A past that lasts: reworking music and creating history at the dawn of modernity

Musical works, like literary and visual ones, exist in relation to other preexisting works. Intertextuality is the very condition of artistic creation, and therefore all musical works are to some degree intertextual. Between the mid-fifteenth and the early-seventeenth century, however, emphatically and self-consciously intertextual composition acquired unprecedented importance. Why? Thisarticle offers a new perspective on this crucial question, taking its cue from recent studies of imitatio and its cultural meanings by literary historians and theorists. Focusing on the reworkings of a celebrated model, Johannes Ockeghem’s chanson “Fors seulement,” I discuss intertextual musical works as links in a chronological chain of pieces considered worthy of being remembered, reheard, and recomposed. These lines of authoritative compositions linked by exhibited intertextual connections testify to a perception of the past no longer as a generic “before,” but as history in the (early) modern and emphatic meaning of the term.