COMPOSER AS APPROPRIATOR: SEMIOTIC ANALYSIS OF MUSICAL WORKS BASED ON APPROPRIATED MATERIALS

By

GARRETT AUSTIN HECKER

A DISSERTATION PRESENTED TO THE GRADUATE SCHOOL OF THE UNIVERSITY OF FLORIDA IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT

OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OF DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY

UNIVERSITY OF FLORIDA

2018

© 2018 Garrett Austin Hecker

To my Mom, my Dad, and my Brother

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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I thank my Mom and Dad for helping me find an artistic and scholarly path in life

and for encouraging me to always try my hardest in every endeavor. I thank my brother

for constantly challenging every idea that I ever presented to him and for forcing me to

define and defend my positions. And I thank the chair of my supervisory committee, Dr.

James Paul Sain, for his clear and sober advice about the profession of music and

about dealing with life in general.

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TABLE OF CONTENTS page

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS .................................................................................................. 4

LIST OF FIGURES .......................................................................................................... 7

LIST OF EXAMPLES ...................................................................................................... 8

LIST OF OBJECTS ......................................................................................................... 9

ABSTRACT ................................................................................................................... 10

CHAPTER

1 INTRODUCTION .................................................................................................... 12

Literature Review .................................................................................................... 17 Methodology ........................................................................................................... 37

Radiohead, “Idioteque,” Kid A .......................................................................... 45 John Oswald, “Brown,” Plunderphonics ........................................................... 47

2 SEMIOTIC ANALYSIS OF OPEN WORKS AND DIRECT QUOTATIONS: “IDIOTEQUE” FROM RADIOHEAD’S KID A .......................................................... 50

Background Information Regarding the Creation of “mild und leise” and “Idioteque” and the Relationship Between Appropriated Materials ...................... 50

Use of Wagner’s “Tristan” Chord in Lansky’s mild und leise ............................ 50 Use of Lansky’s mild und leise in Radiohead’s “Idioteque”............................... 55

Constructing Model Listeners and Interpreting the Relationship Between Works, Creators, and Appropriators ................................................................................ 59

Construction of the Model Listener for Lansky’s mild und leise ........................ 60 Construction of the Model Listener for Radiohead’s “Idioteque” ....................... 63 Comparison of Model Listeners from mild und leise and “Idioteque” ................ 71

3 SEMIOTIC ANALYSIS OF CLOSED WORKS AND INDIRECT QUOTATIONS: “BROWN” FROM JOHN OSWALD’S PLUNDERPHONIC ...................................... 74

Background Information Regarding the Production and Presentation of “Brown” as it Appears on Plunderphonic ........................................................................... 74

Preceded by “Black” ......................................................................................... 74 Samples used in “Brown” ................................................................................. 76 Liner notes and commentary for Plunderphonic ............................................... 79

Constructing Model Listeners and Interpreting the Relationships Between Samples in “Brown” ............................................................................................. 81

Construction of the Model Listener for “Brown” ................................................ 81 Problems in comparing Model Listeners of samples used in “Brown” .............. 84

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4 CONCLUSION ........................................................................................................ 87

APPENDIX

A BOUGHT AND SOLD ............................................................................................. 91

Program Note ......................................................................................................... 91

B THIS MACHINE KILLS FASCISTS ......................................................................... 92

Program Note ......................................................................................................... 92

C EAVESDROPPERS ................................................................................................ 93

LIST OF REFERENCES ............................................................................................. 108

BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH .......................................................................................... 111

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LIST OF FIGURES

Figure page 2-1 Spectrogram analysis of Radiohead’s “Idioteque.” ............................................. 73

3-1 Suggested track sequences from the “liner notes” of the original 1989 release of Plunderphonic. ................................................................................................ 75

3-2 “Liner notes” from original 1989 release of Plunderphonic. This page shows the sample sources for “black/brown” as listed by Oswald himself. .................... 78

3-3 Chart displaying the entrance and exit of different artists’ samples over time in Oswald’s “Brown.” ........................................................................................... 86

8

LIST OF EXAMPLES

Example page 2-1 The chord progression from Lansky’s mild und leise that Radiohead borrows

for “Idioteque.” .................................................................................................... 55

9

LIST OF OBJECTS

Object page A-1 Sound file of “Bought and Sold” (.wav file 75.5 MB) ........................................... 91

B-1 Video file of “This Machine Kills Fascists” (.mp4 file 368.1 MB) ......................... 92

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Abstract of Dissertation Presented to the Graduate School of the University of Florida in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy

COMPOSER AS APPROPRIATOR: SEMIOTIC ANALYSIS OF MUSICAL WORKS

BASED ON APPROPRIATED MATERIALS

By

Garrett Austin Hecker

May 2018

Chair: James Paul Sain Major: Music

Radiohead released Kid A in the year 2000, featuring a track called “Idioteque,”

which prominently features samples from two preexisting works of electronic music: mild

und leise by Paul Lansky and Short Piece by Arthur Kreiger, with the Lansky sample

acting as the driving force of the work. In addition to Radiohead borrowing from Lansky,

Lansky also borrows the famous “Tristan Chord” from Richard Wagner’s Tristan and

Isolde to create the main theme of mild und leise. Therefore, Radiohead’s “Idioteque” is

a work created with material appropriated from Lansky, who himself appropriated

material to create his work. For the listener, the use of borrowed material raises

questions about how to interpret the appropriations in their new contexts. What

commentary is Radiohead making about Lansky’s music by borrowing from him, and

does that relate in any way to Lansky’s commentary on Wagner? How does the

listener’s previous knowledge of Lansky’s work affect their reception of Radiohead’s

song and vice versa?

This dissertation seeks to explore the processes by which a work accumulates or

loses semiotic indexical value through appropriation. Musical borrowing is a force for

commentary that reveals values by placing works in relief of each other. To model these

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processes, Umberto Eco’s theory of the Model Reader for literary analysis is adapted to

the Model Listener for musical analysis. Eco’s distinction between open and closed

works is used to categorize works for interpretation. Thomas Turino’s adaptations of

Charles Peirce’s semiotic theories are used to elaborate on the semiotic functions of

appropriations. The first part of this dissertation examines Radiohead’s “Idioteque” as a

study in the construction of a model listener for an open work using samples with clear

sources. The second part of the dissertation examines “Brown” from John Oswald’s

Plunderphonic as a study in the construction of a model listener for a closed work using

samples with unclear sources.

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CHAPTER 1 INTRODUCTION

Appropriation of music has been an essential feature of music-making in the

Western World for as long as there is record of people making music. For example,

performances of Gregorian chants between the 9th and 13th centuries were often

elaborated with the addition of troping, wherein singers added melodies and elaborated

on the original text of the chant. In the late Renaissance, Franco-Flemish composers of

cantus firmus masses and imitation masses borrowed between one and four voices of

preexisting works as the basis for their new masses. In 1710, George Frideric Handel

composed Agrippina by borrowing music from his own past works as well as music by

other composers. Opera composers of the 16th-century set certain scenes to stock

chord progressions, such as the chromatic “lament bass” progression to represent grief

scenes. Quotations and variations of the Gregorian chant “Dies Irae” were a popular

way of representing death in programmatic instrumental music of the 19th century. In the

20th century, techniques for borrowing music have taken many unique and individual

turns, from quotations of regional folk music by Aaron Copland or Béla Bartók to the

collages created by Public Enemy or George Rochberg. Borrowing is so fundamental to

the history of Western music that J. Peter Burkholder contends, “in the widest sense the

history of borrowing in music is the history of improvisation, composition and

performance.”1 The history of borrowing in music is the history of music.

1 J. Peter Burkholder, “Borrowing,” Grove Music Online, Oxford Music Online, Oxford University Press, accessed September 11, 2017, http://www.oxfordmusiconline.com.lp.hscl.ufl.edu/subscriber/article/grove/music/52918pg1.

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While borrowing has existed for centuries in different forms, listener’s reactions to

musical borrowing have changed significantly over time. Where borrowing was

expected in many genres before the 19th century, the Romantic era ushered in an era of

artistic individualism and originality where both listeners and creators viewed borrowing

as unoriginal unless disguised or used with programmatic purpose. Current United

States copyright law is built upon this ideal of complete artistic originality: The Copyright

Act of 1976 states that the duration of copyright for an artistic work created after

January 1, 1978 is the life of the artist plus 70 years after the artist’s death.2 In 1991, the

United States District Court for the Southern District of New York fundamentally

changed how hip-hop was created by ruling that sampling copyrighted recordings

without permission could be copyright infringement in the case of Grand Upright Music,

Ltd v. Warner Bros. Records Inc. The law, and sometimes public opinion, is currently

stacked against artists who borrow material. Borrowing has transitioned from an

expected musical practice to one that must be done very carefully due to the law and

potential accusations of unoriginality or even plagiarism by listeners and critics.

The first musicologist to suggest that musical borrowing could be studied as a

whole field in itself was Burkholder in his seminal article, “The Uses of Existing Music:

Musical Borrowing as a Field.”3 In that article, he proposes that musical borrowing is a

complex enough subject that is deserving of its own subfield of musicology, alongside

other subfields such as historical musicology, organology, and sociomusicology, among

2 U.S. Copyright Office, “Chapter 3: Duration of Copyright,” Copyright Law of the United States, Dec. 2016, accessed Sept. 11, 2017, https://www.copyright.gov/title17/92chap3.html.

3 J. Peter Burkholder, “The Uses of Existing Music: Musical Borrowing as a Field,” Notes 50, No. (Mar., 1994), 851-870.

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others. Burkholder was, by no means, the first musicologist to write about borrowing as

a phenomenon, but what makes this article significant is that Burkholder outlines a very

specific typology of borrowing techniques and provides questions that listeners can ask

when trying to identify these techniques. This article serves as a technical starting point

for talking about borrowing as a synchronic phenomenon, that is, regardless of time

period. Burkholder’s article is immensely helpful and provides an important new way of

systematically analyzing and criticizing music based on borrowed material. However, it

is also an example of the main problem that I am addressing in this dissertation: most

literature on musical borrowing focuses on the techniques used by the composer in

arranging their borrowed material, rather than how listeners might receive that borrowed

material when interpreting the music.

Obviously, there is no one-size-fits-all approach to interpreting any work of art.

What this dissertation does is outline how the listener can create a broad model for

listening for any piece of music that uses borrowed material. To do this, I will apply

semiotic theories of Umberto Eco. In The Role of the Reader, Umberto Eco outlines the

process by which texts create their own Model Readers.4 Model Readers are created on

basic structural levels such as choices in linguistic codes, literary style, or

specialization-specific jargon. Eco categorizes literary works into two categories: open

texts and closed texts. The specifics of these two categories is discussed more in the

Methodology section, below. For this dissertation, I transpose Eco’s concept of the

Model Reader into the Model Listener for musical purposes.

4 Umberto Eco, The Role of the Reader, Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1979, 7-11.

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This dissertation is organized into four sections: the introduction, two case

studies, and a conclusion. The introduction includes two subsections: Literature Review

and Methodology. Literature Review surveys the literature surrounding borrowing in

Western music in the 20th-century, as well as literature about Radiohead and John

Oswald. Methodology, outlines the methodologies used to conduct the research for this

dissertation as well as the two works that will be used as case studies. The section

defines important theories and definitions that are fundamental to constructing the

Model Listener. It also sets the delimitations of the research and examines the

consequences of those narrow delimitations. This section also defines the fundamental

research question underlying this dissertation. The end of Section ii introduces the two

works which will be examined as case studies in this dissertation: Radiohead’s

“Idioteque,” from the album Kid A (2000), and John Oswald’s “Brown,” from the album

Plunderphonic (1989). Section ii will outline the way that the methodology will be applied

to each work. The case studies present applications of the theories of Eco as outlined in

the methodology. Both case studies examine how to construct Model Listeners for

musical works based on borrowed materials under different conditions: specifically, I

analyze Radiohead’s “Idioteque” as an open work, according to Eco’s theories, that

uses direct quotation from another work. On the other hand, I analyze Oswald’s “Brown”

as a closed work, according to Eco’s theories, that uses indirect quotations.

This dissertation defines two specific types of borrowing: direct quotation and

indirect quotation. These terms refer to the identifiability of the source of the

appropriated material. Direct quotation, as defined in this dissertation, means that the

quote is presented in its unaltered form and that all features of the samples creation are

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identifiable: the artist, the work, the moment in the work, the instrument, etc..

Radiohead’s “Idioteque,” borrows a sample from Paul Lansky’s mild und leise with no

alterations at all. This is an example of direct quotation. In fact, sampling provides a

particularly unique form of direct quotation where a fixed object is appropriated by

another artist. A sample contains texture, rhythm, timbre, and pitch – it is essentially a

1:1 representation of an object unless it is altered by the borrower. Though the issues in

sampling are similar to the issues of borrowing in general. In particular, the first question

to ask when dealing with any kind of borrowed material is whether the material is

recognizable or not. In the case of “Idioteque,” the Lansky sample is recognizable for

those who know the work. On the other hand, in the case of some sample-based rap

music such as Public Enemy there are many samples that are purposely unidentifiable.

The first case study of this dissertation focuses on direct quotation where the original

source of the borrowed material is recognizable by listeners.

The second case study of this dissertation focuses on indirect quotation. This

type of quotation, iswhere the source is altered or obscured in some way. George

Crumb’s Vox Balaenae presents an example of indirect quotation. At the end of the

opening flute solo is a paraphrased quote of Richard Strauss’ Also Sprach Zarathustra.

The flutist in Vox Balaenae performs the opening trumpet melody from the Strauss work

and the pianist emulates the rest of the orchestra, which includes brass and percussion

at this moment. However, the piano does not perform the exact notes of the orchestra;

rather, the listener familiar with Strauss’ work recognizes the quote in the flute and is

placed in a framework where they expect the orchestral response. The piano response

in Vox emulates the register, texture, and rhythm of the orchestral response in

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Zarathustra, but does not borrow the pitches. Even though the piano does not play the

same pitches as the Strauss work, the emulation of texture is enough for the listener to

complete the quote. The listener in this case listens to Crumb’s arrangement against the

memory of Strauss. While this work alludes to Also Sprach Zarathustra, it is also an

abstraction of an orchestral work that is arranged for a new ensemble; in this case,

orchestra is reduced to a trio consisting of flute, cello, and piano. This is not direct

quotation; it is an example of allusion or possibly parody.

Another limitation of this dissertation is the medium of the works that it examines.

Both case studies are works that exist in recorded form only – they are fixed in time and

unable to be reproduced live with acoustic instruments (although Radiohead tries). Even

more limiting, the borrowed material studied in this dissertation consists exclusively of

samples. This dissertation does not examine any types of borrowing that exist in

acoustic music. The implications of this limitation will be discussed further in

Methodology, below.

This study is significant to the field because of the way that borrowed material

has been treated in the literature up to this point. Most studies on borrowing neglect

interpretation in favor of technical examinations of the types and contexts of borrowing.

The standard approach at this point is to look at borrowing from the composer’s point of

view; I am seeking to ask questions about borrowing from the listener’s point of view.

Literature Review

This review of the existing literature focuses on three primary bodies of literature:

literature on musical borrowing in the 20th-century, on Radiohead’s Kid A, and on John

Oswald’s Plunderphonic. There is a wide range of literature on the topic of musical

borrowing, covering all eras of Western art music from medieval music to contemporary

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music. Rather than covering the entirety of the literature, this chapter specifically

reviews literature about musical borrowing in 20th-century music. This limitation is due to

the fact that the case studies in Chapters 2 and 3 are based on music from the late 20th-

century and 21st century. I also show that the existing literature focuses extensively on

pragmatic approaches to musical analysis, as opposed to the idealistic approach used

in this dissertation as informed by Eco’s Model Listener.

