A term borrowed from the visual arts, where it refers to the act of pasting diverse objects, fragments or clippings on to a background, or to the work of art that results. Musical collage is the juxtaposition of multiple quotations, styles or textures so that each element maintains its individuality and the elements are perceived as excerpted from many sources and arranged together, rather than sharing common origins. Other words used for this effect include ‘montage’, ‘assemblage’ and ‘bricolage’. The term ‘collage’ has been applied to music with a variety of meanings, mostly to describe 20th-century works that borrow musical material from multiple sources.
Collage is distinct from Quodlibet, Medley, Potpourri, Centonization and other traditional procedures in that the diverse elements do not fit smoothly together. The wit of a quodlibet derives in large part from the incongruity of hearing in smooth counterpoint or quick succession tunes that one would not have thought to link together, and the pleasure of a medley lies in the smooth joining of familiar melodies that seem to belong together. Elements in a collage often differ in key, timbre, texture, metre or tempo, and lack of fit is an important factor in preserving the individuality of each and conveying the impression of a diverse assemblage.
Rare precedents for collage can be found in music before 1900. The second movement of Biber's programmatic ensemble sonata Battalia (1673) represents soldiers before a battle by means of a quodlibet of eight folksongs in five different keys, which enter at different times and clash in casual dissonance. The Act 1 finale of Mozart's Don Giovanni (1787) has three onstage bands playing a minuet, contredanse and waltz simultaneously. Strauss suggested reminiscence in Ein Heldenleben (1897–8) by interweaving in counterpoint recollections of themes from his own works. Passages in Mahler's symphonies juxtapose references to folksongs, dances, marches and other popular genres, which some critics have described as collage. In each example, the combination of simultaneous yet distinct streams of music is used to suggest several simultaneous events, whether in real life, imagination or memory.
The first fully developed collages occur in a handful of works by Charles Ives (although he did not use the term). Typically, there is a primary musical layer, often based on borrowed material, to which are added fragments and variants of as many as two dozen other tunes, each linked to the primary layer or to each other through melodic or rhythmic resemblance, similarity of genre or character or extra-musical association. The effect resembles the involuntary leaps of memory or dreams, as one thought gives rise to another through association. It is perfectly suited to pieces based on remembered or imagined events, such as the barn dance in Washington's Birthday (c1915–17) and the public holiday celebration in The Fourth of July (c1914–18), the dream scenarios of Putnam's Camp (c1914–20, the second movement of Three Places in New England) and, in the Fourth Symphony, the second movement (c1916–23) and the transcendent spiritual experience of the finale (c1915–24).
Although most of Ives's collages were first performed and published between 1927 and 1937, they remained without successors until the 1950s and 1960s, when they had become more widely known. By that time other influences were also in play, including dadaist mixtures of divergent styles or chance events, a rising interest in musical quotation and the new technology of tape recording. Musique concrète – composed by combining existing sounds on tape through splicing and dubbing (see Electro-acoustic music) – is in its procedures an almost exact parallel to collage in the visual arts; when the sound sources include recorded music, as in Cage's Imaginary Landscape no. 5 (1952) and Stockhausen's Gesang der Jünglinge (1955–6), the effect can be characterized as musical collage.
Bernd Alois Zimmermann composed several works that use collage, a term he did much to popularize. His opera Die Soldaten (1957–65) uses superimposed streams of music from diverse historical periods, quoting jazz, Bach chorales and Gregorian chant, to suggest the simultaneity of past, present and future. His orchestral Musique pour les soupers du roi Ubu (1962–6) is composed entirely of borrowed material, with familiar themes from Baroque and contemporary music appearing amid Renaissance dances. George Rochberg sought to convey ‘the many-layered density of human existence’ in Contra mortem et tempus and Music for the Magic Theater (both 1965) by juxtaposing his own music with material quoted or derived from earlier composers. Stockhausen sought to represent the coming together of all people in universal harmony by combining music from around the world in Telemusik (1966) and Hymnen (1966–7). But not all works from the 1960s and later that use borrowed material can be said to use collage; those that draw on relatively few sources, or carefully integrate the borrowed material into a new context, lack the sense of multiple disparate elements that characterizes collage (see Borrowing, §13).
The best known collage, and perhaps the most complex, is the third movement of Berio's Sinfonia (1968–9). Ironically, Berio resisted the term ‘collage’ for this work, preferring to describe the multiple quotations as markers for various points in the history of music. The movement presents the entire third movement of Mahler's Second Symphony, with some parts of the texture and several whole passages deleted or modified, and overlays it with direct or altered quotations from over 100 musical works across a wide range of epochs and styles from Bach to Boulez, Stockhausen, Globokar and Berio himself. Each quotation is associated with the Mahler work or with the texts that are spoken or sung over the music, resulting in a vast, dream-like network of interconnected literary and musical ideas. The main text is Samuel Beckett's The Unnamable, a first-person narrative of the time after death, suggesting that the movement represents a post-mortem stream-of-consciousness undergoing progressive decay.
