Intertextuality in Early Music: Theory, Terminology, and the Risk of a Meaningless Borrowing
Influence, Models, and Intertextuality
The language of musicology is liberally sprinkled with neologisms—words either freshly minted or taken from other fields to label phenomena that would otherwise go unnamed. Not every newly adopted term (or the concept behind it) has proven trouble-free. Some have arguably narrowed or oversimplified thinking, dragging scholars into a whirlpool of definition, redefinition, and sometimes outright rejection. The most famous case is “Renaissance.” Today, most musicologists handle that word very cautiously; many try to dodge it completely. Yet the term persists, and for better or worse it seems unlikely ever to be fully shaken off. “Mannerism” and “mannerist,” though still used freely in student textbooks of music history, have taken root less firmly and may prove ultimately less durable. On a more technical plane, the concept of “isorhythm” once seemed more valuable than it does now, largely because of Margaret Bent’s careful examination of the problems tied to it.
In certain circles, the idea of “imitation” too is fading—a remarkably swift decline for a term that, after entering musicology's vocabulary through a 1982 article by Howard Mayer Brown, was warmly embraced by many.
So far, few have raised objections to “intertextuality,” one of the most recent borrowings into the musicologist's lexicon. Yet the use of this term (along with its associated adjective) is spreading rapidly. Because it has crept up through various channels rather than arriving via a single landmark study (as did “isorhythm,” for instance), authors have employed it to mean many different things. One might wonder whether, in musicological circles at least, it now has any single agreed-upon definition. A hallmark of Margaret Bent's scholarship has been her attention to the precise meanings of words—both as they were used by our musical ancestors and as they are used or interpreted by musicologists today. So it seems fitting to reflect on “intertextuality” in this celebratory collection.
This short essay begins by tracing the main path by which “intertextuality” entered English-language studies of early music. Reinforcing a view stated elsewhere, it argues that the word as commonly used today in studies of early repertories differs from the meaning it originally held in literary theory—and in some ways may be opposite to the original concept. Then it makes a bolder claim: within the original theory of intertextuality lie possibilities for genuinely fresh critical, historical, and analytical approaches to early music. These can be linked to a central theme in Margaret Bent's recent writings: the “grammar” of counterpoint that structures musical thought in early repertories, and this grammar's relevance to how we hear, analyze, evaluate, and otherwise try to understand early music.
The essay's final section attempts to demonstrate how the use of one specific compositional procedure (itself governed by the “grammar” of counterpoint), when employed by fifteenth- and sixteenth-century composers, produces such formulaic musical results that connections between works become structurally inevitable—often audibly so. In such situations, a very different kind of “intertextuality” may be said to exist.
Three studies of early musical repertories have been particularly influential in spreading the term “intertextuality” into musicology—or so one might judge from how often later literature cites them. Notably, all three turn to the word partly because they see existing terms (like “parody” and “imitation”) as inadequate or problematic, and partly because “intertextuality” serves as a handy and apparently all-inclusive concept to capture every facet of connectedness between musical works.
The first of these, by Rob Wegman, approaches “intertextuality” extremely cautiously during a critique of Howard Mayer Brown's promotion of the concept of “imitation”—the citation by one composer of a musical idea previously used by another. Wegman attempts no definition of the new term and makes only fleeting reference to its origins in literary theory. The relevant passage is numbered for clarity:
- “Perhaps the concept of ‘intertextuality,’ used in literary criticism, comes closest to being relevant. Yet before this or any other term can be adopted, it should be asked whether all recurrences of musical material in Renaissance music have enough in common (with respect to composers’ attitudes, methods of treatment and possible extramusical meanings) to justify the use of one overarching concept at all.”
The second study, published four years later, boldly brings the word into its title. In “Intertextuality and Compositional Process in Two Cantilena Motets by Hugo de Lantins,” J. Michael Allsen also goes beyond Wegman by offering an explicit definition:
- “The term ‘intertextuality,’ as used here, denotes all forms of material – melodic, contrapuntal, structural, and textual – shared by musical works. . . . the concept is valuable in its broad and non-specific nature: it allows us to analyze relationships between pairs of works, or entire complexes of works without the terminological difficulties inherent in words such as ‘parody,’ ‘imitation’ (or imitatio), or even ‘borrowing.’”
