Parody music
Parody music, or musical parody, involves changing or copying existing (usually well known) musical ideas, and/or lyrics, or copying the particular style of a composer or performer, or even a general style of music.
In music, parody has been used for many different purposes and in various musical contexts: as a serious compositional technique, as an unsophisticated re-use of well-known melody to present new words, and as an intentionally humorous, even mocking, reworking of existing musical material, sometimes for satirical effect.
Examples of musical parody with completely serious intent include parody masses in the 16th century, and, in the 20th century, the use of folk tunes in popular song, and neo-classical works written for the concert hall, drawing on earlier styles. "Parody" in this serious sense continues to be a term in musicological use, existing alongside the more common use of the term to refer to parody for humorous effect.
Baroque[edit]
After the beginning of the Baroque period, there continued to be parodies with serious intent, an example being J. S. Bach's reuse of three cantatas in his Christmas Oratorio.[4] As musical fashions changed, however, there was little cause to re-use old modal tunes and compositional styles.[5] After the middle of the 17th century, composers sought to create "a unique musical treatment appropriate to the text and the circumstances of performance".[5] Thereafter the serious parody became rare until the 20th century.[6]
Concert works and opera[edit]
The parodic elements of Bach's "Cantate burlesque", Peasant Cantata are humorous in intent, making fun of the florid da capo arias then in fashion.[6] Thereafter "parody" in music has generally been associated with humorous or satiric treatment of borrowed or imitative material. Later in the 18th century, Mozart parodied the lame melodies and routine forms of lesser composers of his day in his Musical Joke.[6] A century later, Saint-Saëns composed The Carnival of the Animals as a musical joke for his friends;[7] several of the movements contain musical parody, radically changing the tempo and instrumentation of well-known melodies.[b] Bartók's Concerto for Orchestra (1943) features the appearance (followed by a trombone raspberry) of a theme from Shostakovich's Leningrad Symphony.[c]
In theatrical music, the 18th century ballad opera, which included satirical songs set to popular melodies of the time, involved some of the broadest musical parodies.[9] In Così fan tutte Mozart parodied the elaborate solemnities of opera seria arias.[10] His own The Magic Flute was the subject of Viennese parodies in the decades after his death.[10] Parodies of Wagner range from Souvenirs de Bayreuth by Fauré and Messager (sending up music from the Ring cycle by turning the themes into dance rhythm)[11] to Anna Russell's Introduction to the Ring, which parodies the words and music of the cycle by presenting their supposed absurdities in a mock-academic lecture format.[12][d]
Offenbach, a frequent parodist (of among others Gluck, Donizetti and Meyerbeer),[10] was himself parodied by later composers from Saint-Saëns[7] to Sondheim.[14] In the Savoy operas, Sullivan parodied the styles of Handel, Bellini, Mozart, Verdi and others.[15] His own music has been parodied ever since. The parodic use of well-known tunes with new lyrics is a common feature of Victorian burlesque[16] and pantomime, British theatrical styles popularised in the 19th century.[17]
Serious parody was revived, in modified form, in the 20th century, with such works as Prokoviev's Classical Symphony and Stravinsky's neo-classical works including The Fairy's Kiss and Pulcinella.[2] However, Tilmouth and Sherr comment that although these works exhibit "the kind of interaction of composer and model that was characteristic of 16th-century parody", they nevertheless employ "a stylistic dichotomy far removed from it".[2] The same authors comment that the use of old music in the scores of Peter Maxwell Davies similarly "engenders a conflict foreign to the total synthesis that was the aim of 16th-century parody".[2]
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