ABSTRACT
In two earlier studies of motivic allusion in the fifteenth century, I found it useful to describe allusionwhether literary or musical-as a rhetorical technique.1 In so doing I attempted to draw parallels between the practices long documented in poetry and oratory and those evident in music. More recently, in studies of nineteenth-century repertoires, I argue that Romantic theories of symbols and symbolization had supplanted rhetoric as a means of theorizing the same kinds of motivic references. In both centuries it was common for borrowed ideas to be varied. As Howard Brown explained it for music, when chanson composers emulated each other, earlier material was not incorporated into a new context literally, but was “reshaped and rearranged into new musical phrases.”2 This is precisely the formula for citing earlier works that the humanist Gasparino Barzizza prescribed in the early fifteenth century: “all good literary imitation comes from adding, subtracting, altering, transferring, or renewing.”3 In the nineteenth century composers had incentive to disguise musical debts both because the demands for artistic originality required it and because artistic symbols needed to veil their references in order for the references to achieve the status of symbols.4
