contrafactumn.
/kɒntrəˈfaktəm/ Music.
In medieval and Renaissance music, the rearrangement of a vocal composition whereby the music is retained and the words altered, as the substitution of a sacred text for a secular one, or vice versa.
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contrafactum1940
1940 G. Reese Mus. Middle Ages (1941) xi. 314 Latin texts were again generally favoured, and many contrafacta are to be found of texts originally French.
1941 P. H. Lang Music in Western Civilization (1942) ix. 210 An interesting phase of this transformation of Catholic Church music into Evangelical-Lutheran was the so-called contrafactum (from the Latin contrafacere), consisting of a textual arrangement which changes the meaning of secular texts to sacred ones. Various German and Latin hymns to the Virgin and other Catholic church songs were paraphrased so as to fit the tenets of the new creed.
1960 D. J. Grout Hist. Western Mus. (1962) viii. 230 A particularly important class of chorales were the contrafacta or parodies of secular songs, in which the given melody was retained but the text was either replaced by completely new words or else altered so as to give it a properly spiritual meaning.
1967 L. Lockwood in J. LaRue Aspects of Medieval & Renaiss. Mus. 573 ‘Parody’ has even been applied to compositions..in which mere verbal substitution of text takes place, with no musical transformation whatever—a relationship properly restricted to the category of contrafactum.
1968 Listener 19 Dec. 834/2 New words are continually being added to recognisable old tunes, reverently or not, and depend for their effectiveness on our knowing the ‘original’. This ranges from Naafi versions of ‘Colonel Bogey’, contrafacta to Sullivan, English pop songs of the 16th century, to the ‘parody’..techniques of Renaissance composers.
This entry has not yet been fully updated (first published 1972; most recently modified version published online June 2018).
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n.1940