Modelling.

The use of an existing piece of music as a model or pattern for a new work, in whole or in part. Modelling may involve assuming the existing work's structure, incorporating part of its melodic or rhythmic material, imitating its form or procedures, or following its example in some other way. Other types of Borrowing in music, such as Quotation, Paraphrase, parody (see Parody (i)) or Allusion, are often evident in instances of modelling, but modelling implies a deeper relationship of imitation or emulation.

Modelling generally involves works of the same genre (e.g. one symphonic movement modelled on another) or the same texture (a polyphonic mass cycle based on a polyphonic chanson), but modelling across genres, textures or styles also occurs and can be of particular interest. The relationship between new work and model is often ambivalent, with some elements borrowed or echoed explicitly and others suppressed or transformed almost beyond recognition. The similarities between the new work and the older one draw attention to the relationship, but the differences may be equally significant. Such ambivalence has been seen as characteristic of emulation – the attempt to equal or surpass another artist's achievement.

Scholarly studies seeking to establish that one work is modelled on another typically stress the similarities when attempting to prove a relationship and discuss both similarities and differences in interpreting its significance. Even when the similarity is strong, it is often difficult to know how far one work has served as a model for another (see Borrowing, §1). For early music, the chronology can be uncertain; some scholars of medieval and Renaissance music have adopted the term Intertextuality to describe close relationships between pieces when it is not clear which is earlier or whether both were modelled on a work now lost or unknown. In any period, the range of models a composer drew on may have been wider than the currently known repertory. Claims of modelling may have to be revised when more of the music known to the composer is studied; for example, elements in Mozart's early quartets long thought to have been modelled on Haydn have since been shown to be part of a broader Viennese tradition, and one early quartet is likely to have been modelled on Ordonez (Brown, 1992).

In the Western tradition, composers have used modelling in four main ways:

1. to learn how to compose in a certain style or genre, by imitating a work in that style or genre;
2. to imitate a particularly successful or exemplary work;
3. to emulate, compete with, pay homage to or comment on the work of another composer; or
4. to allude to a well-known work and thus convey meaning.These circumstances overlap, and two or more may be present at once. The first two are probably as old as music itself, for all music is based on the improviser's or composer's experience of other music and in a broad sense uses modelling. The last two require a tradition that esteems composers and individual works, and they add levels of interpretation and signification not present in the first two.

Examples of the first motivation for modelling – learning a style or genre through imitation – can be found in the early works of most composers: Monteverdi, for example, based early madrigals (or parts of them) on madrigals by Luzzaschi, Marenzio and Wert, and Stravinsky's early Piano Sonata in F minor drew on sonatas by Tchaikovsky, Glazunov and Skryabin. Writings on music as far back as Musica enchiriadis (c850–900) and Guido of Arezzo's Micrologus (1026–32) include works intended as models for how to improvise or compose in a particular style. Many experienced composers undertaking a new genre have also used models; the sections of Mozart's Requiem that he lived to complete are remarkably similar to those of Michael Haydn's Requiem in C minor (1771) in instrumentation, distribution of chorus and solos, texture, structure, text-setting, harmonic plan and other aspects of technique and style, indicating that Mozart modelled his work on that of his former Salzburg colleague.

The second motivation for modelling – imitation of an exemplary work – is evident in the reworking of popular chansons in the Renaissance, either in new vocal or instrumental versions or in imitation masses (see Borrowing, §§5 and 7). Monteverdi's laments and Handel's Messiah served as models for many successors, as did Haydn's Creation, Beethoven's Ninth Symphony and Stravinsky's Rite of Spring. In popular traditions, an especially successful work provokes imitators; for example, the Beatles' album Sergeant Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band inspired responses ranging from the Rolling Stones' Their Satanic Majesties' Request to a series of concept albums by the Who, Pink Floyd and many others.

Thirdly, composers often honour, compete with, comment on or respond to their predecessors or peers by using their works as models. Machaut used isorhythmic motets by Vitry in this way, borrowing talea, color or structural plan while expanding on or otherwise outdoing his model; these works may have intertwined homage and rivalry in ways comparable to poetic contests among medieval poets. The reworking of polyphonic models in the Renaissance has been linked to emulation, competition and homage through the concept of imitatio, borrowed from rhetoric (see Rhetoric and music, §I). Sometimes a composer invokes a model yet seeks to distance his new work from it; for example, Debussy's Pelléas et Mélisande is modelled on Wagner's Tristan und Isolde and can be read as a commentary on or critique of it, with frequent references framed by a different aesthetic viewpoint. Several studies of 19th- and 20th-century composers have cast the use of an older composer's work as a model in the mould of Harold Bloom's theory of ‘the anxiety of influence’ (see Borrowing, §11): examples include Beethoven's reliance on Mozart's String Quartet in A major k464 for his own early A major and late A minor quartets, Brahms's use of Chopin models for piano works, and Bartók's modelling of the second movement of his Piano Concerto no.3 on the third movement of Beethoven's Quartet in A minor op.132.

The use of modelling as a form of allusion to convey meaning overlaps with the previous two categories. In the last example, the Beethoven quartet movement, headed ‘Heiliger Dankgesang eines Genesenen an die Gottheit’, was written after Beethoven's recovery from a serious illness; the link to Bartók's own circumstances – temporarily improved after three years of being ill from the disease that was soon to end his life – is apparent, making the evocation hauntingly meaningful. The gesture of moving from darkness to light near the opening of Haydn's Creation inspired many echoes in both vocal and instrumental music, including Beethoven's Symphony no.5 and Brahms's German Requiem. Film composers often use specific works as models in order to evoke similar associations; for example, in his music for the Star Wars films, John Williams used as models Holst's The Planets (the most prominent orchestral depiction of space) and Wagner's Der Ring des Nibelungen, whose system of leitmotifs linking four separate operas Williams imitated to suggest an epic on a similar scale spread over a series of films.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

H. Bloom: The Anxiety of Influence: a Theory of Poetry (Oxford, 1973)

C. Abbate: ‘Tristan in the Composition of Pelléas’, 19CM, v (1981–2), 117–41

H.M. Brown: ‘Emulation, Competition, and Homage: Imitation and Theories of Imitation in the Renaissance’, JAMS, xxxv (1982), 1–48

D. Leech-Wilkinson: ‘Related Motets from Fourteenth-Century France’, PRMA, cix (1982–3), 1–22

J.T. Poland: ‘Michael Haydn and Mozart: Two Requiem Settings’, American Choral Review, xxix/1 (1987), 3–14

G. Tomlinson: Monteverdi and the End of the Renaissance (Berkeley, 1987)

J.N. Straus: Remaking the Past: Musical Modernism and the Influence of the Tonal Traditions (Cambridge, MA, 1990)

K. Korsyn: ‘Towards a New Poetics of Musical Influence’, MAn, x (1991), 3–72

A.P. Brown: ‘Haydn and Mozart's 1773 Stay in Vienna: Weeding a Musicological Garden’, JM, x (1992), 192–230

J. Yudkin: ‘Beethoven's Mozart Quartet’, JAMS, xlv (1992), 30–74

A.P. Brown: ‘The Creation and The Seasons: some Allusions, Quotations, and Models from Handel to Mendelssohn’, CMc, no.51 (1993), 26–58

J.P. Burkholder: All Made of Tunes: Charles Ives and the Uses of Musical Borrowing (New Haven, CT, 1995)

R. Taruskin: Stravinsky and the Russian Traditions: a Biography of the Works through ‘Mavra’ (Berkeley, 1996)

For further bibliography see Borrowing.

J. PETER BURKHOLDER