The third study has been especially influential. In his 1994 monograph on Lasso's “imitation” Magnificats, David Crook not only explains his use of the term (again reacting to existing musicological terminology) but also explores its origins and function within literary theory:
- “I have used the term intertextuality to refer to all forms of relatedness between two or more musical texts (i.e., musical compositions). Although this term has appeared in the musicological literature only rarely, it has, since its introduction by Julia Kristeva in 1967, found widespread use among scholars of European languages and literatures. My adoption of the term was prompted, in the first place, by the need for a more purely descriptive term devoid of previous meaning in music-historical writings (in contrast to imitation) and unencumbered by undesirable connotations in general usage (in contrast to parody). In the second place, it derives from the need for a general all-encompassing term under which more narrowly, and variously, defined forms of musical relatedness may be subsumed. . . . Taken in the broadest sense, intertextuality is not an attribute of particular genres or specific compositional techniques and procedures but a universal and inevitable characteristic of musical composition and performance, as it is of literary composition and reading. Just as all works of English literature are related to one another, if in some cases by no more than a core of the most common words and a handful of syntactical rules, so too all compositions of a given musical tradition share common vocabularies and rules.”
Evident in both Allsen's and Crook's texts is an enthusiasm for what they see as the unsullied freshness of “intertextuality”—a term still awaiting precise definition (note Allsen's phrase “as used here” and Crook's “I have used the term . . . to refer to”)—and for its apparent utility as a pseudo-technical term (like “parody” and “imitatio”), since it lies outside everyday vocabulary.
Despite the second part of Crook's definition, however, his actual usage of “intertextuality” proves more limited. In his monograph, he applies it to transfers of thematic, polyphonic, or harmonic content from one work to another—transfers the listener and analyst can interpret as meaningful and that the composer probably made intentionally. Not surprisingly, this narrower scope drew a remark from at least one reviewer of the book:
- “While [the term ‘intertextuality’] certainly allows for (and, indeed, implies) a broader definition of musical borrowing than has been hitherto available, I wonder how much is actually gained by introducing terminology that carries such wide-ranging implications. In its strictest sense, intertextuality is not necessarily predicated on the conscious quotation of material, and in that case it is of little use (as Crook himself admits) in the present, very circumscribed discussion. Could not an alternative term, or terms, be found that focus the debate more clearly and meaningfully?”
That caution might well have been heeded. Instead, recent English-language studies of early music (though not necessarily musicology at large) have increasingly used “intertextuality” as an umbrella term for the many nuanced word-concepts that pinpoint mindful, deliberate, and meaningful transfer between musical works—words such as allusion, amplification, apprenticeship, appropriation, assimilation, borrowing, citation, commentary, competition, copying, cross-reference, development, echoing, elaboration, emulation, expansion, gloss, homage, imitation, indebtedness, interdependence, mimesis, misappropriation, misreading, modelling, paraphrase, parody, pastiche, plagiarism, quotation, reflection, reinterpretation, response, re-use, reworking, rivalry, simulation, summarization, transformation, translation, and many more. Largely missing from this usage, however, are notions of non-directional, unintentional, and (to the listener) essentially meaningless connection conveyed by words like affiliation, alignment, alliance, coincidence, commonality, connectedness, consanguinuity, correlation, grammar, kinship, likeness, linkage, overlap, parallelism, relatedness, resemblance, sharedness, similitude, tradition, and phrases such as “descended from common stock,” “arising from the same cause,” or “based upon the same premise/principle.” As Kevin Brownlee writes:
- “The term ‘intertextuality’ is now used very broadly, and it seems to me that the initial Kristevan and Barthesian use of the term in conjunction with the ‘death of the author’ and the ‘free play of signifiers’ is no longer a determining (or limiting) factor. . . . At the heart of the contemporary notion of intertextuality as I see it is the process of imitation, in a way which makes the reader’s awareness both of the model text as such and of its transformations by the target text essential to the interpretation of the latter (to the ‘production of meaning’). . . . Thus in the mid-1990s, it is now a question of a gamut of (at times overlapping) types of intertextuality. . . . At one end of the spectrum would be the intertextuality most highly marked by a visible authorial or textual intentionality, coupled with an extreme specificity with regard to the model text or texts. . . . At the other end of the spectrum would be those kinds of intertextuality in which the model is not a textually specific one. . . . In these cases, intentionality is much less clearly visible.”
In the following remarks, attention goes to the “other end of the spectrum”—those forms of interrelationship between musical texts that cannot (or need not) be read as elements in a “counterpoint of allusion” but that emerge instead as a natural and unavoidable product of a shared background and the existence of an underlying “grammar.” No attempt is made here to steer the word “intertextuality” away from how it is now used. Instead, the goal is to identify aspects of the broader theory of intertextuality that were once uniquely signified by the word, which still merit close attention from musicologists, but which its current usage usually does not imply—and which may therefore be in risk of once again having “no name.”
