Are Popular Styles Appropriate Contrafacta?
Part 1
As the reader can
now see the discussion of the kind or kinds of music the Wesleys and Martin
Luther utilized with their sacred music has been going on for several years
among modern writers od church music.
The casual reader may not have
had the time or have recognized the need to check out the validity of these
written assertions about Luther’s (and the Wesley’s) sacred music. It should be pointed out that even if John
Wesley, Charles Wesley, or Martin Luther were advocates of using bawdy music, which they were not; their use of this
music would not have constituted Divine approval of such music with sacred
lyric texts. Although there is room and
justification for the use of a variety of styles of music with sacred lyric
texts, it does not take very much musical logic or spiritual discernment to
rightly hypothesize that not every style of music or not every tune will make a
proper concomitant to the message of the gospel of our Lord and Savior Jesus
Christ.
Because the
history of contrafuctum (derived from
Latin) has become so esoteric in the last one hundred years, its connection to
sacred music is misunderstood by many secular and Christian musicians. Therefore, it is sometimes misrepresented by
many writers in church music. The use of
a secular melody with a religious text without substantial change to the music. It may also be correctly
defined as music with the absence of contrast between 'secular' and 'sacred'
styles of music in the Middle Ages which left no resultant contradistinction
between the melodies, harmonies and rhythms if sacred and secular music. For the reasons mentioned above composers,
including those who composed their own music as a concomitant to sacred
didactic lyric poetry, sometimes borrowed a secular song and used it either in
part or whole in their sacred music compositions (contrafacta) . The concept
of contrafactum also included the
substitution of one text for another without substantial change to the music.
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