Any study on musical borrowing should begin by reviewing J. Peter Burkholder’s

article, “The Uses of Existing Music: Musical Borrowing as a Field.” In this article,

Burkholder argues that musicologists generally treat musical borrowing as an isolated

technique associated with a specific composer, historical period, or genre, but that there

is value in categorizing different types of borrowing irrespective of these associations. In

other words, treating borrowing as an abstract subject in itself across time and place.

Ultimately, Burkholder argues that the study of musical borrowing is complex enough to

exist as its own subfield of musicology. Burkholder provides two appendices to the

article. The first gives six questions that listeners can ask to identify the type of

borrowing at hand in a work; he provides multiple answers for each of these questions.

Neither the questions nor the answers are exhaustive. The second appendix is “a

tentative chronology of uses of existing music,” which gives a brief and incomplete

listing of types of musical borrowing that have occurred in specific centuries.5

Burkholder is also the author of the Grove Music entry on “borrowing.” The first

section of this entry presents an updated version of Burkholder’s six questions from the

first appendix of “The Uses of Existing Music.” The updated questions are:

5 Burkholder, “The Uses of Existing Music,” 867-870.

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1. What is the relationship of the existing piece to the new piece that borrows from it?

2. What element or elements of the existing piece are incorporated into or referred to by the new piece, in whole or part?

3. How does the borrowed material relate to the shape of the new piece?

4. How is the borrowed material altered in the new piece?

5. What is the function of the borrowed material within the new piece, in musical terms?

6. What is the function or meaning of the borrowed material within the new piece in associative or extra-musical terms, if any?6

Burkholder provides a litany of potential answers to all of these questions in the article.

To the first question, the answers he provides are about the relationship between works:

are the works of the same genres or not? Do the composers know eachother? Are they

of different eras? The answers to the second question define the amount of material

borrowed: form, melody, texture, etc. The answers to question three relate to how the

appropriated material is used in the structure of the work. Question four addresses the

ways that the appropriation might differ from its source. Question five is relatied to

question three. Question six finally deals with the “meaning of the borrowed material

within the new piece.” Burkholder only provides four potential answers: “motivated by

text or program;” “descriptive;” “allusion;” and “collage.” These answers quantify the

type of borrowing but are not exhaustive.

It is necessary to ask these questions in order to create a typology of borrowed

musical material, which is an important starting point when talking about borrowed

6 J. Peter Burkholder, “1. Types of Borrowing,” in the entry “Borrowing,” in Grove Music Online, Oxford Music Online, Oxford University Press, accessed April 11, 2017, http://www.oxfordmusiconline.com.lp.hscl.ufl.edu/subscriber/article/grove/music/52918pg1#S52918.1. These questions were published in their earliest form in Burkholder’s article, “The Uses of Existing Music.”

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material. But where these questions fall short is in considering the lexical possibilities of

borrowed music. It tries to touch on interpretation in questions five and six, however

interpretation of the material is not where this model is most useful.

In Burkholder’s book, All Made of Tunes: Charles Ives and the Uses of Musical

Borrowing, he uses the music of Charles Ives as a case study for the application of his

typology.7 As might be expected from his model, the study is a very technical

examination of the procedures underlying Ives’ use of quotation rather than the

referential implications of the quotations or how listeners should receive them. The lack

of attention to this latter area is exactly what I am trying to address with this dissertation

in regard to the literature surrounding music that borrows. Burkholder’s study is an

important foundational text for the field of “borrowed music,” but where it thrives on

technical definitions and procedures, it lacks in interpretive value when listening to Ives’

music. He specifies his goals at the beginning of the book, writing that he seeks

to make sense of Ives’ uses of existing music, on three levels: first, by explaining the role of the musical borrowings in individual works; second, by showing the roots for each procedure in the musical traditions that Ives knew; and third, by tracing the development of the later, more unusual procedures from the earlier, commonplace ones.8

By “explaining the role of the musical borrowings,” Burkholder means defining the

musical procedure used to create that quotation (i.e. collage, paraphrase, etc.), not the

interpretive function of the quotation. He also seeks to “show the roots for each

procedure” by tracing Ives’ exposure to certain types of music, and to trace “the

development of the later . . . procedures.” All of this research focuses on the historical

7 J. Peter Burkholder, All Made of Tunes: Charles Ives and the Uses of Musical Borrowing (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1995),

8 Burkholder, All Made of Tunes, 7.

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aspect of figuring out how Ives composed his music, rather than how to listen to the

music. Burkholder writes that by understanding these procedures, “we will be many

steps closer to hearing the music as [Ives] meant it to be heard.”9 Here, Burkholder is

seeking the intentions of the empirical author, which is the exact opposite of what I seek

to do in this dissertation by defining a Model Listener. While the intentions of the

empirical author can be significant in certain ways, they do not always affect the

reception of a work by empirical listeners. Often, listeners are not even aware of the

author’s true intentions, yet they are still able to create valid interpretations of the work

based on the content of the work itself. The Model Listener seeks to examine the

referential signs contained within the work itself, and in this regard the messages

contained within the work could differ from the intentions of the author or listeners. The

final chapter of Burkholder’s book is titled, “The Significance of Ives’ Uses of Existing

Music,” which tries to justify why this research is useful for interpreting Ives’ music as

well as touching very lightly on the interpretive value of the research. There is a

subsection in this chapter called “Why So Much Borrowing?” which is a question

regarding Ives’ historical significance, but does not hold a lot of value in interpreting

works. It asks the question of why Ives borrowed, rather than what the music wants

from us when it borrows.

One definition from Burkholder that is very applicable to this dissertation is

“Quotation,” also from the Grove Music Online dictionary. He writes,

Quotation is distinct from all other forms of borrowing in that the borrowed material is presented exactly or nearly so, unlike an allusion or paraphrase, but is not part of the main substance of the work as it would be if used as a cantus firmus, refrain, fugue subject or theme and

9 Ibid., 7.

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variations or other forms, or if presented in a contrafactum, setting, intabulation, transcription, medley or potpourri.10

The works that I study in Chapters 2 and 3, “Idioteque” by Radiohead and “Brown” by

John Oswald, respectively, both use borrowed material that is “presented exactly or

nearly so”; they both use samples that have recognizable sources (Oswald processes

and alters his samples, but the artistic sources are generally maintained). However, it is

telling that Burkholder seems to exclude sampling from his definition of “quotation.” In

fact, the word “sampling” never shows up in the entry for quotation and there is no

mention of electronic music at all. So, it appears that “quotation” is a description that

only applies to acoustic music, at least for Burkholder.

The entry for “sampling” in the Grove Music online dictionary is abysmal. It uses

the bass line from The Sugar Hill Gang’s “Rapper’s Delight” as an example of sampling

when it is, in fact, not sampled.11 The bass line from “Rapper’s Delight” was performed

live in the studio by Chip Shearin, who was paid $70 for his performance – which

technically makes it a quotation of Chic’s “Good Times” rather than a sample.12 The

entry also identifies the beginning of sampling in music as “DJs mixing records first with

other records, as part of a DJ set, and then during live performances.” There is no

mention of sampling in 20th-century art music, which dates back at least to Pierre

10 J. Peter Burkholder, “Quotation,” Grove Music Online, Oxford Music Online, Oxford University Press, accessed Sept. 14, 2017, http://www.oxfordmusiconline.com.lp.hscl.ufl.edu/subscriber/article/grove/music/52854.

11 Will Fulford-Jones, “Sampling,” Grove Music Online, Oxford Music Online, Oxford University Press, accessed Sept. 14, 2017, http://www.oxfordmusiconline.com.lp.hscl.ufl.edu/subscriber/article/grove/music/47228.

12 The 50 Greatest Hip-Hop Songs of All Time, Rolling Stone, December 5, 2012, accessed Sept. 14, 2017, http://www.rollingstone.com/music/lists/the-50-greatest-hip-hop-songs-of-all-time-20121205/sugarhill-gang-rappers-delight-19691231.

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Schaeffer’s early tape pieces in the 1940s. It appears to be a very pop-music-centric

definition of “sampling.”

John Oswald’s definition of a “plunderphone” is most applicable to the music

being studied in this dissertation. In an interview with Norman Igma, Oswald defines a

plunderphone as:

a recognizable sonic quote, using the actual sound of something familiar which has already been recorded. Whistling a bar of "Density 21.5" is a traditional musical quote. Taking Madonna singing "Like a Virgin" and rerecording it backwards or slower is plunderphonics, as long as you can reasonably recognize the source. The plundering has to be blatant though.13

This definition is specific to recorded music; Oswald differentiates quotation from

plunderphone, where quotation represents an acoustic representation of a musical

object and a plunderphone is literally that object, even if altered. In the case of

Radiohead’s “Idioteque, studied in Chapter 2, the musical sample that they borrow from

Paul Lansky’s mild und leise is unaltered and recognizable. Therefore, it is technically a

plunderphone. In Oswald’s “Brown,” studied in Chapter 3, he borrows many different

samples from many different artists – some samples are even made nearly

unrecognizable. It is curious whether or not Oswald, the inventor of “plunderphonics” as

a concept, considers the unrecognizable samples in “Brown” to be plunderphones given

that he defines it as a recognizable sound. Despite Oswald’s, definition, for the

purposes of this dissertation I am going to refer to all referential material in the case

studies as “quotations” rather than “plunderphones.”

13 John Oswald, interview by Norman Igma, http://www.plunderphonics.com/xhtml/xinterviews.html.

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In her dissertation, Cristina Catherine Losada specifically examines collage

techniques in 20th-century music. She studies three works from the 1960s to devise a

typology of collage. The works that Losada chooses to study are Bernd Aloid

Zimmerman’s Musique Pour les Soupers du Roid Ubu (1966), George Rochberg’s

Music for the Magic Theater (1965), and Luciano Berio’s Sinfonia, movement 3 (1968).

According to her dissertation, Burkholder was on her dissertation committee, and, like

Burkholder, she uses a typological approach to borrowing. She specifically states in her

methodology that she emphasizes “technical aspects over the referential implications of

the practice of quotation.”14 Again, this is useful research to build upon, but it fails to

address the referential aspects of borrowed music.

David Metzer’s book, Quotation and Cultural Meaning in Twentieth-Century

Music, covers a wide range of 20th-century music that borrows from existing music. In

the existing published literature, this text comes closest to what I am hoping to achieve

in this dissertation: a model for how to receive music that borrows from existing music.

In the introduction to the book, Metzer writes:

When a musician borrows from a piece, he or she draws upon not only a melody but also the cultural associations of that piece. Just as with a melody, a musician can work with and transform those associations. Those manipulations provide a means to comment on cultural topics and to reconfigure fundamental cultural relationships.15

In this quote, he seems to address that fact that borrowing opens a dialogue between

the borrower and the borrowed. And throughout the text, he illustrates this dialogue: the

14 Cristina Catherina Losada, “A Theoretical Model for the Analysis of Collage in Music Derived from Selectrd works by Berio, Zimmerman and Rochberg,” PhD. Diss., University of Michgan, 2004, 35.

15 David Metzer, Quotation and Cultural Meaning in Twentieth-Century Music, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003, 2.

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first chapter examines the way that Ives represents childhood nostalgia; Chapter 2

examines racial dynamics in the performance of Black and Tan Fantasy by Duke

Ellington and Bubber Miley; the next two chapters examine “madness” and the creation

of “idealistic worlds” through collage; Chapter 5 examines the dynamics of sampling and

the theft of artists’ money and identity through Oswald’s “DAB”; and the final chapter is

about the identity politics surrounding cover songs, specifically the racial dynamics that

have pervaded the music industry since its inception. However, there are still a number

of problems with this work that I am hoping to address within this dissertation.

The first problem is that Metzer treats borrowing as a two-part relationship

between the borrower and the borrowed. But this model is only sufficient for a limited

amount of music as some music establishes a multi-part relationship by using existing

music. For instance, both of the case studies in this dissertation focus on works that

borrow from works that are already based on borrowed materials: Radiohead’s

“Idioteque” borrows from Paul Lansky’s mild und leise, which itself is based on the

“Tristan chord” from Richard Wagner’s Tristan and Isolde; and John Oswald’s “Brown”

samples from Public Enemy, Charlie Parker, and M/A/R/R/S, among several others, all

of whom sample or quote from existing music. In these cases, borrowing is more than a

two-part relationship: the borrower is simultaneously borrowing from the borrowed and

from the borrowed’s borrowed. When applying Umberto Eco’s semiotic theories, which

will be outlined in the following Methodology section, a model can be created that

accounts for the borrowed work as well as any work that that work already borrows

from.

26

The other problem with Metzer’s book, as it relates to this dissertation, is that the

book tries to use the music to make arguments, rather than letting the music make its

own arguments. On page 3, Metzer writes, “This book explores how quotation has

served as a cultural agent in twentieth-century music.” Although Metzer successfully

arrives at these conclusions in each chapter, this quote in the introduction shows that he

approached each piece with a particular agenda: to prove how quotation furthers social

commentary. As Eco writes, “you cannot use the text as you want, but only as the text

wants you to use it,” however Metzer uses the music pragmatically to reach certain

conclusions about what the music is saying.16 He is using the music as he wants. This

dissertation proposes a model that, instead, asks the music what it wants from its

listeners.

The model that allows us to ask the music about its network of potential

interpretations, rather than pragmatically using the music as the listener sees fit, is

Umberto Eco’s Model Reader. In The Role of the Reader, Umberto Eco introduces the

concept of the “Model Reader,” explaining that “the author has thus to foresee a model

of the possible reader (hereafter Model Reader) supposedly able to deal interpretatively

with the expressions in the same way as the author deals generatively with them.”17 Eco

posits that all literary works have a Model Reader, ultimately existing as a theoretical

ideal but one that the reader should strive to attain. In the introduction, Eco explains

how a literary work produces its own Model Reader through the author’s choice of

language, literary style, and “specific specialization-indices,” or jargon, ultimately

16 Eco, The Role of the Reader, 9.

17 Ibid., 7.

27

selecting a very specific reader by informing the reader of the competence that will be

required to properly interpret the work. At the same time, a work “creates the

competence” of its reader by informing them of what they should know before reading

the work. For example, to fully understand the work the reader must research any

jargon or sources that they are unfamiliar within the work. Thus, the work

simultaneously informs the reader of the knowledge that they need to properly interpret

the work at hand and creates the competence of the reader by establishing a lexicon of

important knowledge the reader must know before approaching the work.

Eco establishes two categories of literary works: open and closed. Open texts

invite the reader to consider every possible (valid) interpretation of a text, in the same

way that an observer should take into account every angle of an Alexander Calder

mobile. The open text is not an invitation for the reader to create personalized and

fictitious interpretations of the text; Eco specifically railed against this type of

interpretation, which he termed overinterpretation: “In theory, one can always invent a

system that renders otherwise unconnected clues plausible.”18 Interpretations of an

open text must be informed by the signs present in the work and the multitude of

possible interpretations of those signs. In open texts, it is especially important that the

reader remembers, “you cannot use the text as you want, but only as the text wants you

to use it”.19 Closed texts are directed at a very specific audience, and Eco admits that

the reader of a closed text exists more in theory than in practice. Regardless, the Model

Reader of a closed text should interpret the signs of the work as the author intended

18 Umberto Eco, “Overinterpreting Texts,” Interpretation and Overinterpretation (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 62.

