Contrafacta, anybody?
  • Palestrina
    Posts: 422
    Dissatisfied with the motets available on the Offertorium ‘Postula a me’, I think my best plan will be to take an existing motet and superimpose this text the original text.

    Has anyone done this kind of thing before? Would be interested in your thoughts on how to proceed.
  • M. Jackson Osborn
    Posts: 8,416
    It was done all the time in ages past.
    It is not uncommon today, especially in the publishing world.
    I know of at least three English texts which are commonly sung to a motet by Christopher Tye.
    Latin motets are often published with an English underlay which has but the most oblique relationship (or no relationship at all) to the original Latin of which it is by the unwary presumed to be a translation.
  • Palestrina
    Posts: 422
    It’s been common enough in the past. I believe it was a key strategy in developing the Antiphonale Romanum...

    So what are the key strategies in developing good contrafacta? This may be a way of repurposing polyphony that is otherwise less likely to appear in the liturgy and making it work again... reminds me a bit of that statue of St Helena somewhere in Rome that started out as some kind of pagan Roman goddess!
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