The Uses and Reuses of Music: Polyphonic Interrelationships or Intertextuality in the Music of T.L. de Victoria

The transfer of an entire block of polyphony, or portions of a polyphonic complex, from one composition to another is a standard feature of those sixteenth-century and earlier works that are based on pre-existent polyphonic compositions. Transfers of this type were long thought to be found only in masses based on pre-existent motets or other polyphonic compositions, and the musicological literature of the past half century is replete with studies detailing the relationship between the earlier work and the new one. For many years, 'parody' was the term used to describe the transfer process. ⁸⁰ Recently, however, it has been shown that this kind of transfer is also used extensively in Lasso's magnificats and the terms 'imitation' and/or 'intertextuality' have been used to describe the process and to distinguish it from parody. ⁸¹