19 Eco, The Role of the Reader, 9.

28

them to be interpreted, in order to construct a very specific story or meaning as intended

by the author. The remainder of The Role of the Reader provides examples of open and

closed texts and the ways that those different texts produce their respective Model

Readers.

Richard Rorty is a pragmatist and a critic of Eco’s Model Reader concept. In “The

Pragmatist’s Progress,” Rorty criticizes the academic rigor that Eco’s Model Reader

asks of its readers, commenting that he might have enough time to interpret Eco’s own

Foucault’s Pendulum this way if he had “three months of leisure and a modest

foundation grant,” and that even then he might fail at creating a satisfactory network of

signs and indices that adequately interprets the work.20 Rorty specifically states that

pragmatists do not wish to make the distinction that Eco makes between using texts and

interpreting texts because, in the pragmatist’s view, when you interpret a text you are

already using that text.21 There is no distinction between use and interpretation

according to Rorty. In fact, to Rorty, any interpretation that a reader can come up with

can be valid depending on what they are hoping to get from the text: “The pragmatist . .

. will eventually come to think of himself or herself as, like everything else, capable of as

many descriptions as there are purposes to be served.”22 Rorty’s position is

problematic, especially in regards to this dissertation, because it disregards the

intertextuality present within a work. In Rorty’s view, it is enough for readers to interpret

the work at hand without relating it to other sources or contexts to arrive at any sort of

20 Richard Rorty, “The Pragmatist’s Progress,” Interpretation and Overinterpretation (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 96.

21 Ibid., 93.

22 Ibid., 92.

29

intrinsic truth-content; the reader may use the work however they see fit, regardless of

their knowledge about it. Eco even allows that readers such as Rorty are possible, and

he categorizes them as “empirical readers.” According to Eco, every reader is an

empirical reader, stating in a lecture at the Library of Congress, “The empirical reader is

you, me, anyone, when we read a text”23. In The Role of the Reader, Eco contrasts the

Model Reader with the Empirical Reader to establish a dialectical framework and justify

his creation of the Model Listener. According to Rorty, we are all empirical readers

dealing pragmatically with the material at hand and that is all that we can be. Eco,

however, acknowledges the reality that all readers are empirical and pragmatic while

positing that these same readers are able to construct a model that would allow them

the most accurate interpretation of the work if they were to take the time constructing

such a model; this is the Model Reader. The Model Reader is a theoretical ideal that

readers should aspire to, however all readers are empirical readers regardless of

whether they construct and follow a model for interpretation or not. Section ii.

Methodology will explain how I transpose Eco’s Model Reader into the Model Listener

and how I apply the Model Listener to the case studies in Chapters 2 and 3.

Radiohead is a rock band that has defied easy categorization. With their 1997

release, OK Computer, they expanded their sound beyond the standard rock band

format they had been following in their previous albums, Pablo Honey (1993) and The

Bends (1995). OK Computer included standard instrumentation expanded with

electronics and with more experimental music. Kid A took the band into even further

23 Drew Linginfelter, “Ecco Eco: Umberto Eco Explains Readers’ Role in Interpreting Texts,” in Library of Congress Information Bulletin 54, no. 22 (Dec. 11, 1995), http://www.loc.gov/loc/lcib/9522/eco.html.

30

experimental territory, at times using many of the same sounds and textures found in

electronic art music. Being such an experimental rock band, the literature written about

them spans from casual rock band biographies to academic analyses of their music. For

instance, Exit Music: A Radiohead Story is an unofficial biography of Radiohead by Mac

Randall. While there is useful information about the life and evolution of the band in the

book, it is not relevant in a theoretical way regarding the music. This dissertation is only

going to consider academic literature written about the music of Radiohead.

Marvin Lin’s Kid A is a scholarly text with a casual tone that is aimed at “the

audience, the fans, the listeners” of Radiohead.24 The book specifically deals with

Radiohead’s album Kid A and interprets the album by examining its treatment of time as

a concept. As the author states, “this book is about exploring the disjunction between

music as a static product and music as a temporal activity.”25 This text discusses

“Idioteque” along with the album Kid A as a whole. However, there is only one mention

of Paul Lansky in the text, on page 143, where Lin acknowledges that Radiohead

sampled from Lansky and Arthur Kreiger. Beyond that, there is no discussion of

Radiohead’s sampling. One interesting discovery that Lin makes, which is discussed

more in Chapter 2, is that when Thom York had writer’s block while writing the lyrics for

Kid A, he used directions written by Dadaist poet Tristan Tzara to write lyrics.26 This

resulted in lyrics that were constructed through the application of an abstract literary

24 Marvin Lin, Kid A, 33 1/3, New York: Continuum International Publishing Group, 2011, 9.

25 Ibid., 8.

26 Ibid., 17.

31

process, but that still create unique and vivid imagery open to interpretation of the

listener. This has significant interpretive consequences that are discussed in Chapter 2.

In Radiohead and the Resistant Concept Album, Marianna Tatom Letts takes a

pragmatic approach to Radiohead’s Kid A and Amnesiac (2001) by constructing a

narrative in which the “vanishing subject,” as she terms it, represents Radiohead’s

“ambivalence toward [their] own success.”27 As the title states, Letts categorizes Kid A

as a “resistant” concept album, which is a term that the author invents to describe the

album. In the introduction, Letts creates a taxonomy for concept albums. She outlines

three broad categories: Narrative, Thematic, and Resistant. In defining what a

“Resistant” concept album is, Letts writes,

‘Resistant’ albums are those that stretch the parameters of the traditionally defined concept album (A clearly articulated narrative, characters, or a musical/lyrical theme) while still conveying some kind of concept beyond a single sequence of organized tracks over the course of an album. The protagonist may expire before the end of the album or may be completely absent, and the musical elements may actively work to annihilate him or may supersede the voice’s normally active role in the texture. In addition, it may be difficult or nearly impossible for the listener to discern the ‘concept’ without being told it explicitly through album packaging, marketing, or statements by band members. All of these elements may also enhance and strengthen the concept album experience.28

“Idioteque” Is used in the construction of this narrative, along with the rest of Kid A,

however Paul Lansky’s sample is neglected any significant attention. The only mention

of Lansky’s mild und leise is in the endnotes and it only states that “Idioteque” is built

around the sample. This book follows the subject of the concept album as they fade in

and out of the forefront of the music, making it difficult for listeners to identify any single

27 Marianne Tatom Letts, Radiohead and the Resistant Concept Album (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2010), 2.

28 Ibid., 25.

32

narrative or concept at all. In constructing the narrative that this book tells about Kid A,

the author is acting as an empirical listener. She acknowledges that this is only one of

many ways to listen to the album.29 But her narrow approach, reducing Kid A to a single

interpretation that follows the subject’s journey, only gives us a single perspective about

the work. Construction of the Model Listener for a work helps the listener be aware of as

many interpretations of the work as possible, allowing them to choose an interpretation

that they feel is best while being aware of the network of interpretive possibilities.

In Everything in its Right Place, Brad Osborn takes another pragmatic approach

to interpreting Radiohead’s music. Osborn turns to neuroscience and ecological

perception to formulate a method for interpreting the music of Radiohead. From

neuroscience, Osborn borrows the concept of “salience” which he writes is an object

that holds interpretive value that is not too different and not too similar from what we are

familiar with. Salient objects keep our attention by residing in this interesting middle

ground between the “marked” and “unmarked,” as Osborn terms it.30 The author also

uses ecological perception to describe how Radiohead creates self-contained

environments, writing “Decoding these complex perception/expectation/realization

chains in Radiohead’s music, as well as the meanings we as listeners derive from them,

is my central aim in this book.”31 We may derive meaning from these chains, however

this narrow approach to the music ensures that we will receive a specific interpretation

filtered through the authors limitations. This is pragmatism; Osborn is using Radiohead’s

29 Ibid., 26.

30 Brad Osborn, Everything in its Right Place, New York: Oxford University Press, 2017, 2.

31 Ibid., 4.

33

music to prove his own personal interpretations of the music, rather than asking the

music what it wants from him as a listener. The Model Listener seeks to avoid these

narrow and limited interpretations, unless the work asks that it be interpreted in such a

narrow sense. The Lansky sample from “Idioteque” is mentioned a couple of times

throughout the book, but never in any way that attributes any interpretive significance to

the sample.

The Music and Art of Radiohead is an edited collection of essays about

Radiohead by scholars of literature and music. This collection is significant to my

research into “Idioteque,” because in this collection Paul Lansky published his full essay

about his experience working with Radiohead.32 There are two versions of this essay. A

shorter version is published on Paul Lansky’s website. In the online version, Lansky

writes about his use of George Perle’s twelve-tone modal system; this information is

notably absent from the longer version published in The Music and Art of Radiohead. In

the longer version, however, Lansky published a transcription of the specific chords that

Radiohead borrowed from mild und leise. Most of the longer version of the article

explains the theoretical and compositional choices that Lansky made when composing

mild und leise along with excessive praise for Radiohead. The other essays in the

collection are relatively empirical readings of Radiohead’s work, with each author

approaching Radiohead’s music with a thesis in mind and using the music to

demonstrate that thesis. Again, the interpretations are not wrong but they are narrow.

32 Paul Lansky, “My Radiohead Adventure,” in The Music and Art of Radiohead, ed. Joseph Tate (Burlington, VT: Ashgate Publishing, 2005), 168-176.

34

The Model Listener seeks to understand how interpretations can be constructed from a

work without favoring any particular interpretation unless the work grants it.

John Oswald’s Plunderphonic occupies a similar stylistic middle ground as

Radiohead; it lies somewhere between art music and popular music. As such, the

literature surrounding Plunderphonic ranges from the amateur to the academic. Again,

as with Radiohead, there are texts that focus on biographical material about the artist,

rather than digging into the music that the artist has created. One such text is

Plunderphonics, Pataphysics and Pop Mechanics: An Introduction to Musique Actuelle,

which primarily consists of biographical information and interviews with the artists that it

is about. While this is useful information in a historical sense, it is not necessarily

relevant to the study at hand. This dissertation is specifically going to focus on scholarly

literature about the music in Plunderphonic.

Chris Cutler’s seminal article, “Plunderphonics,” was written after the release of

Oswald’s album and borrows its title from Oswald’s album. The article is organized in

terms of the evolution of recording technology and its effects on the creation and

distribution of music. It also gives some historical information about Oswald’s

Plunderphonic itself. What is most significant about this article is that it makes the case

that once sound is recorded, no matter its distribution medium, it becomes source

material which can be used by other artists who choose to sample it in creative ways.33

Essentially, recorded sound, especially recordings of popular music, can be raw

material for new compositions. This is an important article for establishing the concept

33 Chris Cutler, “Plunderphonics,” in Classic Essays on Twentieth-Century Music, ed. Richard Kostelanetz and Joseph Darby (New York: Schirmer Books, 1996), 355.

35

of “plunderphonics,” but it lacks significant interpretive value. This article describes what

plunderphonics are and how to create works using plunderphonics, but it does not

necessarily tell the listener how they should receive plundered material.

As mentioned above, Metzer’s book takes a pragmatic approach to interpreting

music that borrows from existing music. Chapter 5 is specifically about Oswald’s piece,

“DAB,” from Plunderphonic. “DAB” is a reinterpretation of Michael Jackson’s “Bad.”

Metzer presents “DAB” through the framework of “Sampling and Theft,” the title of the

chapter. By staking out a specific interpretive position Metzer is acting as an empirical

listener; in this case, Metzer is using “DAB” pragmatically to back up his ideas about

theft in music. He makes valid points: for instance, Metzer states that Oswald steals

more than just Jackson’s music by stealing Jackson’s “most profitable qualities, his

sound and image.”34 Through manipulating samples, Oswald is able to perform outside

of the traditional musical realms of melody, rhythm, and timbre; his performance

reaches into the identifying characteristics of that performer: “By controlling the voice,

Oswald controls the essence of that performer. His ‘plundering’ focuses on essential

qualities of these individuals, including voice and gender.”35 This dissertation seeks to

ultimately avoid this kind of empirical listening by showing how listeners can construct

models that allow them to use all signs within the music to create an interpretation,

rather than stating that the signs point to any single conclusion.

34 Metzer, “Sampling and Theft,” Quotation and Cultural Meaning, 177.

35 Ibid., 177.

36

Jim Leach examines the concept of plunderphonics in three specific ways: “as

artwork; as art product; and as cultural product.”36 This chapter is not necessarily about

Oswald’s album, it is about the concept of plunderphonics as a practice beyond

Oswald’s work. Like the other authors discussed in this literature review, Leach

approaches the concept of plunderphonics pragmatically. But he raises a number of

interesting complications regarding plunderphonics. For one thing, he considers

plunderphonics to be a folk music for two reasons: plunderphonics is distributed through

noncommercial means typical of folk genres, and “‘folk music’ themes, melodies, lyrics

and so on are shared and borrowed, improved upon, made one’s own, and then passed

along.”37 In this latter sense, folk music is characterized by building on borrowed

material; Oswald is participating in this dialogue between past and present through

technology rather than acoustic quotation. The other question that Leach asks about

plunderphonics is “for whom are these samples recognizable?” He ultimately comes to

the conclusion that because recognition of the samples is integral to the practice and

reception of plunderphonics, it turns the audience into a “thematic aspect of its

technique.”38

Though Leach comes to viable conclusions about plunderphonics as a

technique, he still approaches the entire topic with an agenda in mind, by using

plunderphonics to ask questions about the validity of the technology used to create

36 Jim Leach, “Sampling and Society: Intellectual Infringement and Digital Folk Music in John Oswald’s ‘Plunderphonics’,” in The Arts, Community and Cultural Democracy, ed. Lambert Zuidervaart and Henry Luttikhuizen (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2000), 123.

37 Leach, “Sampling and Society,” 131.

38 Ibid., 126.

37

plunderphonics as well as whether or not plunderphonics “radically challenges power

relations within society” (he comes to the conclusion that it does not). He is also seeking

to justify and expand the definition of folk music, by categorizing plunderphonics as

such.

This review has covered three main topics: the existing literature as it applies to

techniques for borrowing music in the 20th-century; the literature surrounding the music

of Radiohead; and the literature surrounding not just John Oswald’s Plunderphonic

album but also surrounding the concept of plunderphonics as a compositional tool. The

following Methodology section expands on the relevant material about musical

techniques for borrowing as well as the theoretical foundations for how to interpret

referential musical material. It then outlines how that material applies to the case studies

in Chapters 2 and 3.

Methodology

In the preceding Literature Review, I discussed Umberto Eco’s concept of the

Model Reader, which he first describes in detail in The Role of the Reader. The Model

Reader is a model for literary analysis. In this dissertation, I am transposing Eco’s

Model Reader into the Model Listener for musical analysis. Eco himself used musical

examples to explain his concept of the Model Reader for open works, effectively

transposing his concept of the Model Reader into the Model Listener. In Chapter 1, “The

Poetics of the Open Work,” from The Role of the Reader, Eco uses Klavierstück XI, by

Karlheinz Stockhausen, Sequence for Solo Flute, by Luciano Berio, Scambi, by Henri

Pousseur, and Third Sonata for Piano, by Pierre Boulez in explaining how open works

function. Given these examples, it is clear that Eco sees the possibility of applying the

concept of the Model Reader to music. Rather than Eco’s “Model Reader,” this

38

dissertation will instead consider a “Model Listener” for each work. This linguistic

transposition does not necessarily need to be a one-to-one mapping, specifically

because music and literature are different mediums and have their own unique models

for consumption. According to Eco, an author creates the competence of the “Model

Reader” through their choice of “a specific linguistic code,” “a certain literary style,” and

“specific specialization-indices.” The Model Reader is also created through source

citation. All of these parameters combine to develop the reader that is most fit to

interpret a literary work. If we are to convert this model to apply to music, a work might

create the competence of its “Model Listener” through a specific musical code (i.e. the

scale, harmony, instrumentation, texture, and other fundamental parameters used in

musical analysis), a certain musical style (i.e. the conductor or performer’s

interpretation; idiosyncrasies of a work or a band in relation to its genre), and specific

specialization-indices for music (i.e. historical references in the work’s text or sound

world; technological idiosyncrasies; specific instrumental or musical techniques;

borrowed musical material). The works whose Model Listeners I will be investigating are

two recordings: Radiohead’s “Idioteque,” from the album Kid A, released in 2000, and

John Oswald’s “Brown,” from the album Plunderphonics, released in 1989.

