MUSICAL BORROWING
Sometimes when musicians are playing a song they reproduce melodies and patterns that they have heard before, that they liked, and that emerge as they perform. They also look for melodic or rhythmic formulas that give listeners or dancers a feeling of familiarity, get our attention or that evoke a certain idea or emotion.
One strategy for doing this is to use predictable patterns. These are rhythmic or melodic sequences that, because they have been repeated many times, are easily recognized by everyone. They are very interesting for dancers since many of them allow us to anticipate what will come next and so be able to express them in our dance. We talk about this extensively in the predictable patterns section of this website.
Another possibility is that the musician takes fragments of other songs (a melodic line) and puts them in the middle of his composition or alone. We call this, musically, a musical borrowing. It is very common within any musical style, but even more so within jazz and swing.
The borrowing can be literal, identical or very similar to the original (some notes are omitted or replaced by others, the original measure is changed, there is more ornamentation...). In this case we call it a quotation or direct borrowing. If it is not exactly the same then we call it an indirect borrowing, an allusion or paraphrase. In this case there are more or less important changes.
One of the best known quotation examples is All You Need is Love by The Beatles, where, right at the beginning, we hear a fragment of La Marseillaise. In fact, if you listen carefully to the whole song you will find quotations from In the Mood, Two-part Invention in F Major by JS Bach and Greensleeves, but also to their own songs like She Loves You.
La Marseillaise, being a widely known song and clearly related to a country and a revolutionary attitude, is one of the most quoted songs. We can find it, for example, in:
The opening of the 1812 overture, by Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky; a work that explains, with music, Napoleon's attempt to conquer Russia using the largest army that had ever existed until then, 614,000 soldiers, and the battles that occurred. Tchaikovsky uses this quotation whenever he wants to refer to the French army.
Two Grenadiers, by Robert Schumann. The author tells us the story of two French grenadiers who, on their way back from Russia, find out that their country has been conquered. When one of them considers how he wants his burial to take place in France, we hear La Marseillaise.
Quotation is widely used in the world of jazz and swing. Listen, if you like, to Swing Out by Erskine Hawkins and try to recognize the melody that appears in the middle of the solo, at minute 2:27. You can also listen to minute 1:04 of Blues En Mineur by Django Reinhardt or minute 1.22 of Stomp, Stomp by The Cats & the Fiddle.
The melodies that are usually borrowed are, generally, hymns, spirituals, nursery rhymes, military marches, patriotic songs, popular refrains or well-known classical music compositions.
You can see examples of swing music using fragments of classical music in this video:
Here you can find examples of swing songs that borrow melodies from other swing-style songs:
There are also recordings that quote popular songs like these:
Now listen to School Days, which is full of quotes from nursery rhymes:
Although it may seem like it, we cannot understand borrowing as plagiarism since the musician does not pretend that it was composed by him. There is neither bad intention nor illegality. On the contrary, the aim of a quotation can even be to pay tribute to a song, a composer, or a musical style.
Night Train is a recording that, if we do not fully understand the context in which it was composed, could seem like plagiarism (or even two) but it isn't. In fact, Duke Ellington was not at all bothered by the fact that Forrest used his riff. The explanation is in this video:
Do you know other examples of borrowing in the world of swing? We would like you to let us know it, either by contacting us by mail or in the comments section of the YouTube videos.