Self-Borrowing: Nature and Terminology

The term ‘self-borrowing’ was defined in the call for papers for the symposium that generated this journal issue as ‘the re-use of pre-existing music in a new work by the same author’.Footnote ³ In existing scholarship general descriptions of the practice, as well as specific descriptions pertaining to individual composers, works and traditions, have been put forward. For the ottocento opera repertory self-borrowing can generally be identified as a composer's transfer of music from one of his operas to another; more specifically, as the appropriation of thematic formulas, rhythmic formulas, cadential phrases; thematic material in its entirety; musical passages set with a different text; and musical passages reused with the same text.Footnote ⁴ The practice might thus involve a single musical component such as melody or the full musical context including rhythm, key, metre, orchestration, tempo and so forth; and the re-use can be literal or, as is more frequently the case, transformed. This has also been explained, for Rossini, as ‘the re-use of themes, phrases, movements and entire numbers, which the composer made use of with some regularity, reclaiming such elements from earlier works, at times leaving them intact and at other times modifying them’.Footnote ⁵

Self-borrowing in music has a lengthy history, and techniques used at other times and in other genres align with those discussed here for ottocento opera.Footnote ⁶ This said, the nature of the borrowed material, the extent to which it is reused, and the manner in which it is treated upon re-use are all crucial considerations for distinguishing ‘types’ of self-borrowing, and consequently for determining appropriate terminology to describe as specifically as possible associated processes in particular time periods, genres and musical traditions. Indeed, precise terminology seems essential, especially since for the ottocento opera repertory we do not have a full understanding of the extent of this practice. Existing scholarship, owing to its focus largely on selected composers and works, provides snapshots that reveal a variety of manifestations of the practice, many of them subtly nuanced. Yet at times authors of valuable studies seem to choose descriptors indiscriminately, and thus scholarly vocabulary may not always effectively convey the subtleties of the techniques implemented by composers.Footnote ⁷ The nuances of individual instances could, to some extent, be more fittingly captured by the judicious application of clear terminology.

A brief and selective overview of terminology, findings and perspectives drawn from a sampling of the published scholarship for various repertories and composers (alongside those for ottocento opera) reveals a striking variety of word choices for discussing both the concept and the practice of self-borrowing.Footnote ⁸ Table 1 contains a partial collection of terms that have entered the conversation along with others that might be applied when appropriate.

Table 1 Terminology

a Definitions are derived from OED Online, www.oed.com (accessed 18 September 2019).

b On various theories of adaptation, see Linda Hutcheon, A Theory of Adaptation (New York: Routledge, 2006).

c On parody, see Linda Hutcheon, A Theory of Parody (New York: Methuen, 1985; reprint, Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2000).

‘Re-use’ could be considered an ‘umbrella’ covering each term in Table 1: it is generic enough to encompass use of existing material in either literal or varied form, as well as with or without intentionality. Other words in Table 1 have specific requirements pertaining to varying degrees of sameness/difference, ethos, technique, complexity, purpose, and plan in the re-use of music. Some of these terms could be applied interchangeably; some terms may be considered as subcategories of others; a few of them may, in fact, prove less useful or even inappropriate. Heeding the inherent nuances of terms may, however, assist in conveying a clearer understanding of self-borrowing in specific instances. Precision in choice of vocabulary could clarify the circumstances of the self-borrowing at multiple levels, as a few examples illustrate. Transformations to an extreme level may suggest ‘recomposition’.Footnote ⁹ If there is an identifiable reason for the re-use, perhaps ‘adaptation’ or ‘repurposing’ would be appropriate. There might also be situations in which one could say that a composer is ‘reclaiming’ his music: this may be suitable especially if a composer is borrowing from a work that was not published or publicly/professionally performed (as was often the case). For conscious re-use, which is referential and presumably intended to be openly recognized, ‘self-quotation’ could be applied. Even in the light of only these isolated examples, it seems clear that a greater degree of specificity in descriptors should hinge on the nature and the extent of the transformation of the borrowed material, as well as the reasons that may have prompted the borrowing.