Radiohead bases the entirety of “Idioteque” on a sample from a composition by

Paul Lansky’s “mild und leise,” which itself is based on the Tristan Chord from Tristan

and Isolde by Richard Wagner.39 Oswald borrows from Public Enemy, James Brown,

and others to create “Brown.” As mentioned, Eco states that a literary work creates the

39 Paul Lansky, “My Radiohead Adventure,” http://paul.mycpanel.princeton.edu/radiohead.ml.html (accessed May 1, 2017).

39

competence of its reader through reference and citation of other works. Music, however,

lacks a clear way of alerting listeners that material is borrowed. Recognition of borrowed

materials, instead, relies on the listeners’ knowledge of the materials being borrowed.

Oswald observes that

Musical language has an extensive repertoire of punctuation devices but nothing equivalent to literature's " " quotation marks. Jazz musicians do not wiggle two fingers of each hand in the air, as lecturers often do, when cross referencing during their extemporizations, because on most instruments this would present some technical difficulties - plummeting trumpets and such.

Without a quotation system, well-intended correspondences cannot be distinguished from plagiarism and fraud. But anyway, the quoting of notes is but a small and insignificant portion of common appropriation.40

He notes that appropriation is not only limited to melodies and harmonies, but also

practiced by singers trying to emulate other more well-known singers. In that case,

singers are emulating timbre, not melodic constructs. Regardless of what part of the

music is being borrowed, identifying borrowing ultimately comes down to the listener

knowing the borrowed material and being perceptive enough to identify it. Whether the

composer intends for the source to be recognized or not is ultimately irrelevant.

Given this complication, listeners trying to identify referenced material in music

and in literature require different skills for each medium. Transposing Eco’s literary

theories, therefore, becomes more complicated because Eco’s theory states that

citations create the competence in their listener by telling the listener that they must

know the original material being borrowed to fully understand the work. The problem

40 John Oswald, “Plunderphonics, or Audio Piracy as a Compositional Prerogative,” http://www.plunderphonics.com/xhtml/x.html (accessed on November 18, 2016). This article was originally presented as a lecture at the Wired Society Electro-Acoustic Conference held in Toronto, Canada in 1985. It was subsequently published in Musicworks #34 and the Whole Earth Review #57.

40

with identifying borrowed materials in music is that unless the listener knows the works

that are being borrowed, they will not recognize the material as borrowed.

Burkholder’s six questions from his entry for the Grove Music Online dictionary

on “Borrowing” are listed in the above Literature Review. Where these questions fall

short are in interpretive value. They do not tell the listener how they might best receive

the defined types of borrowings. This is where the Model Listener has advantages over

Burkholder’s model. Burkholder’s model focuses primarily on unpacking the

technicalities of how borrowing has occurred in a new work, treating interpretation of the

borrowed music as an equal part of the analytical process as a whole, possibly even as

a byproduct of the borrowing. On the other hand, the Model Listener for a work based

on borrowed material recognizes that by basing a new work on an old work, the two

works become fundamentally linked, necessarily commenting on one another when

placed in juxtaposition. Thus, the relationship of the borrowed work to the new work and

the possible interpretations of this relationship are the center of focus to the Model

Listener in a work based on borrowed material, rather than the technicalities of how the

new work borrowed old material.

For more specific terminology regarding semiotic interpretations of music, I will be

borrowing definitions from Thomas Turino’s article, “Signs of imagination, Identity, and

Experience: A Peircian Semiotic Theory of Music,” who himself borrows from Peircian

terminology in describing how listeners can use Peircian semiotics to arrive at viable

musical interpretations. Eco has outlined his own theory of semiotics in his book, A

Theory of Semiotics, however his text focuses on literary and linguistic theories.

41

Turino’s terminology is more useful for my research because he has done the work of

transposing the terminology and concepts of Peircian semiotics to musical analysis.

According to Turino, Charles Peirce defines three basic elements in all semiotic

processes:

(1) the sign, something that stands for something else to someone in some way; (2) the object, which is the "something else," or entity, stood for by the sign, be it an abstract concept or a concrete object; and (3) the interpretant, which is the effect created by bringing the sign and object together in the mind of a perceiver.41

Each of these three main elements is then further divided into subcategories, and the

relationships between these main elements are also divided into categories. In total,

according to Peircian semiotics, there are ten different classes of signs.42 The most

relevant semiotic relationships to this dissertation, and music in general, are the icon (a

sign that represents another object, i.e. the Apple company logo representing Apple

inc.), legisign (the sign as a general abstracted type, i.e. a score as opposed to a

performance of that score), index (a sign related to an object through co-occurrence of

events, i.e. dog barking as index for danger, visitor, or another dog’s presence), rheme

(a sign interpreted as representing its object as a possibility, i.e. a silhouette suggests

the possibility of a figure), and dicent (a sign interpreted as being affected by the

physical state of its related object, i.e. a speedometer is a dicent-index refers to the

speed of its object and is also affected by the speed).43 These relationships can be

41 Thomas Turino, “Signs of imagination, Identity, and Experience: A Peircian Semiotic Theory of Music,” in Ethnomusicology 43, no. 2 (Spring – Summer, 1999), 222.

42 Ibid, 233. Turino provides a table that lists all ten classes of signs ordered from Firstness to Thirdness, where Firstness represents the object itself and Thirdness is abstraction of a sign to the level of language. Each sign increases in abstraction.

43 Ibid, 226-229.

42

combined into different three-part categories, which Turino outlines in his article.

Turino’s article focuses most closely on the dicent-indexical-legisign class of

semiotic interpretation, which he writes is “central to the power of musical

performance.”44 A dicent-indexical-legisign is a class of sign that represents a more

abstract concept by indirectly referencing that concept through a co-occurring event and

is also interpreted as being affected by its related concept (i.e. smoke signaling fire).

However, this category is not the only category by which music can be interpreted; for

instance, Turino also writes that “rhemes are crucial to the semiotic functions of art

because they allow for the play of imagination and creativity” by suggesting possibilities,

as opposed to dicents which suggest physical representations of objects.45 In fact, most

music functions at the level of rheme rather than dicent – that is interpretive possibility

rather than literal representation. Borrowed musical quotes fall under the category of

dicent-indexical-legisign because musical quotes are icons that index another pre-

existing work of music in an abstracted form but are affected by the music that they are

necessarily a part of. An important point of this kind of semiotic interpretation is that

indices differ from person to person, as people necessarily create indices through their

own personal experiences. For this reason, while a piece of borrowed music might be

an index for another piece of music, it may not be indexical of that work to the listener

since its indexical quality depends on whether the listener has ever heard the work

before. However, the Model Listener knows the indexical relationship in order to

develop the most accurate interpretation. By combining Eco’s Model Reader with

44 Turino, 238.

45 Ibid, 238.

43

Turino’s terminology, we can better explain how borrowed materials interact with the

work that they are contained in.

Complicating the application of Eco’s Model Listener paradigm to a new work

based on borrowed music is the fact that the borrowed music also has its own Model

Listener. In order to create the fullest picture of the Model Listener for the new work, the

listener of the new work should also be aware of the Model Listener for the borrowed

work or works. In the two case studies in this dissertation, I will take account of both the

Model Listener for the new work as well as the Model Listeners of the borrowed works.

Through comparing listeners, I will show how the borrower and the borrowed not only

comment on each other but also on each other’s Model Listeners.

In order to demonstrate why the Model Listener is the best approach to

interpretation, I will be contrasting it with the Empirical Listener. Eco himself uses this

dialectical framework to hold up his arguments for the Model Reader. Effectively, the

Model Reader is the ideal that readers should aspire to, whereas the Empirical Reader

is any real reader that truly exists, complete with all of their knowledge and

assumptions. The Empirical Reader is useful for showing the benefits of the Model

Reader because any Empirical Reader can take the time to learn what the Model

Reader is for a given work, thus bringing themselves closer to the best interpretation of

that work. Empirical Readers are also open to over-interpretations and false

interpretations, whereas the Model Reader necessarily excludes these. I will be

transposing both the Model Reader and Empirical Reader, into Model Listener and

Empirical Listener for this dissertation.

44

The works that I am focusing on in this dissertation are both recordings that do

not exist in sheet music form, which is a significant delimitation of my research. One

work is a fixed electroacoustic composition; the other is a recording by a rock band.

Neither is a genre that traditionally uses sheet music or any kind of notational systems.

This is significant to my research because borrowed material is typically analyzed in

different ways depending on whether it is notated for live performers or fixed in a

recorded medium. Where music for live musicians has its own jargon for borrowed

materials, such as transcriptions, paraphrases, contrafacts, variations, and arranging,

electronic music primarily revolves around samples as the basic unit of borrowing.46

Both broad categories – notated and non-notated music – also have their own specific

repertories that they can draw from; that is to say, it is difficult if not impossible for

acoustic works composed for chamber ensemble to directly quote from any work of

fixed of electronic music. Likewise, electronic music can only sample from music that

exists in recorded forms. Both case studies in this dissertation focus on works that exist

in recorded forms and borrow from other works that exist in recorded forms (although

the borrowed works may have been performed live or improvised in the studio in order

to be recorded).

The role of the Model Listener in Oswald differs significantly from the role of the

Model Listener in Radiohead. In the case of these two works that appropriate from other

works, the Model Listener must consider the role of borrowed music within each

46 Burkholder, “Musical Borrowing as a Field.,” 854. Burkholder provides a table of techniques used in the music of Charles Ives, emphasizing “tunes” and melodies as the basic unit of borrowing. Ives’ catalogue consists entirely of sheet music, and, while some of the techniques listed may apply to electronic work as well, the techniques listed are specific to sheet music.

45

individual work. In the Radiohead, borrowed music makes up a significant portion of the

work, however the listener does not need to be aware of the borrowed music’s source to

appreciate the work. In the case of Oswald, the entire work is made of quotation and

Oswald expects the listeners to recognize the quotes, as implied by his program note to

“Brown,” which reads, “J[ames]. B[rown]. takes control of this Public Enemy accredited

cut and shows who’s the Supreme Justice of Superbad. With guest appearances by

Charlie Parker, Matt Dillon, and a bevy of minor appropriators.”47 This fundamentally

changes what the Model Listener looks like for both works. The fundamental question

that I am trying to answer through study of these two works is this: how do recorded

musical works based on borrowed materials create their Model Listeners?

Radiohead, “Idioteque,” Kid A

Chapter 2 is a case study in constructing a Model Listener for a work based on

the direct quotation of material from another work. The work studied is the song

“Idioteque,” from the album Kid A (2000) by Radiohead. The song is a fairly unassuming

electronic track made up of drum samples, synthesizers, and vocals. However, the

thematic synthesizer part is actually a sample of Paul Lansky’s fixed media work, mild

und leise (1973).

It is worth mentioning that there are actually two samples in “Idioteque.” In

addition to the Lansky sample, Radiohead also samples Arthur Kreiger’s Short Piece

(1976). This dissertation will focus primarily on the Lansky sample given its thematic

importance within “Idioteque,” whereas the Kreiger sample is used transitionally.

47 John Oswald, liner notes from Plunderphonic, http://www.plunderphonics.com/xhtml/xnotes.html (accessed November 18, 2016).

46

Eco’s Role of the Reader makes a distinction between works that are open and

works that are closed. “Idioteque” can be considered an open work for a number of

reasons. First, Radiohead makes no effort within the recording of “Idioteque” to inform

the listener of the origins of any of the samples on “Idioteque” (they do credit Lansky in

the album credits, however these credits are often overlooked by listeners). Second, the

lyrics are ambiguous and have no clear message leaving them open to listener

interpretation.

In order to make sense of the Lansky sample, we need to understand

Radiohead’s relationship to Lansky as well as the context of both works: the borrowed

and the borrower. The Model Listener model will be applied in order to deconstruct the

way that “Idioteque” creates the competence of its listeners, through Radiohead’s

choice of instrumentation, samples, genre, and the relationship of the Lansky work to

Radiohead’s work in terms of genre and style. I will also investigate the personal

relationship between Lansky and Radiohead, including the dynamics of music licensing

involved in the creation of this work. Radiohead asked Lansky’s permission to sample

his music and paid him for the sample. Music licensing law played a role in the music

that Radiohead was allowed to create and I will ask whether this affects the way that we

should listen to “Idioteque.”

I also intend to investigate the Model Listener of Lansky’s composition. I will

compare the Model Listener of Lansky’s work to the Model Listener of Radiohead’s

work. In comparing the Model Listeners of the borrower and the borrowed, I intend to

determine if the Model Listener of the borrowed Lansky work has any significant

47

influence or interpretive value on what the Model Listener for Radiohead’s “Idioteque”

should look like.

The first subsection of Chapter 2 discusses the context behind the borrowed

materials in both “Idioteque” and mild und leise. Specifically, it explores the function of

the mild und leise sample in “Idioteque,” as well as the function of Richard Wagner’s

“Tristan chord” from Tristan and Isolde as it is used in mild und leise. The second

subsection of Chapter 2 is an analysis of the Model Listeners for both “Idioteque” and

mild und leise followed by a comparison of those Model Listeners to each other.

John Oswald, “Brown,” Plunderphonics

In 1989, John Oswald released an album consisting of collage-style works that

he composed between 1982 and 1989. The album was entitled Plunderphonic and was

distributed throughout Canada free of charge. Oswald distributed the CDs to radio

stations and libraries; he never sold any of the records for profit and released the album

with the note that “this disc may be reproduced but neither it, not any reproductions of it

are to be bought or sold.”48 Nevertheless, in 1990 Oswald was forced to destroy all

undistributed copies (308 of the original 1000) of Plunderphonic under threat of litigation

from the Canadian Recording Industry Association (now Music Canada).49 The album

can now be found online for free digital download at plunderphonics.com. “Brown” is a

48 Jim Leach, Sampling and Society: Intellectual Infringement and Digital Folk Music in John Oswald’s ‘Plunderphonics’,” In The Arts, Community and Cultural Democracy, ed. Lambert Zuidervaart and Henry Luttikhuizen (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2000), 122; John Oswald, “Liner Notes,” Plunderphonic, Mystery Tape Laboratory, 1989, https://www.discogs.com/Plunderphonic-Plunderphonic/release/231483.

49 John Oswald, “Press Release,” http://www.plunderphonics.com/xhtml/xnegation.html. This website displays the press release distributed by Oswald, where he announced that he was surrendering all remaining copies of Plunderphonic for destruction.

48

track from Plunderphonic that appropriates samples from Public Enemy and James

Brown.

