Throughout the history of music, musicians and music lovers alike have speculated on the ways in which music is capable (or incapable) of presenting a narrative without reaching much of a conclusion beyond that reached by Hector Berlioz when he admitted that music cannot tell a story without the aid of a verbal program.  This has not stopped composers from attempting to pour out their most specific sentiments in their compositions. 

It is perhaps this sense of thematic ambiguity (knowing that the audience will not know what a work is about without the composer's telling them) so inherent in music that allows composers to feel at ease displaying their deepest feelings in this most public of art forms.  And yet many composers attempt to give some sort of clue, whether publicly or privately, as to the nature of a work.  Often it is through the use of various clues in the score, whether verbal or musical, clues which Rolland Barthes' calls lexias.  These lexias demand from the listener a certain familiarity with other works of art.  This in turn is what Robert Hatten defines as intertextuality.

Intertextuality "derives from the view of a literary work as a text whose richness of meaning results from its location in a potentially infinite network of other texts." (Hatten, Robert S., "The Place of Intertextuality in Music Studies," American journal of Semiotics, vol.3, no.4, 1985.) In professor Hatten's argument a work of art need not quote specifically another work in order for this phenomenon to take place.  Composers have, however, exploited this phenomenon since time immemorial in order to provide signifiers to the emotions or even programs developed within their works. This is still the case today, even amidst the myriad harmonic languages that surround us.  Quotation in particular, even within the context of today's stringent copyright laws, is a favorite device of composers not only as a 
means of giving their work an intertextual context but also simply as a way of achieving a narrative.

The issue is further complicated today by the proliferation of recorded music and the flourishing of the "music industry."  Now more than ever we are faced with an audience exposed to all sorts of music, openly available for purchase in recording and even "pumped" into our systems daily by public address systems at office buildings and shopping malls. Today's composers thus have a greater intertextual palette than in precious times when composers were limited by the amount of music they could personallyexperience in a live setting.  Not only that but the advent of electronic recording equipment in the twentieth century has increased the palette even more since composers are no longer limited to quoting melodies but can resort to quoting particular performances by way of electronic reproduction.

An example of this is English composer Gavin Bryars' work Jesus' Blood Never Failed Me Yet in which he uses a brief tape of a homeless elderly man in London singing a snippet of the hymn tune of the same name.   Jesus' Blood Never Failed Me Yet is a seventy-five minute long extrapolation on this recording consisting of little more than instrumental accompaniments to the recorded "tramp" (as Bryars calls him) performed by various instrumental combinations.  Eventually the tramp is "joined" by a live singer (in this case the pop singer Tom Waits) and a chorus which eventually replace him as the recording fades away.  Bryars describes his intentions and the genesis of the piece as follows:

   In 1971, when I was living in London, a friend, Alan Power, was making a 
    film about people living rough in the area around Elephant and Castle and 
    Waterloo Station.  He asked me to help him with some of the audio tapes 
    from the film and during this work I came across the original source for 
    this piece.  In  the course of being filmed, some people broke into 
    drunken song– sometimes a   bit of opera, sometimes folk songs, sometimes 
    sentimental ballads– and one old    man, who in fact did not drink, sang a 
    religious song Jesus' Blood Never Failed    Me Yet.
           (...)For some time, I had had the idea of making a piece of music 
   which  repeated in a gradually incremental way but which had something of 
   the emotional tone of the late 1950's American war films.  However, I 
   soon found that Jesus' Blood Never Failed Me Yet was far too complex and 
   rich a resource for such a simple idea. 
             When I copied the loop onto the continuous reel in Leicester, I 
  left the door of the recording studio open (it opened unto one of the large 
  painting studios)  while I went downstairs to get a cup of coffee.  When I 
  came back I found the  normally lively room unnaturally subdued.  People 
 were moving about much more slowly than usual, and a few were sitting 
 alone, quietly weeping.  I was puzzled  until I realized that the tape was 
 still playing and that they had been overcome by    the old man's 
 unaccompanied singing.  This demonstrated to me the emotional   power of the 
 music, but also alerted me to the need to approach very carefully   anything 
 I did to the tape.
        (Bryars, Gavin, notes to Jesus' Blood Never Failed Me Yet, Point 
Music 438-  823-2, New York, 1993.)

Thus Bryars idea for a simple tape-loop piece evolved into an attempt, the success of which is open to interpretation,  to harness the emotions of the old man in the recording (who died before the piece was completed) and attempt to share, or at least disseminate them to a general public.  In this way Bryars is almost assuming the persona, to use the term coined by Edward T. Cone, of the old man in this case, rather than using his own voice.  Indeed he even provides a sort of disclaimer to this effect at the end of his notes to the most recent recording of the work:
 

Although the old man died before he could hear what I had done 
with his singing, the piece remains as a restrained testament to his 
spirit and optimism... for me there is great poignancy in his voice and, 
though I do not share the simple optimism of his faith, I am still 
touched by the memory of my first encounter with what [Percy] Grainger 
would call the "human-ness" of his voice, and through this piece I try 
to give it new life.  (Ibid.)

