Recycling as creation in postmodern music

: Recycling music from the past has a long history and takes many forms: transcription, paraphrase, parody, simple allusion, quoting, sampling, borrowing, rewriting, recomposing... These practices have changed considerably with the emergence of the postmodern paradigm. Rewriting musical works may now be seen as a way of expressing a creativity relegated to distortions and comments on “found objects”. Postmodern composers thus produce infinitely recyclable and adjustable artifacts, perfectly suited to wander the planetary networks and nourish the soundscapes of the future virtual universes set to supplant, if not to become, the real world.

fetishize the avant-garde, giving priority to the search for novelty and originality.The modern approach generally involves an uncompromising attitude, ascetic, purist and elitist, expressed in a preference for complexity, abstract art and atonal music.
Postmoderns, on the other hand, see history as a rather non-linear process, whose evolution may come to an end.They denounce the avant-garde and turn to the past, which they regard with a mix of nostalgia and irony.This approach is associated with a hedonistic, permissive attitude and with a preference for simplicity and repetitiveness, reflecting a concern for accessibility.In art, it involves the proliferation of ˮneoˮ movements, an eclecticism favoring a melting pot of styles, and the flourishing of recycling practices.

Postmodern recycling of "found objects"
The treatment, function and meaning given to musical quotations have considerably evolved from the first Middle Ages practices of borrowing to the most sophisticated forms of intertextuality explored by twentieth-and twenty-firstcentury composers.Table 2 compares three different approaches on this matter, which correspond to the pre-modern, modern and postmodern periods.Read vertically, it highlights the coherence of each of these three approaches.Read horizontally, it reveals a historical evolution discernible in each of the particular aspects examined.This paper focus on the postmodern period.The analogy suggested by the word "recycling" between these practices and the reuse of household waste, shocking as it may seem, is assumed by certain composers.Ligeti, who describes his opera Le Grand Macabre as a ˮpot au feu that comes out of a dustbin5 " (Balász 1990, 30), provides this original 'recipe': You take a piece of foie gras, drop it on a carpet and trample it until it disappears, that's how I use the history of music and, above all, the history of opera (Samuel, 1981, 25).
In the same vein, one of the most representative postmodern composers, John Adams (1999), claims as source of inspiration a ˮbig dustbinˮ ready to receive all the music in the world.Well before him, John Cage -a postmodern in his own wayhad randomly assembled around a hundred scraps of magnetic tape that had already been recorded and abandoned, according to legend, in a dustbin.This was to be his first composition of electronic music, Williams Mix (1952).
As suggested by this kind of approach, recycling found musical objects goes hand in hand with another postmodern trend: putting together disparate fragments.This is for example the case with Mauricio Kagel's soundtrack of the film Ludwig van (a collage of Beethoven excerpts) and with Pierre Henry's Tenth Symphony and its latter "remix", entirely cobbled together from extracts of Beethoven's nine symphonies.This technique is crucial for the musicians of the electronic scene, who remix in an eclectic spirit jazz, rock, pop, techno or cartoon soundtracks, as well as samplings of traditional, classical and contemporary music.
One can speak of a postmodern aesthetic of recycling, the prophet of which is Marcel Duchamp, father of the concept of the objet trouvé and inspirer of many experimental projects, both in music and visual arts 6 .Following his example of putting a moustache on the Mona Lisa, a number of composers extensively quotenot necessarily in a provocative way -works from the Baroque, Classical or Romantic repertoire.Cage, who assumes the legacy of Duchamp and Satie, illustrates in his Europeras cycle a subversive re-use of musical heritage: he entrusts a computer with the task of randomly superimposing several arias from the Romantic repertoire and their accompaniments considered as interchangeable.
If musical recycling dates back to the Middle Ages borrowing techniques that enabled, for example, a secular chanson to fill the role of cantus firmus in a work of sacred music, in the twentieth century, and especially after 1960, this practice changed in nature.Like Picasso, Magritte or Warhol, postmodern composers came to regard works from the past as "found objects" that they could interpret and distort as they wished.Berio (1983, 146) thus defines the third movement of his Sinfonia as a ˮmeditation on a Mahlerian 'found object'ˮ (the Scherzo of the Second Symphony), while Ligeti's introduces in his opera Le Grand Macabre ˮa sort of pastiches similar to the found objects of Pop-artˮ (Samuel 1981, 25),

