This chapter explores the role of intertextuality in jazz. I argue that major variants of intertextuality– in particular, post-structuralism and Bloom’s “anxiety of influence”– miss what is most important to jazz: the way jazz has served as a vehicle for both the transmission of tradition and a dialogue within it and with other genres. I suggest that Bakhtin’s dialogism illuminates those neglected intertextual features and show how jazz musicians intertextually “re-accent” or “signify” in their use of quotations, licks, style, and repertory. Players quote, use licks, affirm and cross genre boundaries, and improvise over standards in order both to contribute to a tradition and alter it by expressing their individuality. In Jason Moran’s recent work engaging with Thelonious Monk and Fats Waller, he uses stylistic, generic, and repertory-based intertextuality to make the case for jazz as a far reaching but ultimately unified continuum. He thus connects with a larger tradition, but at the same time through recontextualization and re-accenting uses those utterances for self-expression and pushes against cultural– and, by implication, social and political– boundaries. Thus intertextual jazz performances simultaneously express the musicians themselves and engage with the larger whole(s) of which they are a part.

The Magic Flute stands out for its eclectic blend of musical styles. While only one scene – the duet of the Armored Men in Act 2 – includes a confirmed musical quotation, some scholars have posited that the opera contains a multitude of musical borrowings and allusions. Flute’s referential character owes much to Mozart’s ingenious use of musical topics. However, allusions to specific works have also been proposed throughout the opera’s history. In 1950, A. Hyatt King assembled an inventory of Flute’s “sources and affinities,” suggesting many plausible but largely unsubstantiated melodic precedents in works by Mozart and others. Scholars have particularly disagreed about the “source” from which Mozart allegedly derived Papageno’s aria “Ein Mädchen oder Weibchen.” As in the case of the duet of the Armored Men (which quotes a Lutheran chorale), the desire to link Mozart and J. S. Bach has led to divergent claims about the melody’s provenance.