As opposed to “Idioteque,” “Brown” can be interpreted as a closed work. Oswald

goes out of his way in the program notes to identify the artists that he sampled from. In

doing so, he invokes each artist’s style and assumes the knowledge of the listener. He

simultaneously creates the competence of the listener by specifically telling them the

artists that they need to be familiar with in order to make sense of the work.

The reason that I chose this work over others on Plunderphonic, is because of

the complexity of the relationship between the artists sampled. The work is based off of

the music of Public Enemy, a rap group notorious for their own musical appropriations.

In fact, Public Enemy frequently samples James Brown, who is the other major artist

sampled in the song. Oswald explains that he sees this as a “Public Enemy accredited”

work with interjections by other artists.50 He describes the work very dramatically,

positioning is as a struggle for power between James Brown and Public Enemy. But

because Public Enemy samples extensively from James Brown – especially the same

samples chosen by Oswald in this work – there is some overlap and possibly confusion

between the Model Listeners of both Public Enemy, James Brown, and Oswald. As with

the discussion of Radiohead’s appropriations, it is necessary to outline Model Listeners

for each of the works appropriated by Oswald, or at least the most prominent

appropriations. In doing so, a fuller picture of the Model Listener for “Brown” as a whole

can be created.

50 Oswald, liner notes from Plunderphonic, http://www.plunderphonics.com/xhtml/xnotes.html (accessed November 18, 2016).

49

In regards to the technique employed in borrowing materials, the question of the

Model Listener becomes slightly more complicated in the case of “Brown” than it is for

“Idioteque.” Unlike Radiohead, Oswald explicitly informs the listener of the sources of

his appropriations. However, Oswald is using an entirely different approach to quotation

compared to Radiohead; Oswald is forcing the quotations into dialogue with one

another through vertical and linear combinations of samples. This is a distinctly different

technique from “Idioteque,” requiring a different Model Listener.

Chapter 3 examines “Brown” as a case study in constructing a Model Listener for

a closed work based on preexisting material. The first section of Chapter 3 is going to

provide the reader with context surrounding “Brown.” Specifically, it will discuss the

track that precedes “Brown” (“Black”) and review the samples that are used in “Brown.”

It will also go into a discussion of when exactly the commentary first appeared from the

liner notes in Plunderphonic. The next section of this chapter will be an analysis of the

Model Listener for “Brown,” followed by a discussion about the difficulties surrounding

the construction of Model Listeners for the samples used in “Brown” and thus the

difficulties in comparing those models to the model of “Brown.”

50

CHAPTER 2 SEMIOTIC ANALYSIS OF OPEN WORKS AND DIRECT QUOTATIONS: “IDIOTEQUE”

FROM RADIOHEAD’S KID A

Background Information Regarding the Creation of “mild und leise” and “Idioteque” and the Relationship Between Appropriated Materials

The following section provides the reader with information regarding the

production of both mild und leise and “Idioteque” and a discussion of the borrowed

materials used in both works. The first subsection discusses the role of Wagner’s

“Tristan” chord as it relates to Lansky’s mild und leise. The section also reviews some of

the scholarly literature surrounding the history of the “Tristan” chord in Western art

music as well as both Lansky’s and Radiohead’s places in that history.

The second subsection explores the function of Lansky’s mild und leise in

Radiohead’s “Idioteque” as well as the dynamics surrounding the creation of “Idioteque.”

The subsection examines the relationship between Radiohead and Lansky, as well as

the legal consequences of this relationship with regard to music licensing.

Use of Wagner’s “Tristan” Chord in Lansky’s mild und leise

Paul Lansky’s mild und leise was first released in 1976 on the album Electronic

Music Winners. On Lansky’s website, he writes that his work was selected for this

record as a prize for winning a contest held by the International Society for

Contemporary Music (ISCM) - a prize shared by all the composers on the record, hence

the album title. The other composers alongside Lansky on the album are Maurice

Wright, Joel Gressel, Daria Semegen, Menachem Zur, Richard Cann, and Arthur

Kreiger, each of whom went on to have successful careers in music. All of the works on

this record were rendered at the Columbia-Princeton Music Center.

51

1

According to Paul Lansky’s website, mild und leise was the first electronic

composition that he ever composed. On that site he also describes the technologies

and compositional processes used in composing mild und leise. The piece was

composed in 1973 on an IBM 360/91 mainframe computer at Princeton University using

MUSIC 360. MUSIC 360 was a programming language created by Barry Vercoe for the

IBM Operating System/360. The sounds of the work were designed using the digital

implementation of FM synthesis, which had just been developed at Stanford in the late

1960s, and a filter written in Fortran IV to generate and process sound. The harmonic

language of the piece is constructed using “a multi-dimensional cyclic array based on

the” “Tristan” chord and its inversions. Lansky constructed this array by using George

Perle’s 12-tone modal system.2

What is interesting about mild und leise in relation to “Idioteque,” besides the fact

that Radiohead borrowed it, is that mild und leise is also based on borrowed material:

the “Tristan” chord. For many years, scholars believed that Wagner also borrowed the

“Tristan” chord from Franz Liszt: the lieder “Ich möchte hingehen,” by Liszt, contains

one passage that is nearly identical to Wagner’s opening measures of Tristan and

Isolde, which first present the “Tristan” chord. However, recent scholarship has asserted

that Wagner composed the “Tristan” chord himself and that the chronology between the

1 Elliott Antokoletz, “Music Concréte and Electronic Music,” in A History of Twentieth-Century Music in a Theoretic-Analytical Context (New York: Routledge, 2014), 379.

2 Paul Lansky, “My Radiohead Adventure,” http://paul.mycpanel.princeton.edu/radiohead.ml.html (accessed July 1, 2017).

52

two works shows that Liszt may have actually copied Wagner rather than vice versa.3

Regardless of the original source of the “Tristan” chord itself, Lansky uses the chord as

source material to create mild und leise and Radiohead borrows from mild und leise to

create “Idioteque.” This adds a nesting element to the borrowed material in Radiohead’s

“Idioteque.” It also positions both Radiohead and Lansky alongside the lineage of artists

and scholars who have based works on the “Tristan” chord. It is important to note that

despite using the “Tristan” chord as source material for mild und leise, the chord never

appears in its original form. Lansky abstracts the chord into intervallic relationships and

transforms those relationships using Perle’s modal system for pitch manipulation.

Lansky’s use of the “Tristan” chord is analogous to secondary literature on a topic:

Lansky never actually presents the chord in its original position or context, however all

of the material for mild und leise is derived from the “Tristan” chord.

In order to obtain the fullest picture regarding the significance of the “Tristan”

chord and its functions and how Lansky and Radiohead fit into the lineage of artists

responding to the chord, it is necessary to briefly review the impact of the “Tristan”

chord on late 19th- and 20th-century music and music scholars. The “Tristan” chord is

one of the most significant chords in the history of 19th-century. Enharmonically

equivalent to a half-diminished seventh chord, the harmonic function of the “Tristan”

chord in the context of the opening measures to the “Prelude” to Wagner’s Tristan and

Isolde is what has primarily captivated music scholars and composers, spawning music

3 Alexander Rehding, “TrisZtan: Or, the Case of Liszt’s ‘Ich möchte hingehn,’ in Nineteenth-Century Music: Selected Proceedings of the Tenth International Conference, eds. Jim Samson and Bennett Zon (Burlington, VT: Ashgate Publishing, 2002), 75-97. Rehding investigates the authorship and chronology behind the “Tristan” chord as it relates to “Ich möchte hingehen,” ultimately concluding that Wagner composed it first.

53

and scholarly literature in reaction to the chord to the present day. Music theorists have

approached tonal analysis of the “Prelude” to Tristan and Isolde in varying ways.

Harmonically, Arnold Schoenberg analyzes the opening passage of the “Prelude” in the

key of A minor using functional tonal harmony in Structural Functions of Harmony,

determining that the “Tristan” chord is functionally a iiø chord.4 Paul Hindemith analyzes

the “Prelude” contrapuntally in The Craft of Musical Composition, concluding that the

unique resolution of the “Tristan” chord is due to the progression of intervals from

dissonant to consonant, according to Hindemith’s own theories of counterpoint.5 More

recently, Dmitri Tymoczko analyzed the “Prelude” to Tristan as a case study in using

geometric spaces to model contrapuntal and harmonic motion in music with extended

tonality.6 The fact that theorists are able to employ a number of distinctly different

analytical methods to the passage, and arrive at valid conclusions, is a testament to the

chord’s functional ambiguity. This functional ambiguity caused a number of

musicologists to declare a crisis in Romantic harmony.7 Ultimately, this ambiguity led

some composers to reevaluate the concept of functional harmony altogether and to

reconsider the role of dissonance in music as well as their personal and musical

relationship to dissonant sounds. Arnold Schoenberg, for instance, asserted that

4 Arnold Schoenberg, “Chapter X: Extended Tonality,” in Structural Functions of Harmony, 2nd ed. (London: Faber and Faber, 1969), 77.

5 Paul Hindemith, “4. Richard Wagner, Tristan und Isolde, Prelude, Harmonic and Melodic Analysis,” in The Craft of Musical Composition, vol. 1, “Theoretical Part,” translated by Arthur Mendel (New York: Associated Music Publishers, 1942), 210-215.

6 Dmitri Tymoczko, “Chromaticism: The Tristan Prelude,” in A Geometry of Music: Harmony and Counterpoint in the Extended Common Practice (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011), 293-301.

7 “’Tristan’ chord,” Grove Music Online, Oxford Music Online, Oxford University Press, accessed October 15, 2017, http://www.oxfordmusiconline.com.lp.hscl.ufl.edu/subscriber/article/grove/music/28398.

54

“emancipation of the dissonance” was the logical conclusion of Romantic era extensions

to functional harmony.8 Schoenberg went on to create twelve-tone composition matrices

in an effort to subvert traditional harmony altogether. Debussy, in reacting to Wagner’s

extended harmonic language, composed with nonfunctional harmonies. Duke Ellington

addressed increasing harmonic ambiguity by identifying himself socially with the

dissonance, stating in a lecture on his music, “That’s the Negro’s life . . . Dissonance is

our way of life in America. We are something apart, yet an integral part.”9 Lansky’s mild

und leise is not just a continuation of this exploration of dissonance, but it is also an

homage to the legacy of Tristan itself. Radiohead, consciously or not, have positioned

themselves into this legacy as well by borrowing from a work that continues the tradition

set forth by Tristan.

Although both Lansky and Radiohead borrow their source materials for mild und

leise and “Idioteque,” respectively, both artists treat their borrowed materials in very

different ways. Lansky abstracts the “Tristan” chord and rearranges it with chords

synthesized by a mainframe computer.10 Radiohead uses a sample of Lansky’s work

and loops it to create a repetitive groove and a harmonic progression, which both

pervade “Idioteque.” The chord progression that Radiohead samples from mild und leise

8 Arnold Schoenberg, “Composition with Twelve Tones,” in Style and Idea (New York: Philosophical Library, 1950), 104.

9 Mark Tucker, ed., The Duke Ellington Reader (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993), 150.

10 Alex Ross, “ORBITING: Radiohead’s Grand Tour,” Alex Ross: The Rest is Noise, last modified May 15, 2008, http://www.therestisnoise.com/2008/05/chapter-5-orbiting.html (accessed July 2, 2017). On this website, Ross provides audio samples that demonstrate the progression from Wagner’s ‘Tristan chord’ to Lansky’s transformation of the chord in mild und leise to Radiohead’s use of the Lansky sample.

55

is reproduced below in Figure 2-1. The progression consists of four different voicings of

an Eb major seventh chord.

Example 2-1. The chord progression from Lansky’s mild und leise that Radiohead

borrows for “Idioteque.”11

mild und leise is not typical of Lansky’s later musical style (as should perhaps be

expected since it is his very first electronic work). Lansky has even stated that while he

was proud of the work, he had “hoped that [mild und leise] would quietly disappear into

my personal history . . . but this apparently was not to be.”12 Despite his initial wishes for

it to remain obscure, mild und leise has become one of Paul Lansky’s best-known works

because of Radiohead.

Use of Lansky’s mild und leise in Radiohead’s “Idioteque”

On the album Kid A, Radiohead used a significant amount of electronic effects

and instruments in addition to the live instruments that make up their core

instrumentation (two guitars, drums, bass guitar, as well as additional percussion and

synthesizers). The band consists of five members: Colin Greenwood (bass guitar),

Jonny Greenwood (guitar), Ed O’Brien (guitar), Philip Selway (drums), and Thom Yorke

(lead vocals). Some of the tracks feature no live instruments at all, comprised entirely of

11 Paul Lansky, “My Radiohead Adventure,” in The Music and Art of Radiohead, ed. Joseph Tate (Burlington, VT: Ashgate Publishing, 2005), 169.

12 Ibid., 169.

56

prerecorded samples and drum machines. “Idioteque” is one such track that exclusively

features electronics, with the exception of Thom Yorke’s voice. The electronic part was

created by Jonny Greenwood using a modular synthesizer.

The main thematic material for “Idioteque” is an incessant drum machine and a

chord progression played by what sounds like an unassuming synthesizer pad. The

synthesizer part, however, was not performed live as the listener might immediately

assume; it is actually a sample from Paul Lansky’s first piece of electronic music, mild

und leise.13 Besides a mention in the album credits, there is no indication within the

music itself that the synthesizer part is appropriated music. The only way for a listener

to know of the appropriation is through their own research or knowledge of the Lansky

work beforehand.

In an interview for Mixing It on BBC Radio 3, Johnny Greenwood explained his

process in creating the drum machine part and how Paul Lansky came to be featured in

“Idioteque” in the first place:

The true story behind that is that I built a drum machine, ok, out of old components, something just generating white noise, and something that was kind of opening and closing the white noise. It was sounding quite good, and I had a rhythm going, but I needed some chaos. And so I shamelessly put on some records on the turntable and tuned a radio in and just wanted to fill it up, because it was far too empty. And I gave Thom a recording of this, about half an hour long, and he cut it into pieces, and repeats it, repeats it, in sections. . . . There's this melody in it, that's really beautiful, and I couldn't remember how I made it, 'cause I was playing a keyboard as well. And I thought 'yeah, it must just be something, you know, I played'. It's only four notes. And it was only a few days later when we'd finished the song and spent, you know, days on it, that I put the same record back on and these four notes came out just clearly... And so I had to track down Paul Lansky. And the record was interesting, because it was made in 1974, when he was a student, and I wasn't sure what he was doing now, I didn't even know if he was still, you know, a musician or

13 Specifically, the sample is ten seconds long, pulled from 00:43-00:53 in mild und leise.

57

anything. This was a student competition record - who can make the best electronic music in 1974. And then I found out he was at Princeton, and a professor of music. So I wrote to him, and explained what I'd done, you know, a bit embarrassed, and sent him a copy of the recording. And luckily he liked it, or, you know, liked what we'd done with his music.14

According to this quote, it appears the part is so unassuming as a synthesizer part (to

listeners familiar with synthesizer patches) that even Greenwood forgot he borrowed the

sample until he was reminded when replaying the source record at a later date. The

incidental nature of Greenwood’s borrowing and the lack of any signification to the

listener regarding the act of borrowing tells us that Jonny Greenwood never intended for

listeners to necessarily recognize the source of the appropriated sample. However,

intended or not, the sample is recognizable to those that know its source and the Model

Listener would hold this knowledge. It is important to note that empirical listeners may

still enjoy “Idioteque” whether they are aware of the source of the appropriated music or

not. But the Model Listener must be aware of the appropriated material and its source in

order to create the most comprehensive interpretation of “Idioteque.” The interpretive

implications of this information will be explored in the “Analysis” subsection of this

chapter.

