ABSTRACT
Borrowing is probably almost as old as music itself, and Western notated music is replete with examples from every time period.1 Yet borrowing holds a special place in music written before 1600. Borrowed material is the foundation for much Western sacred music before that date and was the very fons et origo of Western polyphony itself. This collection of essays focuses on an era of especially intense interest in borrowed material, the fifteenth-and sixteenth centuries (called here the Renaissance for the sake of convenience). For most sixteenth-century and many fifteenth-century masses, for example, a composer started with the choice of a model before anything else. The name of the model was sometimes proclaimed in the title of the mass (a more common occurrence the later we get in the Renaissance), while the name of the borrowed material might be given in one or more of the voice parts. At times the borrowed material was visibly different in dramatic ways from its surroundings-a short tune in long note values with many ligatures, accompanied by complex canonic instructions. Whole series of works were generated by especially famous models-L’homme armé, Fortuna desperata, Fors seulement, to name just a few-and an element of competition seems at play in many of these reworkings. It is the very obviousness of compositional interest in preexistent material that makes this time seem a heyday of borrowing.
