Stefan De Schepper - Various Composers: Patchwork (2023)

Patchwork is sometimes dismissed as folk art, as a cottage industry, as a hobby and as unpretentious dilettantism, although anyone who has tried their hand at mixing and matching motifs, textures, appliqués and stitching will agree that there is a great amount of skilled craftsmanship and intellectual labour involved: fantasy and imagination – a patchworker had best possess a keen inner vision that can unite the most diverse patches into a meaningful whole even before the first stitch is made; the ability to tell a story and an expressive flow – whoever makes quilts wants their stories to be passed on, memories to be kept, and hopes and promises to be shared; narrative sensitivity and symbolic insight – shapes, motifs and colours often have meanings that are deeply rooted in past and tradition. The idea that beauty can exist in organised multiplicity also extends to art. Think of découpage — the assembly of paper cuttings — or of collage, in which not only different elements but also diverse materials are often assembled in various combinations, glued, and stacked.

In music, this principle has been translated into a range of genres and compositional techniques such as centonisation (the combination of melodic formulas into a synthetic composition) or incatenatura (the linking together of pieces of existing music, as in the Renaissance quodlibet. The pastiche is similar, being an operatic variant in which borrowed fragments are stitched together and given a new libretto to create a new work. The contrasting canzone of Frescobaldi and his contemporaries were even termed patch canzone.

It is also possible to think about music as patchwork in a broader sense; we need merely to consider polyphony, in which voices slide horizontally and vertically over each other with chords and imitative fragments as connectors, or Baroque music in which rhetoric directs the order, repetition and linking of its themes.