Intertextuality in Music

Dialogic Composition

Violetta Kostka, Paulo F. de Castro, William A. Everett, Violetta Kostka, Paulo F. de Castro, William A. Everett

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781000397321
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Music History & Criticism

The concept of intertextuality – namely, the meaning generated by interrelations between different texts – was coined in the 1960s among literary theorists and has been widely applied since then to many other disciplines, including music. Intertextuality in Music: Dialogic Composition provides a systematic investigation of musical intertextuality not only as a general principle of musical creativity but also as a diverse set of devices and techniques that have been consciously developed and applied by many composers in the pursuit of various artistic and aesthetic goals. Intertextual techniques, as this collection reveals, have borne a wide range of results, such as parody, paraphrase, collage and dialogues with and between the past and present. In the age of sampling and remix culture, the very notion of intertextuality seems to have gained increased momentum and visibility, even though the principle of creating new music on the basis of pre-existing music has a long history both inside and outside the Western tradition. The book provides a general survey of musical intertextuality, with a special focus on music from the second half of the twentieth century, but also including examples ranging from the nineteenth century to the second decade of the twenty-first century. The volume is intended to inspire and stimulate new work in intertextual studies in music.

Part I

Musical intertextuality

Defining the field

1What is (is there) musical intertextuality?

Lawrence Kramer

Intertextuality as originally conceived was a relationship within language. Julia Kristeva, who coined the term, is clear on this point: ‘The idea invites the reader to interpret a text as a crossing of texts. Very often, in formalist or structuralist approaches this has been perceived as a return to “quotations” or to “sources”. For me it is principally a way of introducing history into structuralism: the texts that Mallarmé and Proust read … allow us to introduce history into the laboratory of writing’ (Kristeva 2013, 10). Intertextuality for Kristeva is the means by which Jewish mysticism crosses into Mallarmé’s ‘Un Coup de dés’ and the Dreyfus affair into Proust’s A la Recherche du temps perdu.

But we do not stay in the laboratory, or with the text. Kristeva goes on to observe that intertextuality constitutes the writing subject as a ‘sujet en procès’ – a subject in process, a subject on trial: ‘As such, the speaking subject is a carnival, a polyphony, forever contradictory and rebellious’. In its intertextual aspect, the text is an image of this plural expression of unfettered life. And when she turns next to the idea of the semiotic, so called in her idiosyncratic usage, Kristeva describes it in terms that recall and extend her description of intertextuality’s historical flux:

[The semiotic] is simply an attempt to think of ‘meaning’ not only as ‘structure’ but also as ‘process’ in the sense I have mentioned, by looking at the same time at syntax, logic, and what transgresses them … [The semiotic] articulates other aspects of ‘meaning’ which are more than mere ‘significations’, such as rhythmical and melodic inflections.

(2013, 11)

This overlap suggests a line of continuity between history as it is sedimented in texts and ‘the constraints of biology and the instinctual drives that sustain and influence meaning and signification’ (2013, 11). Intertextuality emerges from this perspective as a biological and corporeal figure with a structural name. It is a crossing not of text with text but of history with life. Recognizing this link identifies intertextuality as a strand or genre within the fundamental medium of intelligibility, which in turn is a medium of the continuity of life in Walter Benjamin’s extended sense of the term: life as the ontology of anything with a history. Intertextuality belongs to the biosphere of language (Benjamin 1969, 75).

But it cannot be confined to language. The idea invites extension into other expressive media, and extensions have followed plenteously. Most, however, have tended to preserve the homogeneity of medium built into Kristeva’s formulation. Intertextuality as originally conceived is produced within language; the intertext of writing is other writing. It has thus seemed natural to think of the intertext of pictures as other pictures, the intertext of music as other music. But the entire experience of communication, representation, expression and so on in modernity, and no doubt well before, is an assertion of fundamental heterogeneity. This is most obvious in the mixing and crossing of media but it is, and always has been, potentially present in every act of utterance, depiction and expression. Intertextuality is a general condition of meaning. Or rather, and even more to the point, it is the general condition of meaning. Nothing is even perceptible unless intertextuality makes it so. There is no outside-the-intertext.

