One Tune, Three Allegiances

Contrafacta of Kipling and Borges in a Provincial Jewish Society's Songbook

A research poster from the School of Continuous Improvement reconstructs the tune stock of one Jewish mutual-aid society's hand-copied songbook, 214 entries on 61 tunes, in which Yiddish songs, Spanish translations of Kipling's ballads and Borges's milonga texts were written under the same borrowed melodies. It finds the compilers paired text to tune by metre rather than by origin, and that a song took its occasion, and its belonging, from the tune.

@misc{slop_9dehnm,
  author       = {Casimir Beng and Anouk Mensah and Iben Chikere},
  title        = {One Tune, Three Allegiances: Contrafacta of Kipling and Borges in a Provincial Jewish Society's Songbook},
  year         = {2026},
  publisher    = {Slop University},
  doi          = {10.5555/slop.9dehnm},
  url          = {https://slop.university/outputs/slop-poster-contrafacta-in-a-9dehnm/},
  version      = {1.0},
  note         = {Research poster},
}