Composers of all time endeavor to grant their work referential meanings and have developed multiple techniques to achieve such a common goal. The text depiction and expression by Josquin des Prez (1450-1521), the second practice by Claudio Monteverdi (1567-1643) and musical quotation by Luciano Berio (1925-2003), for example, were some famous attempts in the history of music. In musical quotation, reference is more precise than other techniques because the quoted material itself already bears inherent meanings.

Musical quotation is a technique to directly quote existing musical segments and can guide the audience to associate with specific plots, scenes and themes to which the music is meant to refer. Despite its early appearance in the 13th century, this technique continues to take on a crucial role throughout the history of musical composition ever since. Musical quotation has re-emerged in the face of the decline of modernism in the 20th century, and has even become the representative technique of many composers and featured as one of the principal characteristics of post-modernism.

In this thesis, how different composers connect referential meanings with music will be studied with a focus on musical quotation. The first chapter consists of a review on the tradition of the relations between text and music, followed by a definition of musical quotation; the second chapter provides a chronological introduction of musical works with musical quotation; the third chapter finds an analysis of the quoted materials in the 3rd movement of Sinfonia by Luciano Berio; and the fourth chapter will be an elaboration on how I interpreted the meanings of chapter 4 from the Gospel of John in the Bible through composing Thirst, my composition for mezzo-soprano and a large chamber orchestra, using various compositional techniques including musical quotation.