There are, however, stronger and weaker forms of intertextuality, each of which carries its own set of questions. (That the forms overlap goes without saying.) The weakest form is direct address, the reference by one text to another as a template or an object of commentary, interpretation, adaptation or remediation. Stronger and more pervasive is indirect address, the arena of allusion, memory, echo, paraphrase, mimicry and the like, the most evident forms of which also constitute the text’s context. Both of these forms may begin in static analogy or similarity but they become inert if allowed to remain there. Likeness is potentiality or it is nothing much. The strongest and most pervasive form, but also the least accessible, is what I call adjacency, the unrecognized or unthought participation in one text of an ensemble of others. At this level intertextuality is a vehicle of hermeneutic force, taking force in both J. L. Austin’s sense of the power of utterance to do things and the everyday sense of the general power to change things.

It should be added, though the point is obvious by now, that the ‘text’ in the term ‘intertextuality’ needs to be understood in an expanded sense that includes all the expressive media at our disposal. Intertextuality is not textual, although, paradoxically, this is so only because nothing is not textual. There is nothing that cannot be marked. Things leave traces. Inscription, recording and referring are not merely properties of language and media; they are ontological conditions (Morton 2012, 205–224; Peters 2015). The world is text-laden not because it is permeable to language but because it is a world. In this sense, to quote the famous phrase I played on earlier, there is no outside-the-text.

For this reason, all locations in the intertext are merely occasional. It is convenient to speak of texts and ‘their’ intertexts, the intertexts that belong to them or to which they belong. But speaking this way is no more than a device of orientation and selection. It is a way of following a series of threads within plausible boundaries. Within those boundaries there is no true priority: not text and intertext but just intertext. So to the observation that the intertext is also, and always, intermedial, we have to add that, once invoked, the intertext is primary rather than secondary. The intertext is not a setting. The text, so called, is literally a point of departure.

The priority of the intertext over the text extends to issues of knowledge, intention and chronology. These issues may sometimes become relevant, but they are rarely more than marginal. If we take the concept of the intertext seriously, it does not matter who knew what when. What matters is how the terms, tropes, narratives and maxims elicited by a textual question take shape and move through an intertextual array. Intertextual expression – which is to say, expression as such, utterance as such, demonstration as such – occurs as an assembly of eccentric orbits. It is hard to say this more simply, but try it this way: what matters is not the direction but the motion.

That formulation may stand in lieu of a first principle. But before we can go further, we need to deal more fully with the question of language, especially since the non-verbal nature of music is sure to come up as a problem in any consideration of intertextuality and music. As I began by observing, intertextuality runs across all expressive media equally. But language nonetheless acts as first among equals. Although intertextuality cannot be confined to language, it cannot be separated from language either. Intertextual relations can be performed by a host of non-verbal means, but only language can recognize them. Intertextual links are mute until they are named. And since language is pre-eminently intertextual in its own right, the question of how intertextuality works is indivisible from the question of how language works. Of course, that is anything but a single question. How should we pose it here? Perhaps we should just go ahead and ask what it is that makes language intertextual. What, so to speak, is the intertextuality of everyday life?

Language is constantly paraphrasing itself. Any cognitive demand we make on our language has to draw out the consequences – and they are many – of this simple fact. For one thing, no idea has a definitive or final verbal form. Ideas are atmospheres thrown off by chains of paraphrases. For another thing, the process of paraphrase applies just as much to the performative dimension of language as to its constative dimension. What language does is no more subject to fixation than what it says: two things, in any case, which it always does together. The process is endlessly prolific. Anyone can share in it but no one can rule it. When Wittgenstein wrote the seemingly simple sentence ‘Words are also deeds’, he crystallized the foundations of what would subsequently become speech act theory, but he also left a gap in that pregnant ‘also’. Austin, who detested Wittgenstein, filled in the gap by setting up and then breaking down his own distinction between constative and performative utterance; that is, utterance that affirms versus utterance that enacts. But Austin too left a gap that Derrida, who admired him, would subsequently fill. Derrida added the demand that reading ‘produce the law’ between what one can command of an utterance and what one cannot. But the law thus phrased is a strange one because it too is subject to continuous paraphrase (Wittgenstein 1958, 146e; Austin 1962; Derrida 1968, 158–164).

Measured by traditional standards that still exert real power, this condition of unlimited paraphrase is an obstacle to any knowledge we can trust with confidence. It is even a threat to the possibility of knowledge itself. But perhaps this condition is simply the form knowledge takes.

