Did classical composers of music borrow from each other in a similar manner to the way modern artists cover or sample other artists?

by Yosho2k

Are there any examples of famous orchestral composers lifting elements (with or without permission) of their compositions from other composers? Was there any similarities to the modern transactional nature of borrowing from an artist?

harpsichorddude

To begin, musical borrowing has a long history, spanning classical music well before what we'd call "orchestral composers," or even the idea of permission being especially relevant. One textbook example is that "L'Homme Arme," a song well-known across Europe was used as the starting point for a number of masses spanning both the 15th and 16th centuries. I've written elsewhere in this subreddit about how JS Bach borrowed a lot of melodies from his predecessors a century or two later. Mozart also famously wrote a set of variations on Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star.

But even if this answers the question in your title line, it doesn't answer the question in the body of the post. JS Bach precedes the modern idea of "orchestral music," and quite likely the idea of music ownership. I'm no scholar of copyright law, so I can't comment there, but the very idea of a "musical work" as something to be left for the ages is quite recent, dating from the same 19th-century Germany that gave us the idea of the "orchestral composer." (I've talked a bit about this on another sub.) Likewise, both of my examples above referenced music that was already in common circulation, whether on the street or in church. With folksongs, who was there to even ask permission from?

So we might narrow down the question to: are there situations where a composer, when writing a piece for orchestra, included material from another composer? The answer is again yes. It's hard to make any sweeping generalizations, but most of the ones I know of are of current composers borrowing from much older, or at least more established, composers---in a sense, using their music to claim their own legitimacy as an heir to the "great masters," or some such rhetoric. A few examples:

From the 19th century:

From the 20th century (and a bit after), with more of a twige of irony:

If we were to extend the field to borrowings from folksongs, or popular music, or jazz, the list would be much longer, but I'm trying to take your question a bit more literally.