Another work of Bryars' which deserves mention for its different (and ultimately more successful) use of quotation is his The Sinking of the Titanic , a work which began its conception in 1969 and appeared on record in the same LP as Jesus' Blood Never Failed Me Yet in 1974. 

The Sinking of the Titanic is, in Bryars' words, an open-ended, almost unfinished work which he keeps revisiting and revising as new information about the wreck is discovered (the last revision was done in the late 80s-early 90s in reaction to the discovery of the wreck in 1985.  One wonders if the recent success of James Cameron's film about the disaster will result 
in yet another version of this piece).  Like Jesus' Blood Never Failed Me Yet , the material for The Sinking of the Titanic consists mainly of an old hymn tune, in this case a tune identified simply as "Autumn" and one of the hymns which the band aboard the Titanic disputedly played as the great ocean liner sank into the North Atlantic.  Unlike Jesus' Blood Never Failed Me Yet the effect of the quoted material, as well as its use, is quite different.  Instead of a sampled field recording Bryars gives the hymn tune to a live string sextet around which other instrumentalists and taped elements (such as sound effects and taped interviews with Titanic survivors) as well as digital processing of all these elements take place.  Bryars makes use of all these varying elements, as well as the performance space (one performance took 
place in an abandoned water tower in Bourges which dated to the Napoleonic era) not to assume a persona but in an attempt at depiction.  The depiction in this case, however, is not so much narrative as imaginative, taking as a point of departure the description of the band playing as water surrounded them and a speculation of Bryars' as to the sound of music underwater (if indeed music could play in such physical conditions).  The composer writes:

      This Episcopal hymn ["Autumn"], then, becomes a basic element of the 
music and is subject to a variety of treatments.  Bride [Harold Bride, the 
junior wireless operator on the Titanic who identified the hymn tune as 
"Autumn" in an interview  with the NY Times] did not hear the band stop 
playing and it would appear that    the musicians continued to play even as 
the water enveloped them.  My initial   speculations centered therefore on 
what happens to music as it is played in water.  On a purely physical 
level, of course, it simply stops since the strings would fail to produce 
much of a sound.  On a poetic level, however, the music, once generated in 
water, would continue to reverberate for long periods of time in the more 
sound-efficient medium of water and the music would descend with the    ship 
to the ocean bed and remain there repeating itself over and over until the 
ship returns to the surface.  (Bryars, Gavin, notes to The Sinking of the 
Titanic, Point Music 446-061-2, New York, 1994.)

The resulting music is a type of evocative or speculative program music depicting not an event or a mood but a poetic contemplation on the nature of sound.  Emotion, however, is not lost on the work as the beautiful simplicity of the hymn tune gains added poignancy as Bryars manipulates the sounds around the string sextet to create the illusion of the group playing 
underwater and the sounds of the ship striking an iceberg and sinking.

In these two works of Bryars' intertextuality results in the religious associations of the melodic material.  In the case of The Sinking of the Titanic there are historical associations at a programmatic level as well. 

Intertextuality results in the second of Gyorgy Ligeti's Three Pieces for Two Pianos, "Self-portrait with Reich and Reilly (and Chopin is in the background)" in a much less self-concious manner and is only a result of the processes set up within its musical structure by the composer.  The connections in this work are obvious to anyone who knows who the three composers mentioned in its title are.  Chopin, of course, is recognizable to any lover of "classical" music.  Reich and Reilly, two pioneers of American Minimalism, are more obscure to the average listener and, appropriately, the connection to their work is more subtle than to Chopin's.  The idea behind the piece is that of a broken machine, of "sand in the gears" ( Hausler, Josef [Thomas, John Patrick, trans.] "trompe-l'Oreille, "Allusion, Illusion: concerning some works by Gyrogi Ligeti," notes to Trio fur Violine, Horn und Klavier [Homage a Brahms]/Passacaglia ungherese/Hungarian Rock/ Continuum/ Monument; Selbsportrait; Bewegung" (works by Gyrogi Ligeti), Wergo, wer60110-50, Mainz, 1986.) as it were, resulting from Ligeti's asking the pianists to perform repeated eight-note figures with one hand while depressing certain keys silently with the other.  As the eighth-note figures collide with the silent notes a sense of interruption, of incorrectness" is achieved.  This in turn is aided by the instruction that the pianists should play as quickly as possible yet independently from each other,  bringing to mind the "phasing" techniques of Reilly and, particularly, Reich while remaining harmonically, intellectually and stylistically distinct. 

