Unthinkable Things #10: Musical originality and collaboration through the ages

In the 16th century, it was almost unthinkable for church composers to write entirely original music.

Early 16th century manuscript of Missa de Beata Virgine by Josquin des Prez (Rome, Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana, MS Cappella Sistina 45, folios 1v-2r, via Wikimedia Commons)

OK, so this is might appear to be one of the more wilfully obscure of our "unthinkable things", but there is a serious point here, so bear with us.

The idea of more than one voice sounding at once, which is central to the development of western musical history, started from the premise of embellishing Gregorian Chant. Although not universal, the idea that complex musical forms were in some ways decorations that owed their true structure and essence to raw materials sanctified by time and use was a hard one for composers to shake off.

The principle of working second-hand material into music (and especially religious music) actually reached its zenith in the work of Palestrina and his contemporaries during the Renaissance, at a time when culture was supposed to be throwing off its mediaeval shackles. (This might be through cantus firmus, where typically the tenor voice part is taken in full from an earlier source (often plainchant); paraphrase, where the borrowed material is both varied and spread around different voices or parody, where whole polyphonic chunks of earlier works, often masses, are worked into the new composition.)

There's a popular cult of the individual genius that surrounds classical music, thanks largely to the colourful personas of the Romantic 19th century (think Beethoven struggling alone against destiny). But that perception is in danger of blinding us to the fact that, if we take the long view of the history of classical music, collaborative composition has rarely been far from the mainstream. Even in the 18th and 19th centuries - the high watermark of belief in the primacy of originality - the principle was re-asserted through the form of variations and through arrangement and orchestration. More recently, in the twentieth century, composers like Stravinsky acknowledged their debt to tradition by quotation, or even as in the case of Stravinsky's ballet Pulcinella, by full-scale recomposition.

The point here is that while jazz, blues and latterly sample-based dub or electronic music have pioneered new forms of collaboration, western music has always been the object of a tussle between building on tradition and the expression of novelty. And borrowing and stealing material has always been central to that tussle. As we are currently exploring on this blog, digital communications technology facilitates (and sometimes forces) innovations around both intellectual property and models for collaboration, far beyond the field of music, but the aesthetic foundations for those innovations are deep and ancient.