In The Logic of Sense, Gilles Deleuze observes a strange phenomenon that one might call the infinite relay of sense. The sense of an utterance is what it expresses as opposed to what it designates, manifests or signifies (Deleuze 1990).¹ We might say that sense, so understood, is the coalescence of meaning and meaningfulness. Sense is resonant. But utterance is limited to having a sense; no utterance can say its sense. That can be done only by another utterance, which in turn shares the same limitation. Sense may thus be conveyed by an utterance, but it can become articulate, can enter into life and the life of language, only through paraphrase. Put in terms made familiar by the early Wittgenstein, which Deleuze’s account resembles, an utterance cannot say its sense but only show it. Deleuze differs from Wittgenstein in envisioning a continuous, recursive passage from showing to saying.

Music can be regarded as the paradigm for this protocol of knowledge, which it renders transparent. The paradigm is both internal and external. When one musical event restates another in varied form, the later event acts in the place of, becomes a placeholder for, language. Instead of passing from showing to saying, the relay of sense goes from showing to showing. It thus displaces, but also awaits, the right words to say, and it continues to await them discernibly even if they never come. But they can and do come under the right circumstances, which are precisely those of nuanced and complex paraphrase. When we try to interpret music, either by means of musical or verbal performance, we come face to face with a particularly exposed form of our responsibility for cognition, which comes directly from the necessity of paraphrase. Recognizing that this condition is a source of knowledge rather than an obstacle to it, and responding with creative acts of paraphrase, has, I believe, greatly enhanced the understanding of music (Kramer 2010, 2012, 2016).

As the involvement of music demonstrates, however, paraphrase does not stop with words. Language belongs to paraphrase, not paraphrase to language. Any expressive medium can paraphrase any other. Any can carry over elements of the other’s assertion, action and valuation. The omnipresence of paraphrase in this general form is a communicative universal. As I have put it elsewhere, accenting a slightly different mechanism,

Difference in medium is a difference in means, not a difference of possibility. Meaning in any medium is available in other media; it is intrinsically available for what has come to be called remediation. Meaning can be transcribed. This never happens without some change, but the same is true within any medium. Meaning always only approximates itself – at best. It follows that the general possibility of transcription from one medium to another is the precondition of meaning itself.

(Kramer 2020, 398)

This general possibility is the condition of possibility for the specific bio-historical form of paraphrase that we call, not quite accurately, intertextuality. But it is also something more: it is the condition that makes intertextuality not merely possible but necessary, inevitable, irrepressible, sometimes exhilarating, sometimes oppressive.

Everyday life often demands that we curb or mask intertextual energy. Doing so is practical; it’s efficient. One thing the arts and humanities are good for is providing a space for the unmasking and release of that energy – if our institutions will permit it, which historically they have been too reluctant to do. This reluctance stems in part from a perfectly justified anxiety that as the basis for intertextual understanding becomes less explicit, understanding becomes more speculative. Direct address is reliable, but indirect reference is more questionable and adjacency is questionable at the root. I call this claim justified because it is right, at least in one sense: the more interesting things get, the less certain they become. But as I have argued on many occasions, that is not a problem for humanistic knowledge, knowledge of what we make and do; on the contrary, it is the essential character of humanistic knowledge. The question with uncertainty is not how to reduce or avoid it – one can’t – but how to use it as a welcome means to fuller understanding. One might add to this working credo the observation that certainty is no guarantee of significance. The most solid connections can be pretexts, masks or defences as well as bridges. In general, therefore, intertextual inquiry has a built-in trajectory from the known to the unknown. Intertextual knowledge spirals outward from the links that initiate it and it requires hermeneutic intervention at every point. I want to state this as strongly as possible: anything less than such a robust model of intertextuality is not worth a separate conceptual category. The aim of genuine intertextual inquiry is spirals of adjacencies.

With music in particular, it comes as no surprise that music in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, like music in all centuries, is saturated with other music. The proliferation of media since 1900 probably made that saturation denser and certainly made it more evident that it had previously been. The concept of intertextuality may even derive from that enhanced activity across the whole spectrum of the arts and literature. The concept emerges only once the presentation of overt intertextual links passes a certain unforeseeable threshold of frequency and density. When Schoenberg and Stravinsky appropriate Baroque forms in the 1920s, or Ravel and Strauss do peculiar things with waltzes, the appropriation is obvious but it does not yet become the index of a general condition, let alone a gene...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of figures
• List of tables
• List of contributors
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• Part I Musical intertextuality: Defining the field
• Part II The intertextual poetics of music
• Part III In light of Genette’s transtextuality
• Part IV Constructing meaning through intertextual music
• Index of names and works