Conference Agenda

Contrafact studies have gained traction in contemporary scholarly literature on songcraft and performance practices across a range of musical traditions. The creation of sacred contrafacts of secular songs, as well as the proliferation of volumes of contrafacted texts, provide important materials that affect and reflect the sociopolitical and religious values of an increasingly pluralistic and globalized world over many centuries. Scholars such as Drew Davies (2019), Glenda Goodman (2017), Robert Kendrick (2002), Laura Lohman (2020) and Natascha Veldhorst (2009) have identified analytical approaches to multivalent intertextualities in distinct early modern repertoires. Nonetheless, much work may still be done to theorize the epistemological functions that these musical works served for the communities that engaged with contrafact repertoires. What artistic purposes would underline a seemingly universal appeal to this unique process that reinvented music-text relationships in such flagrant ways? What may the practice of contrafacting signify and what kind of agency does it afford for individuals and groups who cross sacred-secular boundaries? Together, the three contributions to this themed session demonstrate the bidirectionality of sacred-secular exchange in contrafacts arising from different religious perspectives.

This themed session begins with a paper recontextualizing Aquilino Coppini’s Third Book (1609) of contrafacts to suggest that one motivation for its publication was a shared campaign between Coppini and Monteverdi to curry favor with Prince Francesco Gonzaga under the veil of Latin spiritual meditations which replaced the erotic Italian poetry of Monteverdi’s madrigals. Moving to the eighteenth century, our second presenter frames the writing of Hebrew contrafacts of opera arias in the Italianate style for the Amsterdam Grand Synagogue as the negotiation of a cosmopolitan Dutch-Jewish identity. Finally, we close the session with research that explores sacred-secular contrafacting in reverse and points to the canonization of political contrafacts of the Christian hymn, “Hold the Fort,” in the nineteenth-century American women's suffrage movement. By putting three papers that span more than 250 years of contrafacting from three religious perspectives into conversation, this themed session proposes a holistic overview that moves away from issues of repertory circulation and provides a glimpse into a global social-religious practice.

When the Milanese priest Aquilino Coppini dedicated his Third Book of contrafacts to Francesco Gonzaga, the prince and heir-apparent to Mantua and Casale Monferrato, he noted that the glory of Mantua as a center of the Arts was not so much owing to divine providence, “but to the virtue and liberalità of her princes.” Musicologists have noted the ingenuity and effects of Coppini’s contrafacts that tailor close readings and responses to the music of Monteverdi’s madrigals, going well beyond matching rhetorical structure, meter, and sometimes phonemes (Georis, 2014; Kendrick, 1996/2002; Rorke, 1984). By supplying greater context to Monteverdi’s tumultuous period of 1608–1609, a time of anxiety for Monteverdi created by power vacuums in Mantuan court, exhaustion, and personal tragedy, scholars have well outlined Monteverdi’s Mantuan period and his growing dissatisfaction with the Gonzaga (Bowers, 2007; Carter, 2012). A gap in the literature, which this paper addresses, suggests that interpersonal relations played through Coppini’s spiritual contrafacts served a vital role in shared strategy to curry favor with Gonzaga.

This paper argues that Coppini’s Third Book is part of an elaborate campaign involving members of the Milanese Accademia degli Inquieti—Aquilino Coppini and the Carmelite friar Cherubino Ferrari—to intercede on Monteverdi’s behalf to Francesco. The stakes were high for all involved as Francesco was already building his own cappella della musica in Casale Monferrato. What roles, if any, Monteverdi and his Milanese friends would have in Francesco’s emerging court was yet undecided. Monteverdi appears to have had a hand in the curation of this book, providing “Una donna fra l’altre honesta e bella,” a madrigal he would later include in his VI a 5 (1614), opening Coppini’s book as “Una es, o Maria, o speciosa.” Coppini’s intertextual treatment of the text (drawing upon sacred literature and art) solidly associates Monteverdi with the Palatine Basilica of S. Barbara in Mantua. Perhaps hoping diplomatically to inspire Francesco’s responsibility to Monteverdi as part of his family, Coppini was angling for a similar position. For Coppini, contrafacts provide more than devotional forms of “spiritual recreation,” they also are tools of influence and courtly diplomacy.

