Pros and Cons of Paraphrasing

A main topic of discussion when talking about the Reformation and its musical outcomes is the idea of paraphrasing to fit certain settings of music. Paraphrasing is a great tool to use to convey general meanings and themes, especially when it comes to more tricky topics such as Biblical references. Almost every piece of writing that has been set to music has some sort of paraphrasing involved. It is almost unavoidable if the text was not created to be in conjunction with music. Paraphrasing can also be useful in order to make older works more easy to understand. In my experience, I remember using a website called “No Fear Shakespeare”. The website was designed to paraphrase most of Shakespeare’s works and make them easier to understand. It replaces many of phrases and funny jokes that were only relevant in the time period to things that we can understand the reference of today. It is a wonderful tool as long as it does not completely cover up the original, intended meaning. However, the main con to paraphrasing is that no matter how hard you try to preserve the original meaning, some of it will be lost. Someone cannot preserve the author’s intent by ridding their works of certain words or phrases. One of the biggest examples from class that I noticed was “A Might Fortress is Our God”. If I had not already known that this hymn was based on Psalm 46, I would never have guessed the connection. There are some of the same themes, but there is just something missing with the paraphrasing that takes place. Paraphrasing is a tool that should be used with caution.