At the climax of the piece, Ligeti makes reference, at times literal but often simply by allusion, to the finale of Frederic Chopin's Sonata in b-flat minor, op. 35.  The ruling principle in this piece is what Josef Hausler calls the "trompe-l'oreille" effect, which Ligeti himself describes as " the generation of a second order of musical shapes and formal operations; that is, shapes and processes which are not brought forward directly by the players, but emerge through the coming together at an illusory level of processes deferring in configuration and speed." (ibid.)

In Ligeti we therefore see a more subtle level of intertextual discourse 
going on, though Ligeti himself admits that it was with a certain degree of 
humor that he made his references (he says that he "was pulling my own 
leg.").  (ibid.) Indeed wit is a cornerstone of Ligeti's personality and 
approach to music.  "It determines not only his attitude to tradition, but 
also to his own works and discoveries.  He views with humor– often taken to 
degrees of absurdity– even those aspects of his work that have required 
enormous intellectual effort and exertion of imagination to experiment with 
and devise." (ibid.)

Quotation, of course, is not the only way in which intertextual 
relationships occur.  As Hatten points out, in music the "contexts of style 
and strategy [are] regulators of relevant intertextual relationships." 
(Hatten, op. cit., p.70.)  We have seen how style comes into play as a 
regulator of intertextual connections in the Ligeti example, albeit through 
the use of direct allusion if not quotation, while maintaining a strategy 
unique to that particular composer in which any intertextual connotations 
remain mostly in the background.  In the Bryars examples we have seen a more 
conscious use of a strategy for the sake of the expression of a specific idea 
which thus results in stylistic cohesiveness.  In both these cases quotation 
was resorted to, either literally or by allusion.  In the next example 
intertextual connections are made less in the use of literal quotes and more 
in the use of "formulae." 

        Formulae are often useful as parts of musical works, and the 
exploitation of such style structures (strategies which have lost their 
individuality) need not be construed as inter-textual with respect to the 
many  works which contain them.  Put another way, one might consider 
this an "anonymous" intertextuality which is best handled by a theory 
of a common  stylistic  language. (Ibid.)

In "De Stijl" Andriessen sets out to create a picture of the Dutch painter Piet Mondrian by using the writings of one of his contemporaries, M.H.J. Schoemaekers, on "The Principles of Plastic Mathematics," the recollections of one of his friends and a structure based 
on Mondrian's "Composition with Red, Yellow, and Blue" (1927).  This is all done in the context of  funk-like, boogie-woogie sonorities which bring home Andriessen's concern with extremes and bring a wider level of intertextuality to "De Stijl," as they present a "third person" portrait of Piet Mondrian, who famously loved the popular music of his day.  Andriessen treats the funk bass as a passacaglia theme which at times is fragmented and varied as well. 

This obvious stylistic reference to the music of J.S. Bach, one of Andriessen's musical heroes, is further expanded by Andriessen's  use of the B-A-C-H motif, found in many of J.S. Bach's works, as a representation of Schoenmaekers' "cross-figure" theory which influenced Mondrian's work so heavily (this motive is also used in De Materie's second movement, 
"Hadewijch," and the associations there are more overtly religious). 

These are only a handful of examples which support the notion of intertextuality in contemporary music.  In recent years composers have used it purposefully in order to create specific moods or narratives.  Composers have also been unconscious or subversive of such formulae.  The musical landscape remains as fertile as in the nineteenth century when Robert 
Schumann quoted Beethoven to signify his absence from his beloved Clara, perhaps more so.  As composers continue to flourish and more musical techniques and possibilities are explored, as well as newer media for the dissemination and reproduction of music become more accessible and are discovered, the musical landscape promises to flourish as will intertextual 
connections between various works in all the arts. 

Discography

   Andriessen, Louis, De Materie, Asko and Schoenberg ensembles, Netherlands 
Chamber Chorus, Reinbert de Leeuw, conductor.  Nonesuch 79367-2, New York, 
1996

   Bryars, Gavin, Jesus' Blood Never Failed Me Yet, Michael Riesman, 
conductor, Point Music 438-823-2, New York, 1993

   Bryars, Gavin, The Sinking of the Titanic, Gavin Bryars, producer, Point 
Music 446-061-2, New York, 1994

   Hatten, Robert, "The Place of Intertextuality in Music Studies," American 
Journal of Semiotics, vol. 3, no. 4, 1985.