True versus Perceived Self-Borrowing: The Characteristics of Ottocento Opera

Transferring or re-using music across scores seems to have been a fairly common practice at the time under discussion.Footnote ¹⁰ But determining what constitutes self-borrowing, or more precisely when self-borrowing is truly present, in ottocento opera, especially works of the primo Ottocento, can prove challenging because of what Emanuele Senici has marked as ‘the tension between individual style and common compositional idiom, or, better, the perceptual and discursive challenges thrown up by distinguishing between the two’.Footnote ¹¹ The idea that ‘individual style and common idiom are conceptually based on repetition’ is integral to Senici's observation that commentators of the time found it problematic to distinguish ‘between repetition that generated style and repetition engendered by self-borrowing’, so much so that many of them even talked of self-borrowing when none was present.Footnote ¹² The extent to which resemblances and echoes of previous works were in their day and are now deemed definable markers of an individual style and thus acceptable, and the point when they might then have been or may now be judged breaches of originality or signals of derivative techniques and thus unacceptable cannot easily be discerned. In part, the difficulty lies in the highly conventional nature of this repertory, in which ‘conventions, shared codes, and repetitive formulas have often prevailed over the pursuit of innovation’.Footnote ¹³ Consequently, it is to be expected that some recurrence of musical material would have been intrinsically unintentional, even part and parcel of a compositional style, for, as the primo ottocento composer Pietro Guglielmi noted, it ‘is not difficult for a composer, who has formed a style, to unwittingly duplicate some small things’.Footnote ¹⁴

Theoretical evidence from the period sheds light on why such opera teemed with repetitive characteristics that could be confused with borrowing of material. In his composition treatise Il maestro di composizione, the pedagogue and composer Bonifazio Asioli expounded at some length on how to write dramatic music.Footnote ¹⁵ In Book 3, article IV, ‘Confronto tra le Frasi Musicali e i Diversi Metri Poetici’, Asioli addresses technical aspects of text setting; proceeding systematically with brief subsections for each metrical type found in poetic verse (endecasillabo, decasillabo, novenario, ottonario, settenario, senario, quinario, quaternario and ternario), he explains, through copious music examples, how and why specific metrical types are set to music in particular metres and to certain rhythmic patterns.Footnote ¹⁶ Then in articles V and VI, he turns his attention to ‘imitazione’ (‘imitation’, the term applied at the time to the relationship between music and words), specifically expression of sentiment through imitative musical gestures,Footnote ¹⁷ such as accompanimental figuration and instrumentation but also associations with extramusical ideas, fixed by tradition, for example, the pastoral. As Asioli states, his primary goal is to instruct on ‘the adaptation of the sounds [including pitch and instrumental timbre] and the rhythmic motions that imitate and express to the quality of the passions’ conveyed by the verses.Footnote ¹⁸ He separates imitation into two main types: ‘imitazione sentimentale’ (article V), ‘the expression of the sentiments of the soul’ (‘l'espressione degli affetti dell'animo’), for example, happiness, anger, excitement and so forth; and ‘imitazione fisica’ (article VI), either the representation of visual objects that have no sound, such as sunrise/sunset, or the approximation of indeterminate sounds, such as the rumbling of thunder, bird song, flowing water, a galloping horse and so forth. For both categories, he provides music examples drawn from works by Cimarosa, Haydn, Mayr, Mozart, Paisiello and Rossini.Footnote ¹⁹

If followed, his recommendations could have yielded formulaic melodic types, rhythmic figurations and orchestral palettes.Footnote ²⁰ Assuming then that these principles are truly representative of the thinking behind composing expressive dramatic music in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries (and there is no reason to doubt that they are), they may account for a number of commonalities in this repertory and perhaps particularly in the output of an individual composer who, through these techniques, may have developed effective means of dramatic expression and relied upon them repeatedly. In other words, some instances of perceived self-borrowing may simply be symptomatic of a genre that at its core thrived on prescribed and desirable similarities across works.

Asioli also briefly mentions the formal aspects of Italian opera of the era (Book 3, article VII); other authors of the time, notably Carlo Ritorni, analyse the genre's forms and structures in greater detail. In his Ammaestramenti alla composizione d'ogni poema e d'ogni opera appartenente alla musica, Ritorni extensively comments on the norms for the contemporary operatic repertory with regard to internal layout and forms, especially during the primo Ottocento.Footnote ²¹ He describes in detail how solo arias, duets, concerted ensembles, introduzioni and finales follow conventional formal structures and often appear in specific positions within a musical-dramatic work, much of which is governed by the dramatic situations and customary organization of librettos.Footnote ²² Critical of the uniformity in dramatic circumstances and musical forms (though acknowledging a legitimate role for them), Ritorni remarks that all modern operas ‘resemble twin sisters’ and have ‘a single physiognomy’,Footnote ²³ aptly summarizing one reason why the genre is conducive to self-borrowing techniques.

Asioli (through prescription and examples) and Ritorni (through description and critique) both make it clear that conventionality is part and parcel of opera of the era. The characteristics they discuss – the formulaic formal nature of the music, the homogeneity of dramatic situations, the ease of fitting new versified text to existing music – would have facilitated both large-scale and small-scale transplantation of music between one work and another.

