Gee, I haven't even finished hearing the answer about contrafacta or filks, and I'm already enraged.
GARRISON KEILLOR DOES THIS ALL THE TIME ON PRAIRIE HOME COMPANION. ARGH! HOW CAN YOU BE ON PUBLIC RADIO AND NOT KNOW THIS?
Years ago in Madison, he made us (the audience) since one hymn to the tune of another. The tricky part was that one song was 3/4 time, the other was 4/4 time. Because both pieces had the same number of notes, we could do it, but only by not thinking about the fact that the beats didn't match up..
On a more serious note, in high school I had to memorize a good chunk of The Rime of the Ancient Mariner. One of my classmates realized that you can sing the Rime of the Ancient Mariner to "Gilligan's Island, and that's how we all learned it. It was hard not to hum through the test.
I would call this "synchrosyllabic" this can be done because syllables of different poems or lyrics are coincidental.
A correction is in order, here. The term "filk" was originally a typographical error in a fanzine article written by Lee Jacobs in the early 1950s. This was at a time when folk music was becoming popular, and as fandom is a reflection of the mundane world in many ways, and since acoustic guitars are pretty easily carried around and eminently playable, many science fiction fans naturally gravitated to it.
Originally, filking did, indeed, involve writing new, science-fictionally oriented lyrics to well-known tunes as parodies or to comment on fannish events and politics, but it quickly graduated to a more serious form, with the writing talents of authors like Poul Anderson (who was also heavily involved with the SCA), Randall Garrett and Marion Zimmer Bradley writing new lyrics to their own music. This aspect of filk has become dominant, with many of the filkers and filk-groups recording professionally and offering tapes and cds at conventions, through the mail, and online.
(As an aside, a number of typos - or to use the fannish term, tyops - have entered the fannish lexicon, including "potscrad" for "postcard" and, more recently, "cow-orkers" for "co-workers." Us sf fans like to play with words, since we can't get dates.)
Hi Bud, and welcome to one of the best forums around!
As a fellow SF fan, I thought you might appreciate this. It's kinda' on-thread, but it's an example of replacing the words of a well-known poem with scientific verbiage. So I guess that's not "filk," huh? Or is there another word for that besides just "parody?" It was written by my brother (also an SF fan and science geek) when he was 15 years old, which is what amazed me since he got (almost) all the science right. Enjoy …
TWINKLE TWINKLE LITTLE STAR (Revised)
Twinkle twinkle little star
How I wonder what you are
Nuclear furnace in the sky
Fusing atomic nuclei
Emitting all types of radiation
Particles and photons with wavelength variations
Streaming plasma dense with ions
Nuclei releasing muons and pions
Radiation begins to cease
Outward pressures tend to decrease
Only 12 billion years have elapsed
Star contracts in gravitational collapse
Mass is now a neutron star, but
Collapse is too rapid…it contracts too far
Gravitation warps time and space
Energy vortex to another place
Spacetime tunnel beyond comprehension
Links far and near through the 4th dimension
The star has formed, from a very great force,
A black hole in space and a quasi-stellar source
– Dave 1973
Oh, it certainly qualifies as filk in the original sense. I'd love to hear someone sing this.
One of the aspects of the segment that I wanted to comment on had to do with this very thing: common meter. There are relatively few rhythm/rhyme schemes thatg are really euphonious, so the fact that you can sing so many different sets of lyrics to the same melody is inevitable, if frequently surprising (not to mention funny as hell). One of my favorites is the recording by Barnes and Barnes of the theme for "Green Acres" sung to the tune of the Beatles' "A Day in the Life", titled (of course) "A Day in the Life of Green Acres". It's not quite as croggling as "Amazing Grace" sung to "Gilligan's Island", but it's still neater'n a skeeter's peter.