Intertextuality
Good morning. Let’s start with a little academic vocabulary: intertextuality. Julia Kristeva coined the term, and she said: "Every text builds itself as a mosaic of quotations; every text is absorption and transformation of another text." The word looks like jargon, but it’s a very useful concept. In musical terms: the work is not just the piece, or song, itself; it is the piece, plus its antecedents, plus the pieces it quotes or evokes, plus—everything. Intertextuality in literature or music sees artworks in constant dialogue in other artworks. Of course, like any dialogue it depends on the participants and the listeners, who will make connections based on personal experience and disposition. And today’s Biblical text is from Kohelet (Ecclesiastes) 1:9, "there is nothing new under the sun."