   Ligeti, Gyorgy, "Trio fur Violine, Horn und Klavier/Passacaglia 
ungherese/Hungarian Rock/Continuum/Monument, Selbsportrait, Bewegung," 
various artists, Wergo wer 60100-50, Mainz, 1986
 
 
 

I recently married a wonderful woman in a beautiful and surprisingly glitch-free ceremony.  When my wife and I first started planning our wedding we divvied up the tasks that each of us would handle.  I was not unhappy when she decided to take care of most of the details herself--and left me with a single assignment--the music .  Though my wife is herself a musician, she understands that I am perhaps the most finicky kind of musician of them all--a composer.  And not just a passive, keep-my-opinions-to-myself kind of  composer (do those even exist?), but one with lots of opinions. 
    So my wife put me in charge of the music for both the ceremony and the reception.  That meant finding suitable pieces for the ceremony itself, suggesting songs for us to have our first dance to at the reception and hiring the musicians to play both functions.  The latter was the easy part.  My wife and I both studying in the music department of a major university.  We're surrounded by talented musicians. The music, however took a bit of planning. 
    The reception was the easiest, musically.  We (OK, I did ask her opinion) decided to avoid using a DJ and a cheesy garage band.  Luckily, one of my closest friends is a talented jazz saxophonist and he offered to put a little band together for the reception.  The result was terrific and the choice of songs to play was left almost entirely up to the band.  The only exception being 
the song for our first dance.  For that we asked that they play Gershwin's "Embraceable You." 
    We also decided, pretty early on, to use a string quartet for the ceremony, though this eventually became a quintet.  The ceremony itself used very little music--basically the processional, a song midway through the ceremony, and the recessional.  Prelude and postlude music can (and probably should) be left up to the musicians themselves.  This helps avoid a lot of headaches. 
   So, from my experience, here are a few rules to follow when choosing your wedding music.

  No. 1: Keep it tasteful.  Actually, this is the only rule you really need to follow.  All other rules are simply variations of this rule.  Unless you're a personal friend of  Weird Al Yankovic or sing in a barber shop quartet or all your friends are accordian players, you might want to keep your private tastes private.

  No. 2: Keep it small.  Yes, there is such a thing as too big when it comes to the musicians at a wedding ceremony.  This, of course, is a matter of taste, depending on the pieces chosen, so refer to rule no. 1. The Basie Band is great but 17 musicians in a small hall put a damper on conversation

           No. 3: No Mendelssohn or Wagner!  Queen Victoria’s little tradition has worn thin.  If you don’t want your wedding to seem stuffily conservative, avoid these old wedding war horses.  Trust me.  By the same token, Pachelbel’s Canon in D is out too.  Musicians especially hate that one.  So if you insist on using it expect to pay them extra.  It’s the nice thing to do.

     No. 4: No bad pop music.  I’m sure Bryan Adams’ “Everything I do I do it for You” seems like an appropriate choice for the mid-ceremony song.  It’s not.  It’s corny and trashy.  Then again, so is Schubert’s "Ave Maria” after years of usage.  So, once again, refer to rule no. 1.  We used Schumann’s “Widmung, op. 25, no. 1.”  It’s a song both my wife and I loved and which had a text that was very appropriate to how we felt about each other.  Tastes vary, of course, but if you do a little research you can find plenty of musical gems that would enhance the ceremony and seem fresh and new.

     No. 5: Pick meaningful music.  Choose pieces for your ceremony that hold special meaning to you and/or members of your family.  I’ve already mentioned Schumann’s “Widmung.”  We also used Beethoven’s “Heiliger Dankesang” from the a minor string quartet as the first processional because it is a piece I particularly love and have loved for a long time.  For the bride’s processional (we used separate pieces for the wedding party and for the bride.  This is not necessarily a tradition but it’s a practice that I’ve found worked beautifully, both in our wedding and in other weddings we’ve attended recently) we used the “Air on the G string” from J.S. Bach’s Third Overture.  I chose this as a tribute to my mother because it is her favorite piece of classical music.  For the recessional I arranged a dance from Michael Praetorius’ Terpsichore, a collection of courtly dances from 1612.  Praetorius has been a significant composer to me recently and one of our first dates was hearing a performance of Praetorius’ Christmas music.

     One of my first ideas was to write at least one of the pieces for the ceremony but, in the end,   I decided not to.  Getting married is nervewracking enough without wondering how a piece of new music is going to go over.  I ended up contributing an arrangement rather than an original composition.

    One last rule: Have fun.  I found picking music and bouncing ideas off my wife for pieces to be a very fun process.  Make sure to enjoy it.  After all, you get to listen to a lot of music in the process.  Rules one and five are the most important.  The others really depend on your taste.

If you follow this advice the result will be a beautiful and meaningful ceremony that you will remember your entire lives.
 

ARMANDO BAYOLO, born in Santurce, Puerto Rico, began studying the 
piano at the age of twelve.  He began composing two years later and at 
sixteen went on to study at the Interlochen Arts Academy in Interlochen, 
Michigan, where he first began composition studies in earnest.  He holds 
degrees in composition from the Eastman School of Music (BM, 1995) and Yale University (MM, 1997) and is currently completing a Doctorate of Musical Arts at the University of Michigan.  His music encompasses a wide variety of styles and genres including works for orchestra, voice and chamber ensembles.