The Law of Musical Borrowing

Creating music often involves borrowing from preexisting sources. Copyright law applies to a range of common borrowing practices including sampling, remixing, linking, and creating user-generated content for online platforms. When analyzing musical borrowing, it is important to first establish what aspects of musical creativity copyright does and does not protect. A series of cases illustrate when the law identifies borrowing of unprotected aspects of prior works, such as musical ideas, common melodic sequences, and chord progressions. Other cases illustrate how the law also permits some borrowing of protected expression if the borrowing is fair use. Digital technology facilitates musical borrowing, and certain online practices such as posting hyperlinks to other musical sources are permitted unless the person posting the links knows that the link leads to infringing material, intends to encourage others to infringe or meets other requirements for secondary liability for copyright infringement.

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 Comparing original sources, unpublished sketches, and published autographs reveals the composer’s precise transcriptive mechanisms.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.

Borrowing in Music

This text examines the idea and practice of musical borrowing in the composition of art music in two distinct historical contexts: the age of music conceived as oration (ca. 1600–1800) and the age of the strong work concept (ca. 1800 to the present). It shows that the idea of musical borrowing is an evolving, historical concept that needs to be examined contextually in order to understand what it meant in the period within which the music in question was composed, as well as for the specific composer. The text also briefly examines related topics: authorship, plagiarism, imitation vs. emulation, music conceived as oration, and the strong work concept.

Past Tense

This essay examines a number of key works by British composer Margaret Lucy Wilkins, whose music regularly engaged with medievalism its inspiration, choice of texts, musical borrowing, and in the composer’s broader evocation of historical practices and architecture. Through analysis of pieces composed across two decades, the discussion confronts several tensions between Wilkins’ reception of the medieval past and her emphatically modern aesthetic. Focusing on four pieces—Witch Music (1971), Ave Maria (1974), Revelations of the Seven Angels (1988), and Musica Angelorum (1991)—this essay shows how Wilkins’s medievalism manifests an ambivalent relationship with central compositional aesthetics of the twentieth century such as serialism and modernism.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.