Rationale and Meaning in Self-Borrowings

That, as a consequence of the conventionality of the genre, ambiguities may arise about what truly constitutes self-borrowing, makes respecting matters of ethos, focus, purpose and context when defining, identifying and describing the practice essential. By necessity, these criteria would vary in each instance, but intentionality would seem to be required as a measure for differentiating instances of true self-borrowing from those of ‘repetition’ that is a consequence of the genre's common idiom or of a composer's stylistic consistency. Assessing the level of intentionality is fraught, however, for it compels us to consider that some rationale or meaning accounted for the re-use of a passage. This may or may not have been the case. A number of scholars have adopted the position that the self-borrowings in this repertory may be no more than similarities and they thus bear no meaning.Footnote ²⁴ The absence of meaning may be part and parcel of the genre, for as Mary Ann Smart commented (with regard to Rossini's habitual repurposing of music in different contexts), ‘much of what we see and hear in nineteenth-century Italian opera was conceived for immediate, visceral effect, short-circuiting any patterns of symbolic or political interpretation’.Footnote ²⁵ And this kind of effect also accounts in part for why self-borrowing could be practiced across works in this repertory.

In many instances of self-borrowing, attempting to identify precise discursive meanings or patterns may indeed be unproductive. Perhaps because of the potential futility of the exercise, it is key to consider additional reasons why a composer may have deemed it acceptable to reuse existing material from his own works. There were certainly both practical and aesthetic reasons. As is often noted, borrowing pre-existing music was, in some cases, a simple timesaving tactic, especially given the temporal and financial exigencies of the ottocento opera world. As Rossini commented about his works, ‘the same pieces of music will be found in several operas: the time and the money I was given to compose were so homeopathic that I barely had the time to read the so-called poetry to be set to music’.Footnote ²⁶ Moreover, routinely faced with time constraints and consequently often composing at a fever pace, in the face of creative incapacity, composers may well have been tempted – out of necessity – to turn to their previous works as repositories of musical ideas.Footnote ²⁷

Beyond practical benefit, engaging in self-borrowing, when done strategically, might also have had artistic value. Revisiting already composed music gave a composer an opportunity to explore the inherent potential of a rich design more fully, and recontextualizing a passage or transforming it allowed him to realize an alternative version of something in which he had a special investment or to refine or experiment with a favoured musical idea.Footnote ²⁸ For some composers, the practice apparently could become a type of salvage operation for music that had been unfinished, unsuccessful, unpublished or unperformed. In many cases, geography was a consideration: music would be reused in works that had their premieres in different cities, the borrowed music to some extent recomposed, both strategies serving to minimize audience recognition.Footnote ²⁹ Such strategies were possible in the primo Ottocento because of general artistic milieu and business practices in the operatic sphere. Operas, at least in the first quarter of the century, often disappeared after their premiere season; those that survived normally did so for only a few revivals. During this period full scores circulated in manuscript, and operas were often issued in piano-vocal scores of pezzi staccati.Footnote ³⁰

All of this suggests that composers were inclined to reuse music that had experienced a restricted or incomplete life, usually for geographical or qualitative reasons.Footnote ³¹ Temporal distance could also have been advantageous. An example from the music of Verdi seems to demonstrate this last consideration fairly clearly (Ex. 1). I am not the first to point out that echoes of the composer's 1838 set of romanze – his first published work and thus his introduction as a composer to the broad musical public – resonate in his later music. In many instances, it is difficult to pinpoint precisely where, and it is often more of what might be called a sonic profile or even a stylistic element, that reappears in an opera, a shadow of the earlier composition.Footnote ³² But one phrase presents a particularly distinctive case, seemingly a true instance of self-borrowing: a melodic fragment from Verdi's 1838 romanza ‘In solitaria stanza’ (Ex. 1a) found a new home in ‘Tacea la notte placida’ in Il trovatore (Ex. 1b) fifteen years later.

