The Process of Modulation in Musical Collage

By exploiting the multivalent implications attendant on principles of quotation, disjunction and juxtaposition, musical collage works of the 1960s, like their analogues in the visual arts and literature, call into question traditional notions of unity. However, these compositions also incorporate new modes of continuity which lend a distinctive expressive force to music of this kind. The present article outlines organisational precepts which composers including Luciano Berio, George Rochberg and Bernd Alois Zimmermann have used to achieve a degree of syntactic mediation: overlap, chromatic insertion and rhythmic plasticity. The common occurrence of these principles in works exhibiting widely divergent stylistic predispositions indicates that they may constitute important technical aspects of this particular repertoire.