2020 Volume 66 Issue 1 Pages 1-15
This paper examines how collage in music was comprehended in an academic field and area of
musical practice by elucidating its aspects from the 1970s commentaries on G. Mahler’s quotations. Musical collage at present is mainly considered as one of the significant compositional techniques in contemporary music from the late twentieth century onwards. It being perceived as a subordinate concept of borrowing with a long-standing history, previous studies have intensely focused on its technical side. Although the precedent studies in relation to intertextuality or semiotics suggest meaningful methods of structural analysis, its cultural and historical contexts are evidently overlooked.
Bearing the aforementioned methodological problem in mind, this paper treats secondary sources of historiography used for deep understanding of compositional technique as primary sources to present aesthetics of that time. This paper takes a method of tracing the history of the word collage, exploring the arguments on Mahler’s quotation made by two prominent musicologists, W. Dömling and T. Kneif, and their contemporary composer G. Ligeti in the 1970s. Their arguments verified multifaceted perspectives of formalism, semantics, or the function of social criticism respectively. The underlying basis of the diverse views is clarified as follows: 1）As other contemporary studies that aimed for theorization of musical collage did, those diverse perspectives were derived from the premise that musical collage is intimately bound up with collage practice in the plastic art and 2）in an academic field, internal structure or acoustic recognition was the core of their discussion, meanwhile in the field of music practice, a social and cultural situation surrounded by the composer was incorporated in musical collage. This study not only sheds new light on a further understanding of musical collage in its early reception but provides the groundwork for future studies on its cultural meaning in the 1970s.
