Cited The Old Metaphor

Musical quotation means merging sections of music into a new piece directly and (almost) completely, and they serve as auxiliary composition of non-developmental theme(s) or motives. As artificial process of existed musical materials, quotation represents deeply the basic idea of European music– creation: whatever early Gregorian chant attain its originality through breaking away from foreign unchangeable musical materials, or post-quotation in compositional practice and quotationization attain creation through gradually increasing foreign musical materials in order to break away originality.Starting from defining musical quotation, the thesis elaborates firstly two basic characteristics: recognizability, auxiliarization, then from literature and musical examples elaborates musical quotation as a fairly important compositional technique for modern music. Secondly, the thesis elaborates aesthetic functions of musical quotation: meaningful and non-meaning musical quotations. The former, meaningful musical quotation, can be divided into symbolic, ironic and allusive categories, while the latter, non-meaning musical quotation, can be divided into social functional, form-needed and style-juxtaposed categories. Both meaningful and non-meaning musical quotations have been parallel since ancient time. The former was broadly used in the heteronomous compositional trend, while the latter potentially existed in a few pieces. After autonomous aesthetics had become another parallel trend run with the heteronomous aesthetics, composers increasingly selected and used musical quotation from perspective of non-meaning function. In many modern musical pieces there has been large number of quotation and collage of existing musical fragments. The popular trend indicated that the latter has been recognized and favorite by composers.Finally, there are author's aesthetic reflections on musical quotation: 1. One of basic characteristics of musical quotation is its recognizability. The meaningful and non-meaning quotations indicate that composers do consider their listener, the implied listener, who represents the only unchangeable motive of musical quotation on the development of meaningful to non-meaning functions since ancient time. 2. The compositional thinking of original theme and motive is the foundation stone of composition in classical and romantic periods. Musical quotation can only as auxiliary technique existing in new pieces, while modern compositional thinking of style-juxtaposed quotationization breaks through tradition and attains originality to a certain degree. It shows replacement of traditional paradigm and qualitative change of compositional thinking.