Musical parody

Parody music, or musical parody, involves changing or copying existing (usually well known) musical ideas or lyrics, or copying the particular style of a composer or artist, or even a general style of music. Although the intention of a musical parody may be humour (as in burlesque), it is the re-use of music that is the original defining feature.

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 wholly 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 by composers from Bach to Sondheim and performers from Spike Jones to "Weird Al" Yankovic.

The word "parody" derives from the post-classical Latin parodia, which came from the Greek παρῳδία, a burlesque poem or song. However, in the context of European music, the "burlesque" element did not at first apply.

The earliest musical application of this Greek term was only in 1587, on the title-page of a parody mass by the German composer Jakob Paix, as the equivalent of the previously usual Latin expressions missa ad imitationem or missa super …, which were used to acknowledge the source of borrowed musical material. Such preferences for Greek terms was a product of Renaissance humanism which was strong in Germany by that time, though the word's use at the time was infrequent and casual. It was only in modern times that the term "parody technique" came into general use as a historical musicological term, especially after the publication of Peter Wagner’s Geschichte der Messe in 1913. Although the practice of borrowing preexisting polyphonic textures dates back to the 14th century, these earlier manifestations are closer to the technique of contrafactum than to the parody of 16th-century music. In the latter part of the 15th century, composers began to include the other voices of a polyphonic model in basically cantus firmus structures, such as Jacob Obrecht's Missa Fortuna desperata and Missa Rosa playsante. In Grove's Dictionary of Music and Musicians, Michael Tilmouth and Richard Sherr write of the genre:

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