- Department: Music
- Module co-ordinator: Dr. Mark Hutchinson
- Credit value: 10 credits
- Credit level: I
- Academic year of delivery: 2022-23
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.
Occurrence | Teaching period |
---|---|
A | Spring Term 2022-23 |
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:
By the end of the taught part of the project, all students should be able to:
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/
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 |
None
Either of:
Students may only take route 2 if they have already taken a module focussed upon either notated or electroacoustic composition techniques (as appropriate).
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 |
Report form with marks to student within University designated turnaround time.
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: