L\u27homme Arme: A Tradition of Contrafactum

Contrafactum, the replacement of text in a song, and L’homme Arme impacted music both in the 1450s and today. Although their usage changed and dwindled, musicians never stopped using contrafactum and L’homme Arme in their works. With the intent of improving music pedagogy and performance, the purpose of this research was to investigate L’homme Arme and contrafactum and their usage today. The particular problems of this study were to (1) examine contrafactum and L’homme Arme in medieval and renaissance music; (2) explore the use of contrafactum today; and (3) arrange a piece of music that combines a sacred and a modern secular song. Composers often used L’homme Arme and contrafactum in mass settings and limited the use of contrafactum to mean the switching of sacred and secular text and music. The usage of contrafactum expanded to mean the replacement of text in music which included many modern parody songs. With modern technology, anyone could compose or arrange a modern parody or other work that includes contrafactum which led to viral parodies and recorded reactions to them. To demonstrate contrafactum in a modern parody sense, I applied the text of “Mary Did You Know?” to “Africa” by Toto