Here are three recent attempts to clarify the meaning of “intertextuality” as originally defined by largely French philosophical writings of the 1960s and 1970s:
- “Intertextuality. A term coined by Julia Kristeva in an essay of 1966 to describe the necessary interdependence that any literary text has with a mass of others which preceded it. A literary text is not an isolated phenomenon, it is ‘constructed from a mosaic of quotations; any text is the absorption and transformation of another.’”
- “Intertextuality. A term proposed by Julia Kristeva, drawing on Mikhail Bakhtin’s notion of dialogism (‘the necessary relation of any utterance to other utterances’) to indicate a text’s construction from texts: a work is not a self-contained, individually authored whole, but the absorption and transformation of other texts, ‘a mosaic of quotations’ (Kristeva, 1967). This is a matter not of influence (from one author or work to another), but of the multifarious and historically variable relations between works as heterogeneous textual productions (‘influence’ is simply one limited and limiting figure of intertextuality).”
- “Authors do not create their texts from their own original minds, but rather compile them from pre-existent texts, so that, as Kristeva writes, a text is ‘a permutation of texts, an intertextuality in the space of a given text’, in which ‘several utterances, taken from other texts, intersect and neutralize one another.’”
Also significant is a statement by Roland Barthes from 1971, as it became widely known in the English-speaking world through a 1977 translation:
- “[Any text is] woven entirely with citations, references, echoes, cultural languages (what language is not?), antecedent or contemporary, which cut across it through and through in a vast stereophony. The intertextual in which every text is held, it itself being the text-between of another text, is not to be confused with some origin of the text: to try to find the ‘sources’, the ‘influences’ of a work, is to fall in with the myth of filiation; the citations which go up to make a text are anonymous, untraceable, and yet already read: they are quotations without inverted commas.”
It is not difficult to see at least one way this theory aligns with the analysis of specific musical repertories. Imagine the following exercise: twenty musicologists, all well-versed in the fifteenth-century repertory and secure in understanding the laws of its counterpoint, are asked to compose—independently—a 30-bar stretch of free-standing two-voice polyphony (a discant-tenor duet), using identical mensuration, clefs, and modal type. The chance of there being no significant overlap of musical content among them is small. So how do we account for the connections and resemblances that emerge? Margaret Bent proposed “grammar” for the contrapuntal fluency that would underlie such an exercise (and indeed underpins the work of fifteenth-century composers themselves). Yet perhaps no word except “intertextuality” adequately conveys the interrelationship that exists between (1) an individual utterance, (2) the “grammar” within which that utterance is made, and (3) any or every other utterance that has been or might be made within that “grammar” by composers broadly familiar with each other's works.
Through a shared musical background and the application of a common musical “grammar,” composers constantly and unavoidably replicate one another. Two composers might even stumble accidentally onto identical formulations.
When this “grammar” of counterpoint operates under the tighter constraint of a specific procedure, the likelihood of replication rises still further. This happens most clearly in fuga, two-voice polyphony where the leading voice's melodic line passes to the following voice, usually in transposition. The procedure may be short-lived (often called “imitation” for lack of a better word) or extended (usually termed a “canon,” despite the fact that “canon” had a different meaning in fifteenth-century musical language).
There are many kinds of fuga. Some are more formulaic than others. The most choice-limited forms of fuga are those in “stretto,” where the two voices are separated temporally by what can be called the “unit” of the counterpoint itself. (For example, in note-against-note or “first species” counterpoint notated in semibreve units, the responding voice enters on the second semibreve.) Strict fuga of this kind, answered at various intervals—the unison, the octave, or other pitches—gives tightly interconnected textural results
The relationship between the fifth and the fourth lies at the core of musical thought in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. This principle can be found in the works of most—and perhaps even all—composers of polyphony, from at least Du Fay to at least Monteverdi. Yet it is equally crucial that, within strict stretto fuga at these intervals, the composer faces extremely limited options. Indeed, those options can be reduced to such a simple set of “rules” that they might be communicated from teacher to student in a single sentence—though the silence of contemporary theorists on that imaginary set of “rules” raises doubts about whether they were ever so tangibly codified at the time.
Whether learned “by rule” or governed by the procedure’s internal “physics,” the constraining forces of fuga inevitably produce replication. This leads to a vast web of intertextuality spanning at least the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, and probably beyond. Two individual utterances composed according to the principles of a specific “type” of stretto fuga need not, however, sound so alike.
Example 11.1 presents two passages, one by Du Fay and one by Josquin, where a discant-tenor duet performs an extended fuga (shown on the upper stave) accompanied by a thematically independent contratenor (lower stave). In both cases, the fuga occurs in stretto at the temporal distance of a minim (thus minims may be counted as “units”) and answers at the interval of the lower fifth. According to the “rules” or “physics” of this particular “type,” contrapuntally correct fuga emerges when successive notes of the melody are formed from any mixture—even a wholly random one—of these intervals: rising seconds, falling thirds, rising fourths, falling fifths, (rising sixths, falling sevenths), and rising octaves. This constitutes the “interval stock” of stretto fuga that answers at the lower fifth. Additionally, the pitch of any unit may be held over further units at any moment.