Integral rewriting
The postmodern composers give new life and dignity to "minor" genres such as transcription and orchestration, which had been almost abandoned by the avantgarde of the 1950s.The following examples illustrate in various ways this shift, which resulted in the blurring of the boundaries between recycling (reinterpreting, rewriting, recomposing) and original creation.
John Adams' orchestration of Liszt's La lugubre gondola, modestly presented as an ˮexercise in the macabre style of the nineteenth century" (Adams 1996), is significant in that it magnifies the modernity and darkness of the original composition.Inversely, Wagner's Ride of the Valkyries set by Uri Caine in a twilight Venice and deprived of the sonic power of a large symphony orchestra, is reduced to a derisory gesticulation.Pierre Schaeffer's Bilude, integrally quoting the Prelude in C minor from Bach's Well-Tempered Clavier, turns it into a "concrete music" by replacing musical sound with various noises.In Gavin Bryars' The Sinking of the Titanic, the noise (that of water, in this case) also alters musical meaning, by slowly drowning out an anthem played by the orchestra of the liner during the disaster.Dieter Schnebel's aim in his Re-Visionen cycle -to reveal the unexplored potential of masterpieces from the past -has been well surpassed.His spatialized vocal versions of excerpts from The Art of Fugue form a "journey to Bach Land" transporting listeners into the past but also into the future.His Beethoven-Sinfonie, a parodic orchestration (timpani and chamber orchestra) of the Fifth Symphony's first movement, subverts the cliché of the heroic composer.His Webern-Variation transform the monochrome pointillism of the Viennese composer's piano writing into a thick orchestral texture.As for his Schubert-Phantasie for large orchestra, freely built around an "analytical instrumentation" of a Schubert's piano sonata, it should be regarded as an original composition.
Salvatore Sciarrino calls his various rewritings ˮelaborationsˮ.Most of them are creative transcriptions, like those of the child Mozart's piano pieces.Sciarrino's choice of instruments is generally significant in itself, as in his version of Bach's Toccata and Fugue in D minor, where he abandons the massiveness of the organ for the fragility of the flute, or in his Exercises in three styles, string quartet arrangements of Scarlatti's piano sonatas in a style reminiscent of Haydn's quartets.The composer's most personal "elaborations" combine music by Gesualdo and by himself written in Gesualdo's Conceived as sonic "diffractions" of the original works, they take the form of an Italian puppet opera featuring, among other things, a folk singer's voice and sounds of breaking glass.
Hans Zender's "composed interpretation" for voice and orchestra of Schubert's Winter Journey and Brice Pauset's "composed listening" for piano and small orchestra of Webern's Variations for piano also show that one can compose music on (and about) music.As for Max Richter, he "re-composes" Vivaldi's Four Seasons in the spirit of a remix culture from which he distinguishes himself by his use of traditional techniques instead of the DJ' typical sampling.Some composers also adopt the posture of a restorer who fills in missing parts of an unfinished painting.Yet, if Berio's Rendering, a restoration of a Schubert symphony, tries to be faithful to the Viennese composer, Georg Friedrich Haas introduces in Sieben Klangraüme his own thematic material into the interstices of Mozart's Requiem.

Romanian composers
In Romania, and in other Eastern European countries, the ideological constraints and the isolation suffered by artists under the communist regime resulted in the postmodern Zeitgeist manifesting in different ways and with a certain time lag7 .Recycling of musical works from the past rarely came in the form of extensive quotation or of complete rewriting, but rather in the register of a late modernism in which the borrowings are dissimulated.
There are exceptions, however, such as Tiberiu Olah's puppet opera Geamgiii din Toledo [The Glassmakers of Toledo] (1959), a ˮpostmodern parody avant la lettreˮ (Lupu 2008, 318) 8 .While this work ridicules the absurdity and falsity of the conventions inherent to the operatic genre, it could also point to the clichés of ˮsocialist realismˮ.In this respect, it recalls Shostakovich's Rayok the Anti-Formalist, ferocious satire of the Soviet regime.
Olah is also one of the few Romanian composers to have used quotations as an almost exclusive musical material, and even as subject of an entire work.His PaROdiSSINIana (1973) is a musical joke in which a duet for cello and double bass by Rossini is both performed and parodically ˮcommentedˮ (Thomasz 2008, 440-442).Years later, Andrei Tănăsescu, a disciple of Olah, would proceed in a similar way in his piano pieces Ciuleandra and Vălurile Dunării.
Quotations in Romanian composers' works are most often difficult to detect, as they are truncated, concealed ans perfectly integrated into a complex musical fabric.Sometimes they are only revealed at the end of a work, like Debussy's Ondine motif in Prairie, Prières by Aurel Stroe, or the incipit of Mozart's Fantasy in C minor for piano K. 475 in Obelisk for Wolfgang Amadeus by Tiberiu Olah9 .
The tribute paid to the masters of the past rather yields cryptic quotations.Unusually for him, Ştefan Niculescu inserts in Sincronie II, Homage to Enescu and Bartók, melodic motifs extracted from works of these composers.In an equally covert manner, Dan Dediu refers in his Studies for orchestra op.23 to Mozartian ˮmottos", in an approach described as falling somewhere ˮbetween modern and postmodern commentary" (Rădulescu 2002, 216).

