Contrafacts
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
A contrafact is a new musical composition built out of an already existing one, most often a new melody overlaid on a familiar harmonic structure. As a compositional device, it was of particular importance in the 1930s/1940s development of bop, since it allowed jazz musicians to create new pieces for performance and recording on which they could immediately improvise, without having to seek permission or pay publisher fees for copyrighted materials (while melodies can be copyrighted, the underlying harmonic structure cannot be).
Contrafacts are not to be confused with musical quotations, which comprise borrowing rhythms or melodic figures from an existing composition.
[edit] Examples
Well known examples of contrafacts include the Charlie Parker/Miles Davis bop tune "Donna Lee," which uses the chord changes of the standard "Back Home Again in Indiana" or the Dizzy Gillespie composition "Groovin' High", which uses the changes of "Whispering" (a song recorded in 1920 by the Paul Whiteman orchestra). The Gershwin tune "I Got Rhythm" has proved especially amenable to contrafactual recomposition, with the "Rhythm changes" second only by the 12-bar blues as a basic harmonic structure used by jazz composers.
