If Avant-Garde compositions are pure chaos, then the New-Romantic compositions are Organized Chaos.

There’s an old saying with its roots in the Bible that says “Everything Old is New Again”. That mantra is the Raison d’Etre and the Modus Operandi for the New-Romantic composers. In essence, what these composers do is they take a pre-existing composition or composing style, and make it their own, reshape it and adapt it to fit the times. It’s not like this kind of thing hasn’t been done in the past. On the contrary, it’s actually been done for hundreds of years now. But what sets how it was done in the past and how it’s done now is that the transformations is more as a homage than it is a theft. Not to say that people in the past didn’t do simple homages back when, but I’m getting off topic. Again.

There are three different types of borrowing that composers can choose from: Imitation, Emulation, and Quotation. What I will try to do (emphasis on the word “try”) is define each one in the context of this music style and give examples as to what I’m talking about.

To Imitate is to Take or Follow as a model or example. To Imitate in music, meanwhile, is for one composer to do that with another composer (It’s often considered cheating or lazy to do it with your own compositions).

It’s good for practice for newer composers to write in the style of old composers in order to practice for their own compositions, but the more seasoned composers do this sort of thing all the time as well. Maurice Ravel, for one, imitated Claude Debussy's style so well, the two composers can hardly be told apart if one was completely unfamiliar with their respective styles.

For example, here is Maurice Ravel’s Jeux d’Eau:

And here’s Claude Debussy’s 1ere Abaresque:

As you can tell, there are as many similarities between the two men as there are differences.

There also exists, in music, a device known as parody.

No. Not THAT kind of parody.

In this case, we are referring to the reworking of one composition into another. Doing so was a common affair during the Renaissance. For example, here’s the 15th century pop hit sweeping Enlightenment France, Guillaume Du Fay’s Se la face ay pale.

And not 15 years later, Du Fay worked that same secular tune and made...this:

Now you’re probably wondering to yourself: what does any of this have to do with the Avant Garde? The answer: it has everything to do with the Avant Garde. The point of the introductionary section is to show that this sort of thing is universal and has been happening in varying degrees for as long as there was music. Now, let’s get into some of the more gritty stuff.

To emulate is to copy or imitate a style from the past. The go-to examples for this are the “Neo” genres. Neoclassicism, Neobaroquism, Neoseralism, you name it. A common example is Stravinsky’s Pulcinella, written in the style of the Italian Opera Buffa that, with minute differences, actually sound as though it was lifted straight out of the 18th century.

(Incidentally, one Dennys commercial actually went the extra mile and arranged an excerpt of the overture for an actual baroque ensemble. If you can stand horrible breakfast puns, it’s worth a listen.)

But now, let’s move on to some actual Avant Garde: John Adams. Best known, of course, for his quasi-minimalist opera Nixon in China, John Adams is a decidedly modern composer known for his drive, his patterns, and the occasional habit to write the same piece over and over again.

I'm not kidding. Just listen to the beginning of each of these

But for this case, we’ll focus on the latter piece, Grand Pianola Music. It’s easy to assume that the piece is meant to emulate a Pianola, a Player Piano. But further (read: actual) listening to the piece shows the roots run much deeper than that. Absolutely, the pianola influences are there to some degree (such as the mechanized feeling of the piece and other effects sprinkled about) but it seems to emulate more so the American Vernacular. In this case, popular music.

Adams said he got the inspiration for this piece while driving on the highway. Could this piece then be emulating life on the open road? The American Dream? The very essence of the Land of the Free and the Home of the Brave? Of am I just overthinking this? Anyway, Grand Pianola Music is still a fun and moving ride.

Now comes the most notable portion of the Great Imitators: Quotations. This one’s straight forward: it’s taking part of someone else’s work, inserting it into yours, and making something out of it. I feel as though I have talked enough about non Avant-Garde material, so I’ll be focusing most of the rest of the conversation on those pieces. Starting with what is indeed a devilish quartet.

Those who have scene The Exorcist have heard the beginning of George Crumb’s string quartet Black Angels. Written on commision while at the University of Michigan in 1971, it was written primarily to jump on the bandwagon of Electronic Music (more on that later). It was mostly a commentary on the turmoil surrounding religion during the time. The 1st violin, uncoincidentally, portrayed Satan while the Cello was the voice of God.

What follows is a quartet that sounds less like Mozart or Haydn and more like Penderecki's Threnody for the Victims of Hiroshima. And that connection is entirely intentional, using similar techniques and the fact that each part has a different Threnody within it. Additionally, constant references to Satan in music sprout up throughout the piece, with various instances of the Diabolis in Musica (in layman's term, a Tritone) and quotations from the Dies Irae, Franz Schubert’s String Quartet No. 14 (Death and the Maiden) and Tartini’s infamous Devil’s Trill Sonata. It’s not ridiculously blatant like other works there, but it’s still drilled in enough to be worth talking about. And of course, it’s far from the only piece to do this sort of thing.

Fredric Rzewski’s powerhouse piano piece The People United Will Never Be Defeated is something of a hybrid composition. A theme and variations piece, it takes the socialist Chilean folk song of the same name (so yes, if it sounds Russian, chances are it’s entirely intentional) and takes it through 39 different variations so virtuosic, it makes Paganini’s Caprices in A Minor look like something out of the Suzuki String Book.

Perhaps I use quotation in the loosest sense of the words here. Theme and Variations often takes someone else’s theme and shapes it to their will, like Ralph Vaughan Williams did in Fantasia on a Theme by Thomas Tallis, or more famously, Benjamin Britten did with his Young Person’s Guide to the Orchestra. Regardless, I said the quotation was making something out of it, and I’ll be darned if that’s not the case here.

The piece is divided into 36 parts and a cadenza, bookended (in a nod to Bach’s Goldberg Variations) by the original theme. What makes this piece so unique is that it starts out entirely Neoromantic, as though it were a piano piece of Mussorgsky or Brahms. But once one gets into the variations, it’s a different story. The Wikipedia article where I got all this information lists by name pandiatonic tonality, modal writing, and serialism within this virtual smorgasbord. Additionally, quotations from other leftist tunes like “Bandiera Rossa”

and Bertolt Bretch-Hanns Eisler’s “Solidarity Song”

can also be heard within. So yes: The People United Will Never Be Defeated is as virtuosic and creative as it is left.

So, in conclusion: musical borrowing is a long time endeavor. It has been done as long as people have written music, though it has only recently truly come into practice in the last century. You know, it’s fun to hear snippets of your favorite song, is it not?

You never talked about Charles Ives.

...Uh, well then.