Introduction and overview

Appropriation of pre-existing music and melodies, whether from one's own compositions or those of other composers, is as old as polyphonic music itself. We may think, for instance, of the cantus-firmus masses of the sixteenth century, in which composers built a polyphonic web above a borrowed melody; or of variation works from the eighteenth, nineteenth, and twentieth centuries, in which melodic and harmonic transformations of a theme produce an independent work. In recent history, musical borrowing has occurred most often in the form of quotations or reminiscences – a practice in which, as Roland Tenschert has observed, the musical quotation has the same function as a quotation in language.

If the effect is thus limited to the small number of listeners who possess a comprehensive musical knowledge, it nonetheless holds a special appeal, even for Richard Strauss, in spite of the dim view he expressed in the motto cited above. (The negative tone stemmed from the displeasure he felt when Willi Schuh called his attention to an inadvertent quotation in one of his works.)