Are Popular Styles Appropriate Contrafacta? Part 2

Are Popular Styles Appropriate Contrafacta? Part 2

           An example of contrafactum was the setting of Charles Wesley’s hymn text Hark! the Herald Angels Sing to a melody from Mendelssohn's Gutenberg cantata Festgesang by William H. Cummings.  Palestrina’s Mass Assumpta et Maria is a contrafactum (parody) of his motet Assumpta et Maria. Note that the term “parody” in the sixteenth century was not used in a pejorative sense.  It simply means that there was a borrowing of melody, harmony and rhythm of another musical composition which was composed in like manner to other music written especially for sacred music.

          Why all the fuss about musical parody or contrafactum?  Any sacred musical praxis which is justified by mistakenly believing that using many popular musical idioms is comparable to historic use of secular contrafacta is faulty. Observing the vast chasm between historic church music and many popular musical idioms of the late twentieth and early twenty first century clearly debunks any music philosophy or praxis which tries to draw parallels between what is going on in modern church music and historic use of contrafactum.

           It should be pointed out that the mixing of secular styles of music with sacred texts is often done in jest by many arrangers today. This hocking of the arranger’s musical skills, which is done many times to simply prove that he or she can amalgamate the world’s music with sacred text, is hot an intellectually honest endeavor.  A style of music should be married to a sacred text because the composer or arranger believes that the genre being used is the best vehicle for the presentation of the text.  Certainly to utilize a musical parody in the pejorative sense is a sacrilegious musical effort on the part of the composer or arranger. 

Quote for the Day

"And you, my young friend, let this noble, wholesome, and cheerful creation of God [music] be commended to you. By it you may escape shameful desires and bad company. At the same time you may by this creation accustom yourself to recognize and praise the Creator. Take special care to shun perverted minds who prostitute this lovely gift of nature and the art with their erotic rantings; and be quite assured that none but the devil goads them on to defy their very nature, which would and should praise God its Maker with this gift, so that these. . . purloin the gift of God and use it to worship the foe of God, the enemy of nature and of this lovely art" (Quoting Martin Luther) Protestant Church Music, by Frederick Blume, New York: W.W. Norton & Co., 1974, p. 10.