ABSTRACT
No musical style begins ab ovo. In the history of Western music, the emergence of a new style is marked by an incessant process of rupture, as each new piece simultaneously situates itself in an already-formed style and tears itself free of that style. The new piece is defined partly in terms of the distance it manages to put between itself and the stylistic type that characterizes it. To this extent, parody is fundamental to all art – indeed to all communication – since each new work of art must in some way follow established precedent. But although this is normally a ‘simple’ dialectical process, in that the new piece – the new style – is born from the womb of one immediately preceding it, this is not always the case. Sometimes the new piece will appropriate features of styles to which it is related only distantly or not at all. It is these stylistic leaps, the unheralded appearance of atavistic or exogenous traits as part of a new art work, that dramatically attract attention to themselves and raise questions that call for a systematic answer. The simplest and most basic of these questions is: What does the incorporation of these foreign elements mean?
