Harvest on the Downbeat

Contrafactum and Text-Setting in Radio Songs Commissioned for Four Successive Development Plans

A paper from the School of Settled Matters reconstructs the 96 songs a state broadcaster commissioned for four successive national development plans, 41 of them contrafacta written to a tune first broadcast for an earlier plan, and reads each setting against its notated metre. It finds that inherited refrains held later lyricists to the stresses of the texts they replaced, so that the share of stressed syllables on weak beats in contrafacta doubled, to 24 per cent, as the plans' vocabulary lengthened, while listeners went on quoting the words of the plan before.

@misc{slop_29lei2,
  author       = {Anselm Threlkeld},
  title        = {Harvest on the Downbeat: Contrafactum and Text-Setting in Radio Songs Commissioned for Four Successive Development Plans},
  year         = {2026},
  publisher    = {Slop University},
  doi          = {10.5555/slop.29lei2},
  url          = {https://slop.university/outputs/slop-paper-re-texting-the-plan-29lei2/},
  version      = {1.0},
  note         = {Research paper},
}