In the 1990s, Radiohead was actually sued by The Hollies over the song “Creep,”

which was Radiohead’s biggest commercial success. The Hollies claimed that

Radiohead stole the chord progression from their song, “The Air That I Breathe,” which

they wrote in 1974. The Hollies were successful in their suit and, as a result, the

songwriters of “The Air That I Breathe,” Albert Hammond and Mike Hazlewood, now

14 Johnny Greenwood and Colin Greenwood, interview by Robert Sandall and Mark Russell, Mixing It, BBC Radio 3, January 20, 2001, transcript available at https://citizeninsane.eu/media/uk/bbc/04/i11a_2001-01-20_bbcrad3.htm.

58

receive writing credits and royalties for “Creep.”15 On an archived version of the now

defunct website, alberthammond.com, there is a quote from Hammond in which he

describes the ordeal of suing Radiohead:

I don’t publish The air that I breathe, I only own the writer's end, so the publisher of the song, Rondor Music, when the song Creep came out, he felt it was a steal from The air that I breathe, and he sued Radiohead, and they agreed. Radiohead agreed that they had actually taken it from The air that I breathe. Because they were honest they weren't sued to the point of saying "we want the whole thing". So we ended up just getting a little piece of it.16

From the above quote, it seems that Radiohead are responsive to the copyright

concerns of other artists. And, perhaps to avoid the ordeal of being sued once more,

Greenwood was sure to receive explicit approval from Lansky to sample from mild und

leise. In an email exchange dated September 9, 2017, I contacted Lansky to get details

about whether or not Radiohead approached him for permission. According to Lansky,

Yes, they were very gracious about it. They gave me 20 percent of the royalties and after ten years offered me a very handsome buyout. I saved Jonny Greenwood’s original email but haven’t been able to find it recently. They also gave me free tickets to Radiohead concerts whenever they played in the NY area and also backstage passes. It was great to meet them. They are very sweet people.

The relationship between Lansky and Radiohead is significant in this regard and, while

it may not be imminently important to the empirical listener’s interpretation of the work,

the Model Listener is aware of this relationship and its interpretive possibilities. The

15 Melissa Locker, “11 Suspiciously Sound-Alike Songs,” Time, August 21, 2013, accessed, September 15, 2017, http://entertainment.time.com/2013/08/22/11-suspiciously-sound-alike-songs/slide/the-hollies-the-air-that-i-breathe-1974-vs-radiohead-creep-1992/.

16 Albert Hammond, “Creep”, Albert Hammond, 2012, accessed on Sept. 15, 2017, https://web.archive.org/web/20121011042328/http://www.alberthammond.com:80/song.php?id=426.

59

interpretive implications of this relationship will be explored in the “Analysis” subsection

of this chapter.

It is unlikely (though possible) that Johnny Greenwood or Thom Yorke knew that

mild und leise was based on the “Tristan” chord. As mentioned in the previous

subsection, Lansky never presents the actual “Tristan” chord in its original form

throughout mild und leise. This means that Radiohead does not borrow the “Tristan”

chord directly, but instead they borrow one of Lansky’s transformations of the chord.

Radiohead’s version of the “Tristan” chord is analogous to a tertiary source,

commenting on the secondary source that is Lansky’s mild und leise. This has important

implications with regards to the Model Listener, which will be analyzed below.

Constructing Model Listeners and Interpreting the Relationship Between Works, Creators, and Appropriators

The following sections will provide an analysis of Lansky’s mild und leise and

Radiohead’s “Idioteque.” The purpose of the analyses is to break down the relationship

between the work and its borrowed source material, as well as valid interpretations of

this relationship, to construct Model Listeners for each work. The Lansky analysis will

appear first, followed by the Radiohead analysis.

The final subsection of this “Analysis” section compares the Model Listeners of

mild und leise and “Idioteque” to each other. After comparing the purely musical

features of both works and constructing their respective Model Listeners in the

preceding sections, I compare the Model Listeners determine if they reveal any new

ways of listening to either work.

60

Construction of the Model Listener for Lansky’s mild und leise

On Lansky’s website he writes that mild und leise is based on George Perle’s 12-

tone modal system, which Perle succinctly describes in the “Preface” to his book

Twelve-tone Tonality in 1977. It makes sense that Lansky used Perle’s system, given

that Lansky was a student of Perle at the time and was working with Perle on

developing the 12-tone modal system. Using Perle’s method, Lansky writes, “I worked

out a multi-dimensional cyclic array based on [the ‘Tristan] chord as the harmonic basis

of the piece . . .”17 He also writes that the work uses FM synthesis. The fact that Lansky

provides us with such intricate detail of the work’s creation tells us three things: The

Model Listener must be familiar with FM synthesis, the ‘Tristan’ chord, and George

Perle’s 12-tone modal system. All of this is a tremendous amount of foreknowledge

befitting a work of music composed by an American composer working in academia in

the 1970s. While knowledge of FM synthesis and Perle’s system are necessary to the

Model Listener, the present analysis is most concerned with the ‘Tristan’ chord since it

is borrowed material.

The ‘Tristan’ chord is an icon that is indexical of an entire lexicon of academic

music analyses as well as a large amount of music also based on the ‘Tristan’ chord,

other than Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde. The chord is so significant in Western art music

history that its function and indexical value goes beyond the physical level of articles

and music. The chord is indexical of a fundamental shift in thinking and practice within

Western art music, influencing Debussy’s use of nonfunctional harmony and ultimately

providing the foundation for Schoenberg’s groundbreaking “emancipation of the

17 Lansky, “Radiohead.”

61

dissonance.” The Model Listener is familiar with this lexicon, as this would provide the

listener with the most information regarding the history of the ‘Tristan’ chord, as well as

Lansky’s place in the chronology surrounding the use and study of the chord. Whether

anybody would be familiar with this tremendous body of literature, other than perhaps a

scholar of the ‘Tristan’ chord, is not necessarily relevant; again the Model Listener is a

theoretical ideal that may not exist practically in any single listener. Though it is

important to note that the Model Listener is not a static concept; Emperical Listeners

can become Model Listeners by investing themselves in a work and acquiring the

necessary knowledge to interpret it. Empirical Listeners might still enjoy and validly

interpret “Idioteque” without knowing of the “Tristan” chord and its history. However, the

Empirical Listener who becomes familiar with the scholarly and musical responses to

the “Tristan” chord becomes closer to embodying the Model Listener.

Although Radiohead’s “Idioteque” was composed over twenty years after

Lansky’s mild und leise, the Model Listener would benefit from knowing about

Radiohead’s appropriation and recontextualization of Lansky’s work. Many listeners

only discover mild und leise today after learning that Radiohead borrowed it. Therefore,

“Idioteque” and mild und leise are both indexical of each other. Also, as will be

discussed in the next section, “Idioteque” is indexical of the ‘Tristan’ chord. So if the

Model Listener should be familiar with the index of ‘Tristan chord,’ then it follows that

they should be familiar with “Idioteque.”

By using the ‘Tristan’ chord, Lansky creates a dialogue between himself and this

enormous lexicon of musical study, while also adding his voice to that lexicon. This

reflects a time-honored tradition in Western art music of composers basing new works

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on innovative or popular ideas, expanding and abstracting the concept until a whole

new category is formed and the once-innovative idea is standardized. The so-called

“Pierrot” ensemble is a similar example: Schoenberg’s Pierrot Lunaire used a unique

chamber ensemble instrumentation for its time; now, that instrumentation is a standard

one followed by many chamber ensembles around the world. “L’homme armé” masses

are a similar example from the Renaissance, where composers borrowed a popular

melody so frequently that we can now refer to an entire category of masses by the

name of this borrowed tune. By borrowing the ‘Tristan’ chord for mild und leise, Lansky,

like many other composers of the 20th century (especially students), reinforced the

broader category of “’Tristan’ chord works.”

The next clearest connection that mild und leise has to the music of Wagner,

other than the ‘Tristan’ chord, is its harmonic language. The harmonic language in

Wagner’s music is notoriously ambiguous, stringing together streams of chords and

melodies without clear cadences. However, despite Wagner’s tendency to dance

around tonal centers without reinforcing any single one, the music is not quite what we

consider to be atonal. Likewise, Lansky’s mild und leise gives the listener a similarly

ambiguous effect with its harmonic language. This is because George Perle’s 12-tone

modal system is designed to create an effect similar to Wagnerian harmonic ambiguity,

despite being highly systematic, giving the listener glimpses of tonal structures without

defining a tonal center.

If we apply Eco’s categories of works as outlined in The Role of the Reader, mild

und leise is a distinctly open work. Even though the work references a unique element

as its source – the ‘Tristan’ chord – there is no specific conclusion or interpretation that

63

the work demands from the listener besides an abstraction of the chord as a musical

structure. Lansky transforms the ‘Tristan’ chord throughout mild und leise, further

abstracting the chord from its original use as an icon representing the character Tristan.

Wagner uses the chord as an icon for a specific character. Lansky, on the other hand,

abstracts the chord and uses it as pure source material, divorced from its original

context. Since the work is open, it does not have any necessarily correct interpretation.

However, there may be a correct set of interpretations. In Peircian terms, we might

categorize this work as a rhematic-indexical-legisign because it indexes the ‘Tristan’

chord as well as several traditions of 20th-century contemporary art music and it has a

broad possibility of correct interpretations rather than a single one.

Construction of the Model Listener for Radiohead’s “Idioteque”

Radiohead, whether they intended to or not, continued the artistic transformation

of the “Tristan” chord and added themselves to the indexical lexicon that is referenced

by the chord. Like mild und leise, this means that the Model Listener must also be

familiar with the indices referenced by the ‘Tristan’ chord. However, most listeners do

not realize that the sample is a sample in the first place, let alone the ‘Tristan’ chord.

A major reason that most listeners do not realize that the synthesizer part in

“Idioteque” is sampled from mild und leise is because of technological advances during

the 24 years that passed between Lansky creating mild und leise and Radiohead

releasing Kid A. The section of mild und leise that Radiohead chose to sample sounds

like a standard patch that might be found in a synthesizer manufactured during the

1990s when Kid A was recorded. Indeed, it would be easy for modern listeners of

popular music to believe that the part is simply performed live on a modern synthesizer

rather than rendered on a mainframe computer. Interestingly, Radiohead performed

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“Idioteque” live on Saturday Night Live on October 14, 2000 and reproduced the sample

in question by performing it live on a sampler instead of playing the Lansky sample

through in its fixed form. This seems to imply that Radiohead does not feel that it is

important for listeners to be aware of the sample source. Actually, since they performed

the part live, it seems that they do not care if listeners know that the part was sampled

at all, if only because most viewers of a live performance can not tell the difference

between a sampler or synthesizer.

This raises the question of whether or not the Model Listener needs to be aware

of the Lansky sample at all. Here, it is important to remember that the Model Listener is

a theoretical ideal and may not necessarily be embodied by any single person. Rather

the Model Listener is a way to model which knowledge is necessary for the most

thorough interpretation of a musical work. That means that a listener can fulfill parts of

the model without actually embodying the Model Listener and still technically be correct

in their interpretation. In the model for “Idioteque,” the Model Listener is aware of the

Lansky sample, however empirical listeners may not be aware of the sample. That does

not mean that these empirical listeners have an incorrect interpretation, it merely means

that their interpretation is less thorough than the Model Listener’s interpretation would

be.

Radiohead’s use of the Lansky sample turns the sample into an icon and

Radiohead’s use of that icon creates new indices for the sample. One new index

created by Radiohead’s recontextualization is “indebtedness.” Lansky is an important

figure in the chronology of Western art music history, particularly in the realm of

electronic music. Even though Radiohead does not make their borrowing obvious, the

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work itself is indebted to the Lansky sample for its creation, with Radiohead even

getting permission from Lansky himself to use the sample. And on a larger scale,

Radiohead and all other contemporary musicians that use electronics are indebted to

Lansky and all of the composers who worked at the Columbia-Princeton Music Center.

Another index created by the recontextualization of this sample is “simplification.”

Radiohead only borrows a ten-second sample from Lansky’s 18-minute work. They then

repeat that sample countless times to create a steady groove and a cyclic chord

progression, two concepts that are nowhere to be found in the complexity of Lansky’s

mild und leise. Whereas Lansky completely abstracted the “Tristan” chord itself,

Radiohead abstracts this moment of Lansky’s mild und leise by looping the sample to

create a groove and harmonic progression out of it. This is Radiohead’s dialogue with

the lexicon of the “Tristan” chord.

But, these interpretations are looking at the Lansky sample isolated from the

lyrics of “Idioteque.” To create the most thorough Model Listener for “Idioteque,” we also

need to examine the lyrics so we can determine what the song is about and how that

might relate to the music, especially the Lansky sample. The lyrics to “Idioteque” are

provided below:

[verse 1] Who's in a bunker? Who's in a bunker?

Women and children first And the children first

And the children

I'll laugh until my head comes off I'll swallow till I burst

Until I burst Until I

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Who's in a bunker? Who's in a bunker?

I have seen too much I haven't seen enough

You haven't seen it

I'll laugh until my head comes off Women and children first

And children first And children

[chorus] Here I'm alive

Everything all of the time Here I'm alive

Everything all of the time

[verse 2] Ice age coming Ice age coming

Let me hear both sides Let me hear both sides

Let me hear both

Ice age coming Ice age coming

Throw it in the fire Throw it in the fire

Throw it on the

We're not scaremongering This is really happening

Happening We're not scaremongering

This is really happening Happening

Mobiles squerking Mobiles chirping

Take the money run Take the money run

Take the money

[chorus]

[bridge]

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The first of the children [Repeat until fade]18

There is some discussion online regarding what the lyrics actually are in some

verses, since Radiohead did not distribute lyrics with the album. Different sources on

the Internet for lyrics conflict with one another. For instance, the lyrics above were

retrieved from Google Play and they write that the lyrics in the chorus are “Here I’m

alive.” However, on Genius.com, a website for listeners to crowd-source lyrics and leave

comments about lyrics, the lyrics in the chorus are listed as “Here I’m allowed.” In fact,

the listener commentary on Genius.com for these lyrics actually acknowledge the

“endless discussions around the internet” surrounding what these lyrics actually are; in

support of this discussion, the Genius.com commentary links to another discussion on

Reddit.com, where fans of Radiohead compare what they believed the lyrics to be.19 It

is also worth noting that to create some of the lyrics on Kid A, Thom Yorke used a cut-

and-paste collage technique outlined by Dadaist poet Tristan Tzara. The directions are

as follows, as reproduced in Marvin Lin’s book, Kid A:

• Take a newspaper

• Take a pair of scissors

• Choose an article as long as you are planning to make your poem

• Cut out the article

• Then cut out each of the words that make up this article and put them in a bag

18 Lyrics retrieved from Google Play Music, https://play.google.com/music/preview/Tl6wkfxqept55hirtszbkaxc6be?lyrics=1&utm_source=google&utm_medium=search&utm_campaign=lyrics&pcampaignid=kp-lyrics.

19 Genius.com, “Idioteque, Radiohead,” Genius.com, https://genius.com/Radiohead-idioteque-lyrics (accessed October 21, 2017); Reddit.com, “’Here, I’m alive,’ or ‘Here, I’m allowed’?” Radiohead subreddit, Reddit.com, entry posted August 26, 2016, https://www.reddit.com/r/radiohead/comments/4zpnq4/here_im_alive_or_here_im_allowed/ (accessed October 21, 2017).