While Ives and Berio used collage with programmatic implications, it has also been used to deconstruct traditional assumptions about music. Kagel's Ludwig van (1969–70) extracts individual lines from Beethoven's works and reassembles them in new temporal combinations, destroying their original syntax and raising questions about composition, authorship, style, expression, musical continuity and the musical work itself. Cage's HPSCHD (1967–9), composed in collaboration with Lejaren Hiller, includes a collage of fragments drawn from Mozart, Beethoven, Chopin, Schumann, Gottschalk, Busoni, Cage and Hiller and arranged for seven harpsichord soloists using chance operations; these seven solos are played simultaneously with tape music, coloured lights, slides and film to create a multimedia collective happening in which individual lines and personalities are subsumed. His Europeras 1 & 2 (1987) combine, through chance procedures, elements from a wide variety of European operas performed by soloists without a conductor, resulting in an indeterminate collage that provides a witty commentary on the genre of opera by avoiding all intentional musical or dramatic effects.
Other composers to use collage include R. Murray Schafer, Arvo Pärt, Helmut Lachenmann, Frank Zappa, Laurie Anderson and John Zorn. Collage also appears in popular music, particularly since the advent of digital sampling. Night of the Living Baseheads (1988) by the rap group Public Enemy includes over 30 samples of music, speech or sounds, each of which adds to the song's message through the associations it evokes. Here, and in other songs, the many and rapid references to other music suggest the fast pace and competing voices of contemporary society.
MGG2 (S. Fricke)
A. Skrzynska and others: ‘Collage w muzyce’, Forum, x (1971), 1–39
M. Tibbe: ‘Musik in Musik: Collagetechnik und Zitierverfahren’, Musica, xxv (1971), 562–3
E. Budde: ‘Zitat, Collage, Montage’; ‘Zum dritten Satz der Sinfonia von Luciano Berio’, Die Musik der sechziger Jahre, ed. R. Stephan (Mainz, 1972), 26–38; 128–44
W. Dömling: ‘Collage und Kontinuum: Bemerkungen zu Gustav Mahler und Richard Strauss’, NZM, Jg.133 (1972), 131–4
T. Kneif: ‘Collage oder Naturalismus?: Anmerkungen zu Mahlers “Nachtmusik I”’, NZM, Jg.134 (1973), 623–8
Z. Lissa: ‘Historical Awareness of Music and its Role in Present-Day Musical Culture’, IRASM, iv (1973), 17–32
G.W. Flynn: ‘Listening to Berio's Music’, MQ, lxi (1975), 388–421
P. Altmann: Sinfonia von Luciano Berio: eine analytische Studie (Vienna, 1977)
B. Sonntag: Untersuchungen zur Collagetechnik in der Musik des 20. Jahrhunderts (Regensburg, 1977)
D. Osmond-Smith: ‘From Myth to Music: Levi-Strauss's Mythologiques and Berio's Sinfonia’, MQ, lxvii (1981), 230–60
M. Hicks: ‘Text, Music, and Meaning in the Third Movement of Luciano Berio's Sinfonia’, PNM, xx (1981–2), 199–224
S. Husarik: ‘John Cage and Lejaren Hiller: HPSCHD, 1969’, American Music, i/2 (1983), 1–21
C. Reinecke: Montage und Collage in der Tonbandsmusik bei besonderer Berücksichtigung des Horspiels: eine typologische Betrachtung (diss., U. of Hamburg, 1986)
H. Danuser: ‘Musikalische Zitat- und Collageverfahren im Lichte der (Post)Moderne-Diskussion’, Bayerische Akademie der Schönen Kunste: Jahrbuch, iv (1990), 395–409
L.D. Kuhn: John Cage's Europeras 1 & 2: the Musical Means of Revolution (diss., U. of California, Los Angeles, 1992)
F. Escal: ‘La technique du collage dans Ludwig van de Mauricio Kagel’, Montages/Collages: Pau 1993, 51–7
G. Watkins: Pyramids at the Louvre: Music, Culture, and Collage from Stravinsky to the Postmodernists (Cambridge, MA, 1994)
J.P. Burkholder: All Made of Tunes: Charles Ives and the Uses of Musical Borrowing (New Haven, CT, 1995)
For further bibliography see Borrowing.
J. PETER BURKHOLDER