Re: Lena from the Chasidim

[SamWeiss <SamWeiss...>]

At 01:19 PM 12/31/01, Robert Cohen wrote:
>1) Sam, do you know of any recordings of "Ashre Ayin" as a Hassidic niggun?

Not offhand, though I have vague memories of hearing it on an LP of 
Chasidic instrumentals.

>2) I'm puzzled at your reference to a *text* being a contrafact of the 
>refrain of a piyyut.  In general musicological usage, sfaik, a contrafact 
>is a (usually new) text set to a tune "borrowed" from another, already 
>existing source.

That is indeed the strict musicological use (in which, nevertheless, the 
new *text* is the core of the concept).  But more loosely, the term may 
apply to any textual adaptation, especially a parodistic one.  Rabbi Google 
yielded the following prooftext from
http://ccat.sas.upenn.edu/bmcr/2001/2001-06-19.html.
(I'm not sure, however, where the writer got his "technical musical" 
definition from.  He may be confusing "contrafact" with "theme and 
variations" or even "jazz".)
"Contrafact," a term borrowed from music theory, means an art work (a 
musical composition or, as here, a play) that is based in interesting and 
significant ways on another work. In the technical musical sense, a 
contrafact uses the same harmonies as the original piece, but a different 
melody; in literature, Dobrov points out, Joyce's Ulysses is a contrafact 
of the Odyssey, as is the first part of the Aeneid (p. 16). Similarly, 
Acharnians re-works Telephus in comic terms.


_____________________________________________________________
Cantor Sam Weiss === Jewish Community Center of Paramus, NJ