Ex. 1a Giuseppe Verdi, Sei romanze (Milan: Giovanni Canti, 1838), no. 3 ‘In solitaria stanza’, bars 26–30 (the figure is repeated at bars 38–42 with different text; see Table 2) (Giuseppe Verdi Musica da Camera, comp. and ed. Victor DeRenzi, 2 vols (Brooklyn: Arista, 2000): I: 12–13)

Ex. 1b Giuseppe Verdi, Il trovatore (1853), Act I, scene 2, ‘Tacea la notte placida’, bars 88–95 (bars 57–64 are the same music set to different text; see Table 2) (Giuseppe Verdi, Il trovatore (New York: G. Schirmer, n.d.), plate #14140)

Table 2 Texts of Verdi's romanza ‘In solitaria stanza’ and of his ‘Tacea la notte placida’ from Il trovatore. Text in bold is set to the musical phrase discussed here

In Verdi's treatment of this passage, although the metres vary – common time in the song and 6/8 in the opera – the key and the pitches remain the same. Quoting music from a chamber work published in Milan and composed before his first opera would have been ‘safe’ in 1853, for the likelihood that Verdi's Roman audience for Il trovatore would have known those early songs was slim. It is indeed tempting to ponder why Verdi would have returned to this phrase pretty much verbatim. The texts (in Table 2) furnish little insight beyond a celestial reference at one occurrence of the phrase in each work (see boldface verses), and there is no explicit dramatic context for the song text to shed light on a possible connection, although feminine suffering underpins both situations. If Verdi had some personal preference for or special attachment to the phrase, it is lost to history. The intriguing reappearance of this melodic passage easily passes as an example of pure repetition; like one of Parker's so-called ‘musical doubles’ more stylistic or generic than meaningful. Nonetheless, this example should at the least give us pause, especially in the works of a composer who is not routinely linked specifically with the practice of self-borrowing.

Acceptability and Aesthetic Considerations

Composers’ attention to minimizing the possibility of listener recognition of reused music raises questions related to the acceptability of self-borrowing. Several scholars writing about self-borrowing in ottocento opera have drawn on contemporaneous critical commentary for insights into views on and experiences of the practice. Frequently disapproving (as citations at the opening of this essay suggest), such commentary focuses largely on aesthetic considerations related to originality, organicism, progress and even at times national identity. It also reveals the importance of considering various aspects of self-borrowing within a relatively specific temporal context.

Understanding how negative and positive critical assessments of the techniques of musical borrowing might be balanced is difficult, for perceptions change across the nineteenth century in step with evolving systems, structures and styles. The importance of temporal context is illuminated by Smart, who with regard to Bellini has discussed how the relatively positive discourse of the 1830s (some of the most active years of his compositional activity), concerned mainly with novelty in the composer's works, conflicted with the more negative commentary of the 1880s (nearly 40 years after his death), debating the violation of the very nature of a musical artwork and its essence in the light of the composer's musical self-borrowings.Footnote ³³ Even during a composer's lifetime, perceptions of his engagement with self-borrowing could shift in a similar direction: as Alexandra Wilson has noted in relation to Puccini (though much later in the century), for critics there was only a small difference between elements of repetition and those engendering style, and what they once praised in the composer's operas as indicative of a well-defined individual style eventually came to be perceived as ‘hackneyed’.Footnote ³⁴

Despite some uneasiness over recognition and public criticism of reused music, a number of composers bought into compositional approaches related to self-borrowing, albeit to greater and lesser degrees. Bellini had a ‘relaxed attitude to reusing material’ manifested in widespread borrowings from most of his early operas; he was not defensive about self-borrowing to his colleagues, although he attempted to conceal his practice from journalists and audiences; and he engaged in self-borrowing fairly judiciously.Footnote ³⁵ Rossini found a need to justify having engaged liberally in self-borrowing, at least after the fact and when his music became widely available in print for all to see and study. To his publishers Giovanni and Tito Ricordi Rossini admitted to having indulged freely in reusing his own music, expressing concern upon the publication of his collected works that with the widespread availability of his entire output the presence of the same musical passages in multiple operas could be proven through score study and thus provide fodder for negative criticism.Footnote ³⁶ Despite these seemingly minor reservations, many composers of the era who engaged in self-borrowing seem to have regarded it as a handy and worthwhile compositional tool.

Self-Borrowing and the Listening Experience

While (as noted) a few particulars related to composers’ and critics’ perspectives on self-borrowing during the Ottocento can be retrieved, capturing the thoughts or reactions of general listeners of the era is more elusive. One way to begin to understand how the public might have perceived a composer's re-use of music is through pondering aspects of the listening experience. In doing so, it seems important to keep in mind both the historical and social context of listening (the ‘auditory culture’ of the era) in relation to the intertwining of ‘musical object’ and ‘listening subject’Footnote ³⁷ and the experiences, associations, knowledge, attitudes and beliefs that the listener would have brought to the musical encounter (what Pierre Bourdieu would have us understand as ‘cultural capital’).Footnote ³⁸

