Interpolation is the new contrafacta: on Rick Beato’s discussion of interpolation in pop music in light of contrafacta in 16th century Lutheran musical practice

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j_9Larw-hJM

Rich Beato recently discussed how recent popular songs display such obvious debts to songs from the last century that the question he asks is “Isn’t this just stealing?” I'm not going to address that question. Instead I'm going to ask a new question, "Has this kind of overt musical borrowing of existing musical materials and super-imposing a new text on old music happened before?"  The answer to that is yes and that this has happened for centuries in Christian church music traditions.  But first ... 

Rick Beato discusses a concept called interpolation, which in this case means to take a melody from an existing popular song, giving it new lyrics, and recording it from scratch without actually sampling the song from which the melody has been borrowed.
 
Beato describes interpolation as a bit of a puzzle, how it’s possible for you to take an existing melody that maybe someone else wrote, adding new lyrics and then “it’s yours?” This practice was so commonplace in sixteenth century German-speaking lands music historians refer to the practice as contrafacta, where German Lutherans might take a melody such as the chant Veni Sancte Spiritus and rework it into a German vernacular tune that preserves the core of the chant but makes it accessible to non-Latin speakers.  Now there is the old saw that Luther and Lutherans just transformed old bar melodies into hymns but that view has largely been dismantled. 
 
Chiara Bertoglio published a door-stopper of a book around 2017, summarizing research into how Lutherans in the sixteenth century did not necessarily just add Christian texts on secular tunes but what they did frequently do was adapt existing Catholic music into German vernacular.  Contrafacta was the practice of imposing a new text on an established musical work, which could even be a polyphonic work. A simple potential case study for an English-language contrafacta would be if someone took a slow Latin chorale setting of Verbum Caro Factum Est and rendered it into English with a vernacular text “And the Word Became Flesh”; the music itself would not be changed at all, only the text, but this could and would be treated as a “new” work and there were composers in the sixteenth century who specialized in this kind of re-composition or, if you will, “sampling”.  Not only was it not frowned up in nascent Lutheranism this kind of practice could be regarded as an act of musical heroism and public service, seeing to it that Lutherans would not deprive themselves of the best music the Catholic tradition had to offer in the process of differentiating themselves from Catholicism on doctrinal issues such as the nature of justification by faith and rethinking aspects of how liturgy “worked”.
 
If you have an extravagant amount of time (or are a lightning fast reader) I suggest Bertoglio’s book.  I’m only a few chapters into it but it’s a formidable survey of the practices of Christians in Europe in the sixteenth century and all the debates and practices and theories they had about music.
 
https://www.chiarabertoglio.com/reforming-music
https://www.degruyter.com/document/doi/10.1515/9783110520811/html?lang=en
Reforming Music : Music and the Religious Reformations of the Sixteenth Century
 
eBook
Published: March 6, 2017
ISBN: 9783110520811
 
Hardcover
Published: February 20, 2017
ISBN: 9783110518054
 
Paperback
Published: November 19, 2018
ISBN: 9783110636819
 
So when Rick Beato asks “Isn’t this just stealing?” an answer to that can be:

1.       In the sense of overt recycling, maybe but

2.       Modal mutation and reharmonization of known musical phrases isn’t that literal (I did listen to the songs Beato references)

3.       Per the Dua Lupa reference, contrafacta obviously still exists in the 21^st century, it just involves lawyers

Back in the sixteenth century lawyers were not arguing over musical borrowings.  Lawyers (if they were named John Calvin!) were arguing about literally more religious doctrinal issues in the sixteenth century.  What people call “interpolation” in 21^st century popular music has a precedent in early modern European Christian liturgical music. The differences, among many, between “then” and “now” is that in the long 19^th century (let’s say between 1780 and 1920) a doctrine emerged in northern trans-Atlantic philosophy and aesthetics that touted the power and value of originality among Artists who were supposed to be genius enough to come up with their own ideas and not just recontextualize, revise, or even literally recycle existing pieces of music with new texts and call it new music.  That was not how Lutherans rolled between the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries.  Johann Sebastian Bach was not really the kind of person to feel bad about super-imposing a new cantata text on a previously written piece of music and calling the result a new musical work. 

If you want a short and fairly readable primer on Bach’s late career self-borrowing Daniel Melamed’s
Listening to Bach: The Mass in B Minor and the Christmas Oratorio is a good start.  And for a review …
https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2018/12/20/bach-master-recycler/
 
Historically the response of “they just don’t care” was the more normative response.  It was in the wake of Romanticism that “isn’t this stealing?” was more likely to become the musician’s default response.  This is not to defend all behaviors of musical borrowing without citation or credit.  Far from it.  But since Beato has obviously been baffled by what “interpolation” is supposed to be taken for and is asking, I think, in good faith, “Isn’t this stealing?” this would be exactly where people steeped in the history of what many call “classical music” in general and liturgical music in Christian European practice in particular, can jump in and discuss.  Happily adding new texts to old music was considered a good thing in nascent Lutheranism. Chiara Bertoglio tours the sixteenth century and has noted that within early Lutheranism the boundaries between what we might now call highbrow and lowbrow musical styles and forms were all considered permeable, endlessly negotiable boundaries and it was not considered a bad thing to make a new German chorale on an old Catholic plainchant, and it wasn’t even considered a bad thing to create a German vernacular liturgical text adapting a Psalm and super-imposing it on, say, an old Latin language choral work.  The whole concept of intellectual property as taken for granted in 20^th century Anglo-American popular music had not yet arrived. 

So if we ask "Isn't this stealing?" Well, if it is `now' it most certainly wasn't `then'.  A whole web of philosophical and economic and social customs emerged in the last few centuries to change how people might have construed the question "Isn't this stealing", more to the point, of even starting to conceive of music in such a way as to even allow Rick Beato's question to be conceived of before even being asked. In the sixteenth century the answer might have been "No, and if it `is' stealing it's the kind of shameless musical `stealing' that needs to happen if vernacular church music is going to move forward".  I won't attempt to flood your attention span with a list of Lutheran music historians and scholars on that topic because I'm more in the Anglican/Swiss/Dutch/Scottish Calvinist traditions and I'm not going to pretend Lutheran musicology is even remotely my wheelhouse.  But I've dipped my toes into it here and there.  

It looks like today's pop music `interpolation' maps with yesterday's German Lutheran `contrafacta', at least a little bit. 

POSTSCRIPT 7:24pm 

In U.S. contemporary Christian music it may be more common to create new music for old texts than to create new texts for old music because when so many beloved texts are already vernacular and in the public domain the cultural rewards of adding a contemporary musical sound to an established text are substantial.  

But I can't help mentioning that as contrafacta practice goes in church music in the United States there may be few examples more famous than Thomas Andrew Dorsey setting the next text of "Take My Hand Precious Lord" to the well-known tune Maitland.  Dorsey made a few substantial bluesy changes but here in 2024 I don't think anyone could mistake what he did "with" Maitland for earlier forms of the tune.  I have an older post discussing a book about Dorsey's development you can read, if you like.

So contrafacta, interpolation, the tradition of taking a known, even a legendary tune, and superimposing a new text on it is one of the more venerable practices in Christian music of the last, oh, four centuries.  It's in contemporary secular trans-Atlantic popular music that it comes across as possibly (or, sure, actually) stealing.