Creative recycling
The full-length rewriting of musical "found objects", as performed by postmodern composers, calls into question the notion of creation.Some critics point out that the diverting of existing works tends to replace invention, while creation confuses itself with plagiarism (Sabbe 1998, 99-102) 10 .To be sure, postmodern composers no longer follow the model, cherished by the moderns, of tabula rasa and of creating ex nihilo.They entirely assume making music about music, or even creating ˮnew works from ancient remains" (Manoury 1998, 118).As Jean Molino observes (2006, 83), "people have always used the old to create the new", the only differences concerning "the extent, fidelity and treatment of borrowings 11 ".
However, when extended quotations are the central element of a work, if not its subject, one may wonder about the nature of the author's contribution.Should we be satisfied with this weak 12 , second-degree creativity?Is the postmodern period capable of producing its own artistic patrimony, or is it an "age of emptiness" (Lipovetsky 1983)?In fact, the notion of artistic creation has undergone a significant transformation.It is now acceptable to assert one's creativity by setting quotations in new and unexpected contexts, by distorting and diverting them from their original meaning.While reinterpreting music from the past, postmodern composers are forging for it a new identity, bearing a part of themselves.
Indeed, when Dieter Schnebel composes his "analytical instrumentations", this "restrained creative act, between respect and diversion", as he calls it, ultimately leads him to a discovery of himself 13 .When Gavin Bryars quotes in extenso the music played during the sinking of the Titanic, he expresses his own feelings about many other collective tragedies that have marked the twentieth century.When Hans Zender imagines a ˮcomposed interpretation" of Schubert's Winter Journey, he is transforming it in a highly subjective and creative way.When Pierre Schaeffer dresses Bach's Prelude in C minor in the garb of ˮconcrete musicˮ, he provokes his contemporaries with one last witty wink.

Conclusion
The massive recourse to quotations reflects an important cultural and societal shift.If the creative drive characteristic of the modern composers, their obsession with novelty and originality, correspond to their desire to make history, the lesser creative commitment of postmodernists, their apparent lack of ambition and originality, seem to indicate a propensity to be more a subject of history.The willful spirit of the former, summed up in the motto "change the world", is replaced by the resignation of the latter, who seek comfort in alternative worlds.To be sure, spectacular advances in digital technologies will more and more enable us to 11 For theorists of intertextuality such as Jean Ricardou and Antoine Compagnon, "all writing is collage and gloss, quotation and commentary", and "writing, for it is always rewriting, is no different from quoting.See Escal 1984, 188.  1The adjective ˮweakˮ could also be understood here in the sense -not necessarily pejorative -in which Gianni Vattimo speaks of postmodern ˮweak thinkingˮ (pensiero debole). 13See Michel 1970, 112.escape reality and take refuge in virtual worlds, where worst-case scenarios are tackled by avatars.
The disguise and role-play typical of musical postmodernism -Berio replacing Schubert to finish his symphony, Sciarrino putting himself in the shoes of the child Mozart to orchestrate his piano pieces -are all in line with the omnipresence of simulacra in postmodern societies, as analysed by Jean Baudrillard.The identity of musical works, constantly modified and reinterpreted, thus becomes uncertain, like that of many found objects circulating on the planet's networks, undergoing transformations that make them unrecognizable.Such wandering ghost-objects, more and more anonymous, are likely to furnish the future virtual universes set to merge with, and eventually replace, the real world.

Table 1 .
Modern and postmodern founding assumptions and hallmarks 3

Table 2 .
Historical evolutions in musical quoting treatment4 "Recycling" and "rewriting" are generic terms designating various ways of reusing music from the past, such as quoting, transcription, parody, etc., but also the 4 An early version of this table figures inIliescu 2007, 34.