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• Shake it gently

• Then take out the scraps one after the other in the order in which they left the bag

• Copy conscientiously

• The poem will be like you

• And here you are a write, infinitely original and endowed with a sensibility that is charming though beyond the understanding of the vulgar.20

Yorke stated publicly that he saved all of the lyrics he was planning to throw out, and

instead he cut them up, put them in a top hat, and pulled them out at random to create

lyrics; he used this technique to fight his writer’s block. And in 1999, a year before the

release of Kid A, Tzara’s instructions were actually posted to Radiohead’s official

website, so it is clear that Radiohead was aware of Tzara’s work. 21 Though this

generative process may seem to make the lyrics irrelevant, we cannot just disregard the

lyrics’ content. The process used to generate lyrics does not matter as much as the

actual result achieved, so while this may mean that the lyrics were randomly generated

it does not mean that a listener cannot still interpret them. An empirical listener might

not even be aware of the fact that some lyrics were randomly generated and, as is

evidenced by the user comments on Genius.com about Radiohead’s lyrics for

“Idioteque,” listeners will still create meaning out of the lyrics whether they were

intended to mean anything or not. For instance, user TheWolfAtTheDoor interprets the

chorus by writing:

I’ve always thought of this as being a criticism of the Internet, especially as 2000 was about the time it became widely available to the public. On the

20 Marvin Lin, Kid A, 33 1/3 (London: Continuum, 2010), 13.

21 Ibid., 17.

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internet, you can get anything whenever you want, a far stretch from the early 1990s and before.22

But, the Model Listener is aware of both the process and the actual lyrics. The process

does not render the lyrics meaningless to the Model Listener, rather it further informs

the listener’s understanding of how the lyrics might be properly interpreted. Given that

Tzara was a Dadaist poet, Radiohead’s use of Tzara’s directions places Radiohead

alongside the lineage of other Dadaist artists. In that vein, “Idioteque,” and perhaps all

of Kid A, is a commentary on the pretentiousness of listeners and critics of music. The

lyrics of “Idioteque” evoke such desperate imagery such as “bunkers” and “ice ages.”

This apocalyptic imagery combined with Dadaist poetic techniques that render text

meaningless is a sign to the listener that there are much bigger problems than music

that they should be worried about.

According to Eco’s theories, “Radiohead” is an open work like mild und leise. The

lyrics paint a collage of desperate images like “bunkers” and an “Ice age coming” with

equally desperate cliché phrases like “women and children first,” “take the money and

run,” and “we’re not scaremongering, this is really happening.” Besides a generally dire

tone warning of danger, there is no specific message contained in “Idioteque.” This

means that the listener is free to create their own interpretation based on the network of

lyrical and musical signs present in “Idioteque.” So, the Model Listener is aware of these

signs and all of the possible valid interpretations of them. This dissertation, of course, is

not going to exhaustively list every possible interpretation, but the Model Listener as an

ideal is aware of the possibilities. The following paragraphs will examine how the Model

22 TheWolfAtTheDoor, “Idioteque, Radiohead,” Genius.com, comment left June 18, 2016, https://genius.com/35709 (accessed October 21, 2017).

70

Listener can construct one such interpretation by looking at the lyrics of “Idioteque” as

they relate to Radiohead’s use of the Lansky sample.

The Lansky sample is not present throughout the entirety of “Idioteque”; there are

moments where the sample is left out of the texture. It may be instructive to examine

which lyrics the sample is coincident with, as this coincidence creates an indexical

relationship between the sample and those particular lyrics. There are only three

moments where the Lansky sample drops out of the texture: during the second verse,

during the bridge between the second chorus and the outro (“The first of the children”),

and during the outro itself.

The second verse uses imagery of “Ice age,” “fire,” and a desperate plea of

“We’re not scaremongering, this is really happening.” Even through a cursory Internet

search of these lyrics, one can find listeners and critics interpreting these lyrics as a

reference to the broader subject of climate change, a subject which was gaining political

attention at the time that Kid A was produced and a subject about which Thom Yorke

has been particularly outspoken. By removing the Lansky sample from this moment in

the music (replacing it with more high-frequency drum machine sounds), it clears up the

texture in a way that allows Yorke a platform to share his concern more clearly. The

removal of the sample creates a sense of emptiness or space in the texture, and the

spare texture left by the lone drum machine leaves the listener nothing else to take in

except Yorke’s plea. The next moment in the track where the sample is removed is the

bridge, which presents a thin texture of drum machine and a new sample being looped.

The texture of this section sounds thinner than the first time that the sample is removed.

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The work ends with the Lansky sample removed again and the sample from the bridge

transitioning into the next work. This is the sparsest texture in “Idioteque.”

Looking at a spectrogram of “Idioteque” reinforces the emptiness that we can

hear in the sections of the work that lack the Lansky sample. A spectrogram of

“Idioteque” is provided in Figure 2-2. The Lansky sample can be seen represented in

red and yellow in the lower frequency range on the spectrogram. Just before the

halfway point in chart, the red in the lower frequency is absent for a short time; this is

the second verse, the verse about climate change. At about 2/3 through the chart, we

can see that the red is missing again, and there is significantly more blue in the

frequency spectrum above 5Khz for some time; this is the bridge. At the end of the

chart, we can see that all the frequencies above 5Khz are blue and there is no red in the

lower frequencies. Corresponding with the lyrics about climate change in the second

verse, this thinning of the frequency spectrum creates an analogue to a changing

climate for the listener: the second verse lacks the Lansky sample, the bridge lacks the

sample and thins out the frequencies above 5Khz, and the outro lacks the sample and

all frequencies above 5Khz. By looking at the work through this spectral lens in relation

to the Lansky sample, one possible valid interpretation “Idioteque” (though, again, not

the only valid interpretation) is that “Idioteque” is a sonic representation of the

consequences of climate change.

Comparison of Model Listeners from mild und leise and “Idioteque”

mild und leise and “Idioteque” are both open works, so the Model Listener for

each work includes a broad network of possible valid interpretations. mild und leise is a

much more open work than “Idioteque” for a number of reasons, the most obvious being

that “Idioteque” has lyrics and mild und leise does not. Words, no matter how abstract,

72

conjure more concrete imagery in the minds of listeners than absolute music simply

because words represent concrete objects or ideas. mild und leise and “Idioteque” are

also completely different in their musical goals and both fall into different musical

genres. Besides being open works, the Model Listeners of mild und leise and

“Idioteque” look significantly different.

One of the significant connections between the Model Listeners of both works is

that the ‘Tristan’ chord is such a central focus. And both works treat the chord in

abstract ways that obscure the chord from its original source: Lansky abstracts the

chord through FM synthesis and George Perle’s 12-tone modal system, and Radiohead

further abstracts the chord by borrowing Lansky’s already transformed version of the

chord and turning it into a groove and harmonic progression. By using the ‘Tristan’

chord, even though abstracted and distanced from its source (or perhaps because of

that), Radiohead added a level of depth to “Idioteque” that perhaps elevates it to the

level of art music, especially if taken in the larger context of Kid A as an album.

By borrowing from Paul Lansky, Radiohead positions themselves alongside other

contemporary art music composers while simultaneously positioning Lansky’s music as

a source of acceptable sounds for popular music. Being familiar with the Model

Listeners of both works helps the empirical listener construct a more complete

interpretation when listening to either work.

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Figure 2-1. Spectrogram analysis of Radiohead’s “Idioteque.”

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CHAPTER 3 SEMIOTIC ANALYSIS OF CLOSED WORKS AND INDIRECT QUOTATIONS:

“BROWN” FROM JOHN OSWALD’S PLUNDERPHONIC

Background Information Regarding the Production and Presentation of “Brown” as it Appears on Plunderphonic

Preceded by “Black”

On the album, Plunderphonic, the track “Brown” is preceded by the track “Black.”

The program notes for “Black” read as follows: “Part one of James Brown’s Greatest

Bits. There’s a guest appearance by Prince.”1 WhoSampled.com, is a site that identifies

the samples used by artists in their recordings, as well as the precise point where those

samples appear in the track. According to WhoSampled.com, “Black” samples from

three tracks, listed below:

James Brown, “Funky Drummer” Prince, “Bob George” Public Enemy, “Security of the First World” The above list is not exhaustive, however, as there are many samples of various shouts

and grunts from different James Brown recordings that are unlisted. This fact leads us

to the problem of identifying samples and and how that relates to constructing the Model

Listener for this work. This problem will be discussed further below, in the subsection

“Problems in Comparing Model Listeners of Samples Used in ‘Brown.’”

Discogs.com is a website that is used by the audiophile community to trade

recordings and catalogue details about specific versions of different recordings. On this

site, one can find pictures of the original liner notes included with the original 1989

release of Plunderphonic. Interestingly, in these original notes Oswald lists “Black” and

1 John Oswald, “Album Notes,” http://www.plunderphonics.com/xhtml/xnotes.html.

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“Brown” together as a single track listed as “black/brown.” This implies for the listener

that the two tracks should be listened to as a single product. However, in the same liner

notes, Oswald provides a list of “suggested track sequences” for anyone who might

broadcast the album. This list is provided in figure 5-1. In this list of suggested track

Figure 3-1. Suggested track sequences from the “liner notes” of the original 1989

release of Plunderphonic.

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sequences, there are only two sequences that include the track “Brown (track 9),” and

zero sequences that include “Black (track 8),” let alone the two tracks together. Since

the works are intended to be listened to as a single work, it may be that both are meant

to be played in sequence in this list. However, what confuses the issue is that Oswald

specifically lists track 9, which is “Brown;” nowhere does he list track 8 in any

sequences. It is unclear why Oswald would list 9 instead of 8, or whether it is meant to

include both tracks in the listed sequence. Despite this confusion, this chapter is going

to focus on the track listed as “Brown,” which is track 9.2

What is most significant about the relationship between tracks “Black” and

“Brown” is that both tracks sample from the same primary artists. According to Oswald’s

program notes, “Brown” is a “Public Enemy accredited” track, and it also features James

Brown, among other artists. James Brown and Public Enemy are also the featured

artists on the track “Black,” which precedes “Brown.” This context has important

interpretive value for the Model Listener regarding the ways that the tracks interact and

how Oswald forces James Brown and Public Enemy to interact with each other.

Samples used in “Brown”

In the pictures of the original liner notes for Plunderphonic, found on

discogs.com, Oswald writes a page about how the album was created and organized

and how to listen to it. On this page, he describes the “James Brown tracks” as

“vehicles for various types and sources of appropriation.”3 “Brown” uses samples from

2 John Oswald, “Liner Notes,” https://www.discogs.com/Plunderphonic-Plunderphonic/release/231483.

3 Oswald, “liner notes,” https://www.discogs.com/Plunderphonic-Plunderphonic/release/231483.

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at least sixteen different recordings. According to WhoSampled.com, the following

recordings are all sampled on Oswald’s “Brown”:

Bobby Byrd, “I Know You Got Soul” Bomb the Bass, “Beat Dis (UK Extended Dis)” James Brown, “Blues and Pants” James Brown, “Cold Sweat” James Brown, “Funky Drummer” James Brown, “Get on the Good Foot” James Brown, “Get up (I Feel Like Being a) Sex Machine James Brown, “I Got You (I Feel Good)” James Brown, “Papa’s Got a Brand New Bag” James Brown, “Who Can I Turn To” M|A|R|R|S, “Pump Up the Volume” Public Enemy, “Don’t Believe the Hype” Public Enemy, “Night of the Living Baseheads” Public Enemy, “Rebel Without a Pause” Public Enemy, “Security of the First World” Public Enemy, “Terminator X to the Edge of Panic”4 However, this list is not exhaustive because in the program notes for “Brown,” Oswald

writes that he also borrowed recordings from Charlie Parker and Matt Dillon, neither of

whom are on the above list.5 The picture of the original Plunderphonic liner notes, found

on Discogs.com, gives a less specific list that helps us fill in the gaps for some of the

missing samples. This picture is shown in figure 5-2. In these notes, Oswald does not

cite every single James Brown song that he samples to acquire all of the various shouts

and grunts performed by Brown; rather, he lists all the James Brown samples under the

broad heading of “Selections from the James Brown audio Utterance and Riff Archive

(distilled from two dozen LPs).” This is a sample library of James Brown utterances that

Oswald has apparently collected himself. These original liner notes also identify the

4 WhoSampled, “Brown, by John Oswald,” http://www.whosampled.com/John-Oswald/Brown/samples/.

5 Oswald, “Album Notes,” http://www.plunderphonics.com/xhtml/xnotes.html.

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Charlie Parker sample as the “alto saxophone cadenza from ‘A night in Tunisia’.”

Oswald does not cite the Bobby Byrd recording in this list, though it is cited on

WhoSampled.com.

Figure 3-2. “Liner notes” from original 1989 release of Plunderphonic. This page shows

the sample sources for “black/brown” as listed by Oswald himself.

All of the artists listed above, in the list of sampled artists from whosampled.com,

have some connection to James Brown. Bobby Byrd had a history of performing and

recording with James Brown throughout both of their careers. And all of the recordings

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and artists listed above sample from James Brown (with the exception of Public

Enemy’s “Security of the First World” and the James brown recordings themselves, of

course).

There are two types of samples in Oswald’s “Brown”: samples where the source

is clear and samples where the source is unclear. Some of the samples’ sources are

clearly recognizable. For instance, the unique melodic sample from Public Enemy’s

“Terminator X to the Edge of Panic” is clearly identifiable from 00:07-:00:20 in “Brown.”

However, many of the samples in “Brown” have ambiguous sources, which has

important implications for the construction of the Model Listener. Oswald creates a

dialogue between samples with recognizable and unrecognizable sources – direct

quotations and indirect quotations. Samples of James Brown have the most ambiguous

sources because it is impossible to place every single grunt and shout uttered by Brown

since he makes such characteristic use of those sounds. Other samples are cut or

manipulated to the point of unrecognizability. This spectrum of how recognizable the

samples are plays an important role in the construction of the Model Listener.

Liner notes and commentary for Plunderphonic

Plunderphonic is currently available for digital download on plunderphonics.com,

and has been since 2004 according to discogs.com. On plunderphonics.com, there is

commentary provided for each track on Plunderphonic. However, this commentary does

not appear in the pictures of the liner notes from the original 1989 release of

Plunderphonic. So the question is: when did this commentary first appear?

The photographs of the original liner notes from the 1989 release of

Plunderphonic contain no program notes, only information about samples on each track

and a brief page where Oswald writes about how the album was created. However, on

80

plunderphonics.com there are program notes listed for every track, with a note stating

that “commentary on tracks featured on the debut PLUNDERPHONIC CD by Geo.Ray

Brain, public relations, Mystery Lab.” This statement seems to imply that this

commentary appeared on the debut release of Plunderphonic in 1989. However, it

seems that this is just a poorly worded sentence: rather than stating that this

commentary appeared on the initial release, the sentence is stating that this is new

commentary being provided by Geo.Ray Brain to the tracks that were featured on that

initial release. So the commentary was released with this digital release of the album.

This can be confirmed by digging through both plunderphonics.com and the pictures of

the original liner notes on discogs.com. None of this commentary appears in the

photographs of the liner notes from the 1989 Plunderphonic debut. Discogs.com,

however, catalogues different releases of albums, so if one looks at the page for the

2004 digital re-release of Plunderphonic, discogs.com does indeed list Geo.Ray Brain in

the album credits under two roles: “Liner Notes [Commentary by] – Geo.Ray Brain” and

“Management [Public Relations] (Geo.Ray Brain is also listed in the credits for the 1989

album as “Public Relations,” but there is no “liner notes” credit. Incidentally, it seems

that Geo.Ray Brain is a pseudonym used by Oswald.).6 So, it seems the notes first

appeared when Plunderphonic was digitally re-released, 15 years after it was ordered

destroyed. According to the photographs of the liner notes from that initial release,

found on discogs.com, it does not appear that these notes were available at that time.

