Ethan Hein remixes "Dreams" across a dozen other works to illustrate harmonic/melodic divorce in popular song, and I can't resist making a response song about Charles Rose would likely say the rumblings of that divorce go as far back as Hector Berlioz and the divorce papers sure got signed by the time of Phil Collins era divorce-ballads

https://www.ethanhein.com/wp/2024/the-melodic-harmonic-divorce-in-pop/

https://www.ethanhein.com/wp/2025/what-key-is-dreams-by-fleetwood-mac-actually-in/

https://www.ethanhein.com/wp/2026/what-i-learned-from-remixing-dreams-over-and-over/

https://ethanhein.substack.com/p/twelve-remixes-of-dreams-by-fleetwood

 

Dropping the vocal stem of Fleetwood Mac's "Dreams" on to the instrumental tracks of "Stayin' Alive" by the Bee Gees sounds good.  It does also sound very funny.

 

Dropping the vocal line over Bach's legendary Prelude in C major from Book I of the Well-Tempered Clavier also worked quite well.  All the remixes are worth hearing not just for their novelty but as a way to underline Ethan Hein's blogging thread about the emergence of harmonic/melodic divorce in popular music.  Now if Charles Rosen were still alive he might have been tempted to clear his throat and say that the first rumblings of harmonic/melodic divorce were beginning to happen with the music of Hector Berlioz centuries ago.  Yeah, yeah, if you actually like the music of Berlioz and I kind of don't but point taken. And now I will digress, as I so often do.

Now I do have a thought about what is actually very important in Hein's remixes and what they have to do with music.  The most significant power in creating musical connections and developing musical possibilities is memory.  The intrinsic relationship between working memory and musical perception and interpretation goes at least as far back as Augustine of Hippo (whose De Musica is available in English translation at archive.org now). I have been very critical of Ted Gioia for his use and misuse of Augustine's complex and mercurial thoughts about music for some time now. Part of the complexity of Augustine's thoughts on music come from the simple fact that he wrote Books I-V of De Musica before his conversion to Christianity while Book VI was written after he had become a Christian. The good news for non-Christians who blanche at the prospect of reading one of the most famous Christian thinkers in history is that Books I-V don't discuss Christian doctrine at all for previously stated reasons. The bad news is that De Musica is regarded as one of the most punishingly tedious treatises on anything from antiquity.  Augustine himself realized it was so painfully dull that he opened Book VI with an apology for how genuinely boring everything he wrote in Books I-V actually was!

Modulating well is what the science of music was for Augustine and by "modulating" was not meant "changing keys".  Since everything in the treatise was about poetic rhythm in Latin poetics "modulation" is best thought of in rhythmic terms.  To put this in terms that may be clearer to hiphop than other styles of music, you could say that Books I-V were where Augustine established the scientific principles of establishing a flow.  Those concepts are by and large unfamiliar to me but I have friends who are into hiphop and rap and have explained the basic idea in theory and practice.  Part of my aversion to Gioia's handling of Augustine is how the Christian saint becomes symptomatic of the Greek of Greeks when he needs to be the emblem of "Pythagorean" music and thus a bad guy, but when Gioia wanted to question whether there was even such a thing as "Western" harmony he abruptly remembered Augustine was one of the great Christian bishops of Africa.  Right ... that's why I can't take Ted Gioia seriously when he so obviously moves goalposts. Augustine's thought is complex and remains controversial and it's more fair to him historically to not try to simplify him down to one or another side of a glib Substackified dualisms.

So, the thing about memory and music is that juxtaposition and rhythm are significant.  Hein's experiments show that it is possible to reconceive melodic materials in shifting harmonic and rhythmic contexts.  This is only possible if he you have refined your powers of associative memory to the point where you can drop a Stevie Nicks vocal over the instrumental tracks of a song by the Bee Gees.  Leveraging associative memory for musically expressive purposes is what Johann Sebastian Bach did when he created a fugal first movement for the Credo of his Mass in B minor by using the incipit of the ancient plainchant as the subject of his fugue. Once we consider that the fugal subject is the incipit of the Credo then this could be considered one of the more epic sample flips in "classical music", to go back to a post Ethan Hein did called "fugue as sample flip". Ethan Hein and I have gone back and forth about fugue as sample flip in the past and I feel like a chump for not thinking of the Credo from Mass in B minor as a sample flip earlier. 

 

The paradox of Stevie Nicks' vocal fitting so readily over a Johann Sebastian Bach prelude is that 18th century music tends to be so contrapuntal the prospect of such a juxtaposing working is surprising.  The juxtaposition totally works but that is what a "textbook" approach to classical music cultivated since the long 19th century would tell you isn't supposed to happen and shame on you for thinking it!  But those kinds of juxtapositions, as we have just heard and seen via Bach's Mass in B minor, were what happened in actual 18th century practice. But there is a sense in which the Mac/Bach mash-up comes off as a surprise because harmony and melody in Western theory and practice was very married and, if we just run with Bach's life and times as a jokey analogy, had twenty kids where the family resemblances were not hard to see.  As a friend of mine in college once joked, fifteen generations of Bachs had a penchant for sounding similar. 

Temporal disjunction as a basis for musical exploration has been going on for a long time.  In the 20th century we could look at something like George Rochberg's Caprice Variations for solo violin on a theme by Pagannini. The 1970s was an interesting era in both classical music and rock/pop because of the different kinds of experiments in musical code-switching that were going on.  I had a somewhat short (for me) reflection how George Rochberg's landmark string quartets from the 1970s were composed around the same time Stevie Wonder wrote "Living for the City" and both American composers can be heard and interpreted as experimenting with code switching, how to shift pitch vocabularies mid-work.  I think overall Wonder's song has had more staying power but my point is that we've been living in an era in which, as Leonard Meyer put it, not everyone is going to like the same music but democracy should ensure everyone is free to like whatever they like. 

So it can be useful to study popular song where the divorce between harmony and melody has been firmly established since Kramer vs. Kramer.  Back in the days of Berlioz, to keep running with the gag, harmony and melody were a little out of sync and maybe spent a lot of time in separate rooms of the same house,  but neither was actually consulting with divorce attorneys yet and the divorce papers were definitely not finalized.   By the time Phil Collins showed up with his 1980s era divorce-pop harmony and melody were most assuredly living “Separate Lives”. Some forty years on I think we could say that Phil Collins (love him or hate him or whatever) became one of the maestros of the divorce pop song. 

You might find the humor groan-worthy but I don't care any more.  You listening?  I don't care any more!  

an analysis of Matiegka's Grand Sonata II--sampling, paraphrasing and recomposing themes by Haydn and breaking all "the rules" of sonata forms all the way

Brace yourselves for 12,756 words and 36 pages of musical analysis. The latest installment in the Matiegka 2023 project is here ... on Memorial Day Weekend ... in 2025. :)

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 has been writing about musical borrowing in and out of classical music and I can't not share a few case studies from liturgical vocal music and classical guitar repertoire

Ethan Hein has been blogging about musical borrowing in classical music and popular music.  He discussed the changing nature of musical borrowing of the Dies Irae (plainchant) as distinct from settings of the Dies Irae liturgical text (an important distinction to keep in mind that is a given for those of us who sing and do the church music thing in church life but which needs introduction for those who don't).

https://www.ethanhein.com/wp/2023/dies-irae/

https://www.ethanhein.com/wp/2023/musical-borrowing-syllabus/