No. 4 (2004): Influences/Intertextuality in Music

When opting for Influences / Intertextuality in Music as a main theme of this issue we did not wish to suggest that those two notions should necessarily be interpreted as a pair of contrasts. Rather, it was our intention to invite the authors to re-examine their relations. There will always be, of course, different levels of influences one work exerts on another and intertextuality could be percieved as one of them. It is true that from the recent past some theoreticians of literature, (e.g., R. Wellek, J. Culler), criticized the notion of influences as positivistically based, pledging to overcome it by applicating an intertextual approach to the work of art (J. Kristeva, J. Culler), from which it would follow that the two notions mutually exclude one another. We are not interested here in the implications of that revolution in theory that established the “hegemony” of the text, on the problematic of the “creative subject”, but we wish to consider the possibilities of introducing new ideas about influences into musicology. One among such innovations is the “antithetical criticism” of H. Bloom in which the ideas from the field of psychoanalysis and an unorthodox understanding of intertextuality are united in an original way. Although the results of the attempts to implement that theory in music have not been entirely convincing thus far, they offer an empirical basis for new research.
The study of influences in different areas of creativity is closely linked to the investigations on the (usually ambivalent) relations of artists towards the tradition and, in a wider sense, to the past. Although on one level of observation every work is a microcosmos – a world of itself – it is unimaginable without its links with the tradition and its derivations of varying transparencies to specific earlier works. As J. Kristeva wrote down, “No text is independent from another text”, so indeed it is from his creative ancestors
that an artist gets necessary impetus for his own creative work. Every composer probably feels the weight of the master-works of the past that can be felt as a threat to the affirmation of his/her own expression. That influences are believed to be “dangerous” goes as far back as medieval writers’ descriptions of “a cosmic power over others” as “influentia” designated the actions of stars and their effects on people on earth.
The American literary criticism of the 1960s differentiated the notion of influences from those of similarity, analogy, borrowing, imitation, plagiarism, etc. Different levels of influences can be observed, from conscious imitation to unconscious shaping of an idea, sound, or image, sometimes with a borrowing of a tiny detail, but a critic should be careful not to ascribe to influences something that could be a simple encounter or an affinity (C. Pichois). Different levels of influences could be defined as direct emulation, recontextualisation and analytic misreading (J. Samson), and one could also detect direct and indirect influences (U. Weißstein, J. Strelka), negative influences (A. Balakian), “creative treason” (R. Escarpit), and so on. All such theoretical discussions should be tested on concrete works and in doing that the analyst should research what the author made with the influences he received, how he transformed them and made them to serve his own aims.
The authors represented in this issue’s main theme have approached the phenomenon in very different ways, whether explicitly and implicitly or varying degrees in between. Themes such as the presence of the fragments of music of the past in new music, influences that were received and transformed by individual composers, and a musical culture lending from one field and taken to another, have attracted them most.