Foundational narratives produced by the intellectual leaders of the Amsterdam Jewish community at the turn of the eighteenth century describe the "Portuguese" Jews as welcomed members of the Dutch Republic. Regardless of the mythologizing role of such accounts, they show that the Sephardim would portray themselves as pertaining to a pluriconfessional Dutch society. In this light, I examine how eighteenth-century cantorial contrafacts at the Amsterdam Grand Synagogue hint at the engagement of the Sephardic community with trans-European culture. The anonymous copyist of a collection of Jewish liturgical chants preserved at the Ets Haim Library of Amsterdam set traditional texts in Hebrew and Aramaic to music derived from Italianate opera arias composed in the fashionable ‘galant’ style. As such, the Dutch-Jewish contrafacts challenge a conventional scholarly insistence on upholding rigid boundaries between Jews and non-Jews that perpetuate notions of cultural stasis and sideline Jewish agency.

This paper identifies the musical sources in a cantor’s manual from Amsterdam as originating from Viennese circles and proposes that the interactions of the Sephardic Jewish community with the Italianate style point to a phenomenon of cosmopolitanism that characterized Dutch cultural belonging. Thus, the music in this collection of cantorial pieces blurs the boundaries between Jewish and Christian cultures and positions the Amsterdam Synagogue within early modern patterns of enhanced interreligious contact. Yet, rabbinical authorities considered secular music a potential cause of promiscuity, and some wished to ban secular songs and instrumental music from the synagogue. In this regard, I also argue that the Amsterdam contrafacts circumvented the Jewish leadership's ambivalence toward non-Jewish music by "converting" the arias. I reclaim the idea of conversion to indicate that the transformation of Italian operatic texts to Hebrew and Aramaic and their performance in a Jewish liturgical space, effectively located the aurality of the contrafacts within Jewish specificity. As in the case of the Sephardic foundational narratives and in a period marked by anxieties regarding assimilation, the cantor’s manual suggests that synagogal musicians in eighteenth-century Amsterdam used sonic artifacts to negotiate their complex Jewish and Dutch identities.

In the summer of 1887, the American Woman Suffrage Association (AWSA) conducted a mail-in songwriting contest through its weekly circular, Woman’s Journal. They claimed: “Suffrage workers everywhere feel the need of a leaflet of good suffrage songs.” Six months and two committees later, the AWSA delivered its promised Song Leaflet containing the thirteen “best” submissions, together with the names of their authors. Every song included was a contrafact—new lyrics intended to be sung to a borrowed, familiar melody. Most were already part of suffrage musicking, having been previously published in earlier suffrage songsters and performed at women’s rights conventions. Whether intended or merely the product of mainly poetic submissions, the contest resulted in an anthology of reworked favorites in an authoritative collection. In other words, the making of the AWSA’s leaflet was an exercise in canon formation.

This paper takes a two-pronged analytical approach to the AWSA Song Leaflet. Building out from a focused case study—the two contrafacts of the Civil-War-inspired Christian hymn, “Hold the Fort,” present in the AWSA Song Leaflet—I reaffirm through my close reading of the text-text and text-music relationships both the popularity and utility of contrafacts in American political campaigns (Glenda Goodman, Robert James Branham & Stephen Harnett, Laura Lohman). Second, I demonstrate the forceful impact of the quickly canonic AWSA Song Leaflet by tracing how suffrage contrafacts of “Hold the Fort” printed after its publication in 1888 responded to the social and political values expressed in the new lyrics. I argue that the AWSA Song Leaflet subtly reinscribed the power and principles of its compilers, even as it attempted to unite suffragists through a common musical repertoire. Contrafacts of patriotic classics and Christian hymns centered the disenfranchised woman who was white, wealthy, educated, Christian, and native-born and erased those figures from the U.S. woman suffrage movements whose race, class, religion, or origin did not conform to this hegemonic nativism. In my conclusion, I illuminate the power that officially sponsored contrafact anthologies can acquire and exert when musical familiarity and institutional clout intersect.