinson
  • Credit value: 10 credits
  • Credit level: H
  • Academic year of delivery: 2022-23

Module summary

This project will explore musical borrowing: quotation, homage, rearrangement and outright theft. We will consider historical issues; questions of musical expression and meaning; overlaps with literature and cultural theory; and shifting ideas of originality and ownership.

Module will run

Occurrence Teaching period
A Spring Term 2022-23

Module aims

Stravinsky once famously claimed that ‘a good composer does not imitate; he steals’. Of course, we don’t have any record of Stravinsky saying this directly; we only have the word of Peter Yates, a lecturer who wrote a book about him. (And we all know what lecturers are like.) Anyway, even if Stravinsky didsay this, he was just lifting a neat phrase from the poet T.S. Eliot, who wrote (forty years earlier) that ‘immature poets imitate; mature poets steal’. And hewas just flipping around a truism from the Victorian era which claimed piously that ‘great poets imitate and improve [upon their models], whereas small ones steal and spoil’. (You can follow the whole trail on the Quote Investigatorwebsite.)

Whether or not Stravinsky said it, of course, he was right. Quotation, homage, rearrangement and outright theft are rife in music of every era, from Renaissance parody masses to contemporary YouTube mash-ups. (It seems a lot of these composers hadn’t done their Academic Integrity tutorials.) Of course, musical borrowing (the umbrella term by which all these practices are known) comes in many forms: affectionate homage or sly critique; openly acknowledged or carefully hidden; straightforward quotation, subtle reworking, total transformation or multi-layered collage. Lurking behind them all are some fundamental questions: why build a work around someone else’s ideas? What kind of conversation with the past is happening here? And what are the implications for modern concepts of originality, individuality and (dare I say it) copyright?

These are the questions we’ll be tackling in this project. We’ll do it through lectures, group discussions and practical exercises. We’ll analyse examples of musical borrowing from across musical history, and we’ll be borrowing some ideas of our own from other fields (particularly literary theory) to help make sense of them. Concepts that will almost certainly come up include:

  • Quotation as critique (ironic distance) vs nostalgia (rose-tinted presence)
  • Transcription and arrangement as forms of musical commentary
  • Intertextuality, collage and postmodernism
  • Music and the ‘anxiety of influence’
  • Copyright, sampling and plunderphonics

Module learning outcomes

By the end of the taught part of the project, all students should be able to:

  • Identify different methods of musical borrowing in representative works from across history;
  • Recognise core theories of borrowing (within music and other related fields) and apply them to relevant musical examples;
  • Reflect critically upon the relationship between these diverse historical borrowing practices and contemporary concepts of copyright, originality and ownership;
  • Discuss the ways in which practices of borrowing serve aesthetic or political goals in specific musical works.

On completion of the module, in their independent work, students should demonstrate learning outcomes A1-6, A12, and A9, 10 or 12 depending on the nature of their submission. https://www.york.ac.uk/music/undergraduate/modules/learning-outcomes/

Indicative assessment

Task Length % of module mark Group
Essay/coursework
2500 word essay		 N/A 100 Default
Essay/coursework
Composition focussing on musical borrowing		 N/A 100 A

Special assessment rules

None

Additional assessment information

Either of:

  1. an essay of c. 2500 words, title chosen in consultation with project tutor;
  2. a composition of c. 5 minutes focussed upon creative practices of musical borrowing. This may be eithera notated composition for solo instrument or small ensemble, oran electroacoustic composition making use of sampled materials (alongside recorded and/or electronically produced sounds). A written commentary should accompany the composition, explaining the techniques used and relating them to concepts introduced in the module.

Students may only take route 2 if they have already taken a module focussed upon either notated or electroacoustic composition techniques (as appropriate).

Indicative reassessment

Task Length % of module mark Group
Essay/coursework
2500 word essay		 N/A 100 Default
Essay/coursework
Composition focussing on musical borrowing		 N/A 100 A

Module feedback

Report form with marks to student within University designated turnaround time.

Indicative reading

Reading:

Burkholder, J.P. ‘The Uses of Existing Music: Musical Borrowing as a Field’. Notes 50, no. 3 (1994): 851–870.

Boyle, James, and Jennifer Jenkins. Theft! A History of Music. Art by Keith Aoki, Ian Akin and Brian Garvey. Freely available online at https://web.law.duke.edu/musiccomic/.

Frith, Simon, and Lee Marshall, eds. Music and Copyright, 2nd edition. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2004.

Metzer, David. Quotation and Cultural Meaning in Twentieth-Century Music. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003.

Reynolds, Christopher. Motives for Allusion: Context and Content in Nineteenth-century Music. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003.

Watkins, Glenn. Pyramids at the Louvre: Music, Culture, and Collage from Stravinsky to the Postmodernists. Cambridge, MA: Harvard, University Press, 1994.

Listening:

  • Shostakovich: Symphony no. 15
  • Caroline Shaw: Gustave le Gray
  • Du Fay: Missa Se la face ay pale
  • Josquin: Missa L’homme armé sexti toni (especially the Agnus Dei)
  • Robert Schumann: Fantasie op. 17
  • Clara Schumann: Variations on a Theme by Robert Schumann, op. 20
  • Brahms: Variations on a Theme by Robert Schumann, op. 9
  • Schubert: Winterreise (transcriptions by Liszt and Hans Zender)
  • William Dawson: Negro Folk Symphony
  • Duke Ellington: Black and Tan Fantasy
  • Bernd Alois Zimmermann: Musique pour les Soupers du Roi Ubu
  • Berio: Sinfonia
  • Lera Auerbach: Sogno di Stabat Mater
  • György Kurtág: ΣΤΗΛΗ
  • John Oswald: Plunderphonics
  • Danger Mouse: The Grey Album (not commercially available, but accessible on YouTube)


The information on this page is indicative of the module that is currently on offer. The University constantly explores ways to enhance and improve its degree programmes and therefore reserves the right to make variations to the content and method of delivery of modules, and to discontinue modules, if such action is reasonably considered to be necessary. In some instances it may be appropriate for the University to notify and consult with affected students about module changes in accordance with the University's policy on the Approval of Modifications to Existing Taught Programmes of Study.