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. 

Ethan Hein on Bach Anxiety--thoughts on debates about Bach's Lutheranism over time, the highbrow of art-religion, and a scholarly trope of dismissing a whole swath of Western Christianity as "anti-art" as an art-religious reflex

http://www.ethanhein.com/wp/2022/bach-anxiety/

What is that absolute truth, though? Bach was an ultra-conservative Lutheran, so he would have understood himself to be pursuing a different set of truths than people are mostly seeking now. The music academy understands Bach to have been pursuing the truth of the Western tonal system, which he himself helped to codify as it evolved from the church modes. Bach did not write any music theory treatises, but he certainly understood theory, and his student Johann Kirnberger based Die Kunst des reinen Satzes in der Musik on Bach’s teaching.

The question of how devout or conservative J. S. Bach actually was or wasn't has been a surprisingly lively debate.  It depends on who you ask in relationship to which parts of his overall body of work and what their reasons for saying so are.  I'm still working through Pauline Fairclough's Classics for the Masses but she amusingly draws out a history of Soviet attempts to argue in the 1925-1930 period that Bach wasn't religiously observant at all; that he wrote music to order for church and court because that was his job; and there was no evidence he was religiously sincere and therefore it was acceptable to perform Bach provided you never made the mistake of performing a Bach piece in a way that corresponded to a liturgical calendar (i.e. a feast day of some kind). 

John Ahern at Theopolis Institute on how Calvin's view of music was more positive than you might have heard, and less ambivalent than Augustine's

https://theopolisinstitute.com/a-positive-view-of-music/

...

On the one hand, Calvin agrees with Augustine that music is subservient to the ends of the text. This is plain from his comment that music is a “help” to the wandering mind. Music is, in Lutheran terminology, a sermon on, an exegesis of, the text. Calvin may have a positive view of music, but he would be no fan of the ideology Beethoven, Hanslick, Nietzsche (or, dare I say, Roger Scruton) applied to church music. Even Calvin’s positive principle of music is, I believe, totally incompatible with “absolute, autonomous art music” in an ecclesiastical setting. (In the same vein, Calvin would, I wager, have little patience for the organist who insisted that their flowery introductions were “their own act of worship” and so ought to override the pragmatic concerns of congregational worship. Just so we’re clear.)

On the other hand, though, Calvin clearly paints music as some sort of alarm clock on our noetic failings. So Calvinist music should be anything but dull. And, indeed, as originally composed and performed, it wasanything but dull—it wasn’t for nothing that Calvinist psalm settings were called “Genevan jigs.” I think Calvin’s positive view of music can be used to endorse some kind of Christian musical maximalism: yes, music is subservient to the text, but that does not mean that it is meant to be backgrounded. It is subordinate in a hierarchy of ends, but not necessarily in a hierarchy of means and certainly not of perception. Music might well need to shout at us to get us to hear. Like Flannery O’Connor’s vision of the good Catholic writer, the good Calvinist musician must “make your vision apparent by shock—to the hard of hearing you shout, and for the almost-blind you draw large and startling figures.”^[3]

So, if we agree with Calvin’s principle, we should be more comfortable with Josquin’s chaotic polyphony than Palestrina’s tidy counterpoint (certainly Luther was). Perhaps we should be happier with Olivier Messiaen’s dissonant, screaming organ sketches than Widor’s frilly Victorian organ symphonies. Possibly even happier with a hard rock rendition of Psalm 2 or a Lecrae track than the soothing sounds of Chris Tomlin’s mic held ever-so-close to the mouth. I would judge that our approach to the text is better served in the former of each of these pairs. The overly familiar text is made strange and unfamiliar. And that is just what we need, lest we draw near to God with our lips but not our hearts. I don’t merely mean to defend an ugly aesthetic, but perhaps to place music less in the category of “aesthetic” altogether, and in a category more consonant with ancient thought, that of “rhetoric”. Music should speak intelligibly and prophetically in order to be edifying, just as Paul says in I Corinthians 14.

...

and I can well imagine Jim West, if he read the piece, wondering why Zwingli didn't get mentioned. :) 

John Ahern's Theses on Church Music and Economics, some semi-organized thoughts

https://theopolisinstitute.com/theses-on-church-music-and-economics/

There aren't 95, for those fearing an evocation of Luther, there are just 31!

I won't be mulling over all of them or in great deal since it's the weekend and this is the internet but I got to wondering something as early as Thesis 1.