The concept of intertextuality was originally developed in the context of poststructuralist literary theory by Julia Kristeva, who introduced the term in the mid-1960s in connection with her engagement with Mikhail Bakhtinʼs notions of dialogism and heteroglossia. Intertextuality is currently taken to refer to the co-presence of different texts within agiven text, or, in Kristevaʼs words, to the idea that “every text is the absorption and transformation of another text” –an idea later expanded by Gérard Genette as part of the wider concept of transtextuality. The focus on inter-and transtextuality has reflected a widespread tendency in literary and cultural studies to move away from the inherited notion of the text – or the work of art – as a unified, self-contained structure, towards a view that extends the textual paradigm to virtually any signifying nexus and emphasises the relational nature of all cultural productions.Since the 1970s, the notion of intertextuality has been appropriated by many disciplines, including musicology, giving new impetus to the discussion of well-established but somewhat ill-defined topics such as “borrowing”, “imitation”, or “influence”, as well as drawing attention to the roles of the performer and the listener in the production and circulation of meaning. David Beard and Kenneth Gloag, for instance, have written: “The act of reading or, in the context of music, listening, involves tracing echoes and reflections of other texts. Therefore, all music can in some sense be seen and heard as intertextual”, and they go as far as to suggest that, in the context of twentieth-century music, “the inherent intertextuality of music has been enlarged upon as a compositional practice”.In spite of the widespread use of the term in musical literature, however, it would seem that the notion of intertextuality as applied to music has not yet been made the focus of sustained critical attention from a theoretical, methodological and aesthetic perspective. This conference aims to address the theme in a pluralistic way, by focusing in particular on the conceptual questions involved in the application of the notion of intertextuality to music studies. It also aims to provide a background for the analysis of relevant case studies, to be drawn from the widest possible range of 20th-and 21st-centurystyles and repertoires, including art music, music for the stage and the movie screen, jazz, folk and popular music.