Recomposition of musical works among the Jesuits: practice and theory
Recomposition of musical works among the Jesuits: practice and theory

Summary/Abstract: This paper deals with the adaptation of musical works that occurred in Jesuit circles. In sources of Jesuit provenance, we come across the existence of many recompositions of pre-existing works which were accommodated to local needs through various kinds of adaptational strategies. Composers who were active in Jesuit circles in Rome were only too willing to make use of these practices – for instance, Asprilio Pacelli and Kaspar Förster junior who were also connected for a while with musical centres in the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth. Acquaintance with these practices is also attested to by the Roman provenance of organ tablatures. Similar sources of inspiration and analogous techniques of compositional adaptation are also found in Jesuit Bohemian and Silesian circles – Carolus Rabovius and Carolus Pfeiffer, inter alia, made their living this way.The operative strategies employed by composers that we have been studying clearly accorded with the narrative of Jesuit authors who advanced the concept of parodia in their textbooks on poetics – Roberto Bellarmino, Jacob Pontanus and Jacob Masen, amongst other. Like other European humanist authors, their understanding of the concept derived from Aristotle and Quintilian. It is they who made clear the purposes for which one might have recourse to these strategies and the circumstances in which one should employ such tools. Literature and music that came about in reliance on these sorts of procedures had to serve a didactic function, first and foremost. And in point of fact, the same could also be said about the cultural context of repertoire presented in this paper.

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