Emanuele Senici has done this insightfully in various writings where he elucidates issues to consider in interrogating listeners’ possible understandings of and reactions to self-borrowings in the works of Rossini and his predecessors. As part of his illuminating and multifaceted discussions, Senici has observed that in listening and critical judgment the role of memory emerges prominently in discourse about self-borrowing in the operas of the primo Ottocento (in particular those of Rossini).Footnote ³⁹ One of his incisive observations is that the ‘repetition’ related to and inherent in Rossini's music, resulting from frequency of performance and consistency of style, coupled with the social and cultural conditions of the musical milieu of the time, including audience patterns of consumption through attending multiple performances of the same opera in a single season, availability of pezzi staccati and eventually piano-vocal scores for domestic music-making, the possibility of hearing transcriptions and arrangements of ‘popular’ selections from operas in venues outside the theatres, all contributed to the acquisition of ‘knowledge’ of specific musical works.Footnote ⁴⁰

In support of his comments, Senici points to primo ottocento writings by the Italian poet and essayist Giacomo Leopardi. In his Zibaldone di pensieri (written in 1823) Leopardi reflected on the role of memory in musical listening, connected repetition and pleasure in explicit and meaningful ways (the only writer to do so, Senici notes), and discussed the need for a combination of that to which a listener would have been accustomed to hearing and those elements that would have been novel.Footnote ⁴¹ In short, repetition makes music memorable, thereby resulting in familiarity and creating pleasure.Footnote ⁴²

In modern times, theories of musical listening, drawn in particular from cognitive theory, might provide a similar backdrop against which to consider listeners’ perceptions with regard to self-borrowing, for Leopardi's notions resonate within the comments of authors such as Leonard B. Meyer, David Huron and Elizabeth Margulis.Footnote ⁴³ Meyer posited that: ‘If a work has been heard already, we will know what is going to happen and, in later rehearings, the improbable will become probable, the unexpected will be expected, and all predictions will be confirmed. [ … ] The better we know a work – the more often we have heard it – the more we enjoy it and the more meaningful it becomes.’Footnote ⁴⁴ Extending Meyer's foundational ideas, both Huron and Margulis have drawn on neurophysiological research about how people experience the world in general and music in particular to provide scientific evidence of listening phenomena. It is not possible in a short essay to delve in depth into the lengthy, complex and nuanced arguments of these authors, but a brief summary of a few applicable points may provide a preliminary frame within which to continue thinking about the perception and the impact of self-borrowing in listening experiences and to further understanding some of the ways in which Meyer's ideas play out in a broad context.

Repetition – both in repeated hearings of compositions or substantial portions therein and in smaller-scale repetitions internal to a musical work – is an essential characteristic of music, as both Huron and Margulis emphasize.Footnote ⁴⁵ Given that recycling pre-existing music is, of course, a manner of repeating it, there is perhaps much to be gleaned here with regard to musical self-borrowing.Footnote ⁴⁶ Musical repetition at various levels sets up expectation and anticipation making music predictable,Footnote ⁴⁷ and by making music increasingly predictable, repetition enhances enjoyment, interest and involvement, thereby significantly affecting musical pleasure,Footnote ⁴⁸ for one reason because the known is preferable to the unknown.Footnote ⁴⁹ Pleasure is a key component here. Meyer acknowledged the fundamental connection between a listener's musical pleasure and expectation, proposing that much of music's emotional context results from the composer's choreographing of expectation. Self-borrowing might be considered one way in which a composer can choreograph expectation, in that for those familiar with the source work, it creates a specific kind of opportunity for anticipation and predictability – psychological mechanisms that lie at the heart of the pleasures of musical experience.Footnote ⁵⁰

But there is a risk that repeated hearings can over-satiate a listener and that satiation can diminish the enjoyment, turning pleasure to boredom, irritation, or habituation.Footnote ⁵¹ Deviation within repetition can help to minimize the risk of boredom: it might add to the pleasure a new layer – the element of surprise.Footnote ⁵² Surprise, which in effect thwarts expectation, cannot only help avoid habituation, it can also amplify a pleasurable experience by its contrast.Footnote ⁵³ The transformation of pre-existing material, typical of many instances of self-borrowing, presents a type of deviation while still preserving certain expectations. It sets up ‘paradoxical expectation’, a combination of the expected and the unexpected, that is, the music is the same but different.Footnote ⁵⁴ The multi-layered perceptions of anticipating or expecting and then being surprised by a transformation, and the appeal of contemplating what a composer may have cleverly managed to pull out of his musical material upon retooling it forestalls boredom and can make the experience and the music increasingly pleasurable.