Contrafact
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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.
In classical music, examples of the contrafact have a long history, traceable back to the parody mass and In Nomine of the 16th Century. A notable example in recent musical history is "Cheap Imitation" (1969) by John Cage, a work produced by systematically changing notes from the melody line of "Socrate" by Erik Satie using chance procedures. In spite of its usefulness, the term contrafact has not won wide acceptance in classical theory.
[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: the popularity of rhythm changes is second only to that of the 12-bar blues as a basic harmonic structure used by jazz composers.
