Musical Borrowing - an Annotated BibliographyThis bibliography represents the current stage of an ongoing project whose ultimate aim is to create a comprehensive, indexed, and annotated bibliography of published materials and theses relating to the use of existing music in the tradition of Western music.
This is a wide field, embracing borrowing, transcription, variations, quotation, cantus firmus technique, paraphrase, imitation/parody, modeling, allusion, and other ways to rework existing music, from troping and organum to collage and electronic manipulation. The number of books, articles, and other published sources that treat these issues is staggering. We have chosen to include only items that consider the reworking of one or more particular musical works in new compositions (as opposed to general stylistic allusion or resemblance) and to exclude sources that do no more than mention in passing the relationship of a new work to an existing one. We also include items that consider some aspect of borrowing as a whole, that refute claims of borrowing, or that assemble lists of borrowings, whether or not they discuss individual works in detail. Despite these limitations, the scope of the project is still vast; in its current state, the bibliography has more than 1850 items, 1025 of them annotated. Indeed, part of our intent is to demonstrate how pervasive such borrowing and reworking have been throughout our musical tradition by bringing together all the instances and all the scholarship on the subject we can find.