Example 11.2 re-notates these two fuga passages in units, using void notes for the leading voice, full notes for the following voice, and ties to show repeated notes (or “holds”); such notational reduction helps clarify the procedure. Notice how both composers rely almost exclusively on the two smallest intervals from the available interval-stock: rising seconds and falling thirds. Both also use “holds” liberally. Three melodic shapes are common to both extracts: successive stepwise ascents (labelled x in Example 11.2), zigzag descent by falling thirds and rising seconds (y), and successive tumbling thirds (z). Despite these commonalities, the two passages sound surprisingly different, partly because Du Fay’s melody has greater breadth and internal variety than Josquin’s (which tends to repeat itself in short phrases), and partly because Du Fay uses more “holds.”
It might seem perverse to choose two examples that demonstrate stretto fuga—and thus argue for some form of “intertextual” linkage—precisely because they do not bear a particularly close aural resemblance, despite their shared content and technique. But selecting two nearly identical passages would raise the possibility of intentional citation of one piece by another—the “process of philologia” (Brownlee) that lies at the other end of the spectrum of “intertextuality.” The points to stress here are therefore: (1) through the “laws” of stretto fuga—alongside a shared background knowledge of repertory and its conventions—Josquin might have fortuitously replicated Du Fay exactly without any knowledge of doing so, indeed without prior familiarity with Du Fay’s motet or any of his works; (2) such fortuitous replication did occur frequently during the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. This much can be stated as fact. Equally true is that composers of these centuries often deliberately quoted from or alluded to each other’s music, expecting or hoping that listeners would recognize these transfers of material and perhaps extract meaning from them—since allusion to other works is a principal way in which any new utterance acquires “meaning.”
These two situations represent the opposite ends of the “intertextuality” spectrum. What lies between them is more troublesome territory, at least for the modern musicologist. What should we count as an allusion? How do we distinguish genuine citation from resemblances arising by chance—or rather, from the necessarily limited scope for true originality that exists when composers, reared in a common background, write their music according to a governing “grammar”? These are central problems across all music criticism, not only for early repertories (ponder issues of replication and “intellectual copyright” in much popular music today), and they rarely admit easy answers.
To end positively: considerable scope remains for further research into the “thick end” of the “intertextuality” wedge—contrapuntal “grammar” and its attendant procedures—as opposed to the “thin end” of one-to-one connections arising from “the process of philologia.” Margaret Bent draws attention to the “simple techniques that need to be mastered and internalized at the grammatical level before valid further analytical activity or interpretation can take place.” One could argue that specific procedures operating within this “grammar,” such as stretto fuga, also need to be accounted for. Analysis based on such principles may not only allow us to penetrate more deeply into the mentality of composers, but also help us understand how different minds worked in different ways, even when they shared a common background and a common grasp of “grammar” and technical procedures.
For example, Du Fay’s passage from Ave regina celorum (probably composed in the mid-1460s, quoted in Example 11.1a) bears an underlying similarity to the stretto fuga duet that introduces the melismatic setting of “O-” in “Oratione tua” at the start of the third section of his Nuper rosarum flores (composed in 1436, see Example 11.3). Both passages are characterized by variety in melodic contour, melodic breadth, and frequent “holds.” Conversely, the Josquin passage in Example 11.1b bears an underlying similarity to the discant-tenor fuga in the triple-time section of his Ave Maria ... virgo serena at the words “Ave, vera virginitas” (Example 11.4). Both are marked by internal melodic repetitions in short phrases. Even within the apparent confines of fuga, fifteenth- and sixteenth-century composers may reveal individual preferences that distinguish them from one another.
To more fully comprehend the conventions and procedures operating within the “grammar” of counterpoint, we now need to go beyond the testimony of contemporary theorists. For reasons of their own, theorists have much more to say about proportions, for instance, than they do about the “rules” or “physics” of stretto fuga—even in an age when such principles appear in so many musical works. When theorists fall silent, we should have the courage, tempered with appropriate caution, to create neologisms for phenomena that would otherwise have no name. Armed, then, with a suitable lexicon and the ability to read any musical work against the “deep models” of its “grammar” and attendant procedures—instead of, or in addition to, reading against the “surface model” of any specific antecedent—the analyst will be well equipped to evaluate not only a work’s intertextuality, but also its individuality.