6 Discogs, “Plunderphonic-Plunderphonic,” https://www.discogs.com/Plunderphonic-Plunderphonic/release/9239318.

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Constructing Model Listeners and Interpreting the Relationships Between Samples in “Brown”

Construction of the Model Listener for “Brown”

Unlike Radiohead’s “Idioteque,” from Chapter 2, Oswald provides the listener

with a program note for “Brown,” which reads:

J.B. soon takes control of this Public Enemy accredited cut and shows who's the Supreme Justice of Superbad. With guest appearances by Charlie Parker, Matt Dillon and a bevy of minor appropriators.7

This note tells the listener a number of things about how to listen to the work. All of the

artists featured on the work are “appropriators,” so all of the samples (with the exception

of the James Brown samples) are from artists who create their work from borrowed

materials. Borrowed materials in this case means both samples and musical quotes. It

tells the listener the identities of some of the artists featured on the track, but not all of

them. It also gives the listener a narrative through which to interpret the work. By writing

that James Brown “takes control” of this track from Public Enemy, Oswald invokes

imagery of conflict and resistance. This description also implies a trajectory of the work:

the track begins as a Public Enemy track, but ends up being about James Brown in the

end. This trajectory gives the listener a specific framework for interpreting the interplay

of samples on “Brown.” Taking all of this information into account, if we apply Eco’s

theories in The Model Reader to Oswald’s “Brown” then “Brown” can be interpreted as a

closed work. That means that Oswald is attempting to guide the listener to a specific

interpretation, or set of interpretations.

7 Oswald, “Album Notes,” http://www.plunderphonics.com/xhtml/xnotes.html.

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“Brown,” and all of Plunderphonic, is essentially musique concréte. There are no

synthesized sounds on the record; all of the material is derived from recordings of

preexisting music. As such, the Model Listener should be familiar with musique

concréte, particularly the techniques and processes used in the creation of tape works.

In the textbook, Introduction to Electro-Acoustic Music, Barry Schrader explicitly outlines

the five tape manipulation techniques available to musique concrete composers. He

devotes a chapter to each technique, explaining how to achieve each technique and

providing musical examples where each technique is used. The five techniques are as

follows:

1. Tape loops 2. Cutting and splicing 3. Speed change 4. Direction change 5. Tape delay8 These are the only techniques used in the creation of “Brown,” indeed they are the only

techniques used throughout the entirety of the Plunderphonic album. The above

techniques might be combined with one another as well, creating more complex

manipulations. To analyze the manipulation of samples in “Brown,” the Model Listener

must be familiar with the above techniques.

Because there is such a plethora of samples in “Brown,” it does not seem

necessary for the Model Listener to be aware of the source of every single sample. It

seems as if Oswald does not intend for the listener to recognize everything either, given

that some of the samples are manipulated to the point of being unrecognizable. There is

8 Barry Schrader, Introduction to Electro-Acoustic Music (New Jersey: Prentice-Hall, 1982).

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also counterpoint created between the samples that have recognizable sources and

those with unrecognizable sources.

At its core, “Brown” is about counterpoint at multiple levels. Oswald creates

surface-level counterpoint by chopping up samples and placing bits and pieces of

different samples from different artists next to one another. He also plays multiple

samples from different artists simultaneously, creating counterpoint vertically. This is all

purely musical. On a deeper level, these surface-level musical techniques have the

effect of putting different artists into counterpoint with one another. By placing different

artists next to and on top of each other within the same work, Oswald creates a

dialogue between these artists – a dialogue that could not exist without Oswald’s

intervention. Sometimes the artists even finish each other’s sentences; for instance, at

1:51-1:52, Oswald forces Flavor Flav and James Brown to say “don’t hit me” by

sampling from Public Enemy’s “Don’t Believe the Hype” and James Brown’s “Get on the

Good Foot.” It is at this level of interaction between artists, rather than between

samples, where Oswald creates the narrative that he outlines in his program note.

As mentioned, “Brown” is a closed work with a clear narrative structure. The

narrative that Oswald creates in “Brown” can be described as follows: “Brown” opens

with a sample of James Brown shouting “1 2 3 4!” If we consider the preceding track,

“Black,” as leading into “Brown’ then this makes since, since “Black” is based primarily

on samples of James Brown. This opening sample quickly transforms into a sample of

Chuck D from Public Enemy shouting “bring that beat back!” Public Enemy samples

dominate the next 32 seconds of the track. This immediate presentation of the two

artists whose work make up most of the track introduces the listener to the struggle that

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is about to play out over the next three-and-a-half minutes. From 2:05 to 2:19, Oswald

makes the struggle quite literal: samples are manipulated and cut short in ways that

emulate stereotypical fighting sounds from action films, with samples of James Brown’s

grunts punctuating each short impact sound. The action calms down for three seconds

with a sample of the drum break from Brown’s “Funky Drummer,” then at 2:22 there is a

sample of Brown shouting “shoot!” followed by a series of gunshots lasting until 2:25

and then a brief silence. Public Enemy does not appear again for the remainder of the

track; it appears as if James Brown has shot his opponents. This interpretation of these

twenty seconds is backed up by Oswald’s program note indicating that Brown “takes

control” of the track, ultimately showing Public Enemy and others “who’s the Supreme

Justice of Superbad.” This moment is the struggle for dominance between James

Brown and his competitors made aurally literal. Figure 3-3, below, provides a timeline

that clearly shows which artists’ samples are present in the track at any given time.

James Brown dominates the second half of the track between the gunshot samples.

Problems in comparing Model Listeners of samples used in “Brown”

In Chapter 2, it was simple to compare the Model Listener of Radiohead’s

“Idioteque” to the Model Listener of Paul Lansky’s mild und leise. Each of those works

borrow from single and specific sources: Radiohead from Lansky and Lansky from

Wagner. Comparison of Model Listeners for “Idioteque” and mild und leise is a relatively

simple task after the Model Listeners have been constructed.

“Brown” provides the listener with a new set of challenges when comparing

Model Listeners. “Brown” certainly has its own Model Listener, as do all of the works

sampled in “Brown.” However, Oswald is not putting individual works into dialogue with

one another; rather, Oswald is putting artists into dialogue with one another. This is

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significantly different from Radiohead, who create a dialogue between themselves and a

single work of Paul Lansky’s. Oswald is creating a dialogue between James Brown and

Public Enemy by using many different works by these artists. Constructing Model

Listeners for all of these works would be a monumentally time consuming task that

ultimately would not tell the listener much about how these individual works interact.

Oswald also makes it clear that he does not even want the listener to identify every

sample. In his liner notes for the 1989 release of Plunderphonic, Oswald does not list

every sample that he took from James Brown. Instead, he tells the listener that these

are utterances and riffs collected from over two dozen recordings. Some of the samples

are impossible to identify because of the way that they have been manipulated.

“Brown” is fundamentally about the counterpoint that Oswald creates between

the artists present in the recording. It is not necessarily about any specific works by

those artists. There are so many samples in “Brown” and many of the samples are from

recordings by the same artist, such as James Brown and Public Enemy. The listener

who is familiar with the artists behind the recordings will mentally group together the

recordings that are by the same artists. The amount of samples by the same artists that

are used in “Brown” shifts the thematic importance away from the level of samples and

into the meta-realm of artists themselves. In other words, the primary thematic elements

of “Brown” are not samples, but rather the artists behind the samples. It may be

possible to construct a large-scale Model Listener for interpreting all the work by a

particular artist. However, that task is beyond the scope of this dissertation, which is

only focused on the creation of Model Listeners for individual works that borrow from

other works.

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Figure 3-3. Chart displaying the entrance and exit of different artists’ samples over time in Oswald’s “Brown.”

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CHAPTER 4 CONCLUSION

I began this dissertation by identifying a problem in the literature regarding music

based on borrowed material: most of the literature focuses on how composers choose

to borrow music in a technical sense, rather than what the music is trying to tell us about

the borrowed material. Where scholars do approach interpretation of borrowed music,

they often use pragmatic approaches where the music is used to achieve an interpretive

agenda, rather than asking what the music chooses to do on its own. I chose to address

this problem by combining the literary theories of Umberto Eco with Thomas Turino’s

musical translations of Peircian semiotics to create what I referred to as the Model

Listener, which is a transposition of Eco’s Model Reader from literary theory to music

theory. The Model Listener can be used to determine whether a musical work is open or

closed – that is, whether it has many possible interpretations or one that the work

specifically asks of its listeners. After establishing whether a work is open or closed,

listeners can then construct a map of all possible interpretations for any piece of music

based on the signs contained in that work. Turino’s work allows listeners to define the

specific relationships between signs, indices, and interpretants in a work so that

potential meanings can be created.

Chapter 2 demonstrated how to construct a Model Listener for works based on

direct quotations of other works. “Idioteque” by Radiohead and mild und leise by Paul

Lansky are both open works, according to Eco’s The Role of the Reader. While both

works have that much in common, they have significantly different Model Listeners. The

most significant fact linking both works is that they are both based on the ‘Tristan’ chord:

mild und leise uses the chord as source material and “Idioteque” borrows Lansky’s

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transformation of the chord to create a groove and harmonic progression. In both cases,

the ‘Tristan’ chord is completely recontextualized, feeding off of the indexical value of

the chord while simultaneously adding new information too it. The works are otherwise

unique in their own right and, while indexical of each other because of borrowed

material, they do not have much to say about one another.

Chapter 3 demonstrated how to construct a Model Listener for a closed work that

is based on preexisting material. To determine that “Brown” is closed, listeners must

read the program note. There, Oswald outlines a narrative structure wherein James

Brown “takes control” of the work from Public Enemy. Using this narrative provided by

Oswald, listeners can make sense of the interplay between the artists featured on the

track. After a brief “fight scene,” the struggle comes to a head with James Brown

shooting, and ultimately eliminating, all of the other artists on the track.

A major problem in “Brown” is source identification. I have pored through the

original liner notes released with the 1989 debut of Plunderphonic, as well as the

samples identified on WhoSampled.com, to identify most of the samples used in

“Brown.” Ultimately, however, this difficulty in source identification becomes an integral

part of the Model Listener: the samples used are not as important as the artists behind

those samples and the ambiguity of sample sources reinforces the narrative that

underlies the piece. Oswald uses so many samples from the same artists in the work,

that he is not putting the samples into dialogue with each other so much as he is putting

the artists into dialogue with each other. Indeed, it is clear from Oswald’s own liner

notes and the manipulation of some of the samples that he does not intend the listener

to identify every single sample. It is more important that the listener recognize the artists

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behind the recognizable samples, and treat the unrecognizable samples as musical

counterpoint. Fundamentally, “Brown” is about counterpoint in two ways: on a purely

musical level where the samples are in counterpoint, and on a deeper level where the

artists behind the samples are in counterpoint and dialogue with each other.

In this dissertation, I limited my case studies to works that borrow material from

other works. I did not study any purely acoustic music and the borrowed material was

limited to samples. However, the models constructed within this dissertation can apply

to nearly any type of Western music. The Model Listener is a process by which listeners

may construct a network of possible interpretations for any given work. Even though this

dissertation is limited in scope, the concepts apply well beyond the works studied

herein. Further research in this area may explore how Model Listeners are created for

other specialized niches of music; even within the realm of scholarship surrounding

borrowed music, there is room for more research on how to establish Model Listeners

for works based on quotations rather than samples, cover versions of songs, or model

compositions.

The field of studying music composed based on existing music would benefit

from a greater focus on listener reception. As mentioned, most of the literature

surrounding borrowing focuses on how composers borrow rather than why they borrow.

However, listeners of Western music often question what significance the borrowed

material has for the interpretation of the work. The research in this dissertation applies

to listeners of art music and popular music alike, however there is great potential for

amateur listeners as well as scholars. Listeners that are not formally trained in music

may not be as concerned with the techniques involved in borrowing as much as they

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are concerned with how to make sense of the musical product as a whole. Rather than

asking why the empirical author of a work made the choices that they made in creating

that work, this dissertation provides a systematic way of interpreting music from a

listener’s perspective so that the listener can know how to best receive the choices

made by the author. The empirical listener is impossible to avoid – we are all empirical

listeners. However, this dissertation provides the tools by which an empirical listener

may construct a model for listening so that they can be aware of all possible valid

interpretations of a work. Once a listener models the potential interpretations, problems,

and historical and intertextual context of a work, they may become closer to the Model

Listener for that work. The closer that a listener is to understanding the Model Listener

for a work, the more thorough of an interpretation they can have of that work.

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APPENDIX A BOUGHT AND SOLD

Program Note

That familiar tune you love is up for sale, and everybody’s buying it! Don’t miss out,

make it yours now!

Object A-1. Sound file of “Bought and Sold” (.wav file 75.5 MB)

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APPENDIX B THIS MACHINE KILLS FASCISTS

Program Note

Dedicated to the memory of Heather Heyer.

This work was inspired by the “Unite the Right” neo-Nazi rally in Charlottesville, VA in

August 2017 and the subsequent murder of Heather Heyer at the rally. The first half of

this work juxtaposes footage of turn-of-the-century fascists in Italy and Germany with

footage of modern-day fascists in Europe and America. Accompanying this footage of

fascists is music composed by prisoners of Nazi camps. The works borrowed are

Wolfgang Langhoff’s “Die Moorsoldaten,” Martin Rosenberg’s “Jüdischer Todessang”

(Jewish Death Song), and Olivier Messiaen’s “Quatuor Pour la Fin du Temps.” The

second half of the work is an international rejection of fascism based on Woody

Guthrie’s anti-fascist anthem, “All You Fascists Bound to Lose.” Videos of 40 different

artists performing their own versions of the song are combined in different ways.

National flags are used to show the various nationalities of both the artists and fascists

represented in the work. Many of the artists represented in the second half of the work

are from the same countries represented in the first half of the work, demonstrating that

even though fascism is back on the rise globally it faces resistance at every turn.

Object B-1. Video file of “This Machine Kills Fascists” (.mp4 file 368.1 MB)

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APPENDIX C EAVESDROPPERS

Garrett Austin Hecker

Eavesdroppers

(2017)

unscripted version

For String Quartet

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BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH

Garrett Austin Hecker (b. 1989) is a composer and percussionist from South

Florida. His music explores stylistic hybridity, socio-political subjects, and humor.

Hecker has presented compositions nationally and internationally at such events as the

Florida Contemporary Music Festival, New Music on the Point, Charlotte New Music

Festival, PARMA Festival, Toronto International Electroacoustic Symposium, and the

INTIME Symposium with performers such as Kevin McFarland, Don-Paul Kahl, Taylor

Barbay, Elise Adriana Jimenez, Anatoly Larkin, Ivan Trac, IKTUS Percussion, Great

Southern Wind Quintet, and Nuclear Music. He completed his PhD in Music

Composition in 2018 at University of Florida, where he also earned his Master of Music

Composition in 2013. He earned his Bachelor of Music in Composition from University

of Miami in 2011. Hecker’s primary composition teachers have been James Paul Sain,

Paul Koonce, Paul Richards, and Scott Stinson. He is currently an adjunct professor of

music at Santa Fe College.