Borrowing and creating art

 Montaigne imitated his teachers and borrowed heavily from them. The topic interests me because I think that borrowing is a common, normal, healthy part of creating art.

Antonin Dvořák and Charles Ives were among the many composers who borrowed folk tunes. You can find Internet threads on the best jazz versions of the Rodgers and Hammerstein tune “My Favorite Things.” I’m not sure the concept of hip-hop is viable if you rule out sampling.

I understand that the technological revolution has made theft and plagiarism tragically common. But if we eliminated imitation and borrowing from music, we’d eliminate most of the stuff I find interesting.

Montaigne sometimes wondered whether he’d written anything that wasn’t in Plutarch or Seneca. I enjoy Plutarch and Seneca. But I would choose Montaigne if I could read only one of the three. Similarly, I can become fascinated by what jazz musicians did with marginally interesting pop tunes.

I wish that our thinking would catch up with our technology and that we could find a more honest way of talking about how human beings create art.

One small point about the language we use in our thinking: Before the Internet, the word appropriation was part of my vocabulary. Without thinking about it, I just stopped using it. When I see the word now, I’m suspicious.