A term used to denote a technique of composition, primarily associated with the 16th century, involving the use of pre-existing material. Although the technique of parody was important, particularly in mass composition, throughout the 16th century, the term itself was not used until 1587 when it appeared in the form ‘parodia’ on the title-page of a mass by Jakob Paix. ‘Missa … ’, ‘Missa super … ’ or ‘Missa ad imitationem … ’, followed by the title of the work on which the mass was based, had been the usual way in which borrowed material was acknowledged. The preference for Greek terms, seen earlier in Kotter’s use of ‘anabolē’ for prelude, for example, was a product of humanistic influence which was strong in Germany by the time of Paix, and may account for his adoption of ‘parodia’ from the Greeks as the equivalent of ‘ad imitationem’. In 1603 Calvisius published a motet based on a piece of Josquin’s labelled ‘Parode ad Josquini’, and in 1611 there appeared a treatise by Georg Quitschreiber entitled ‘De parodia’. The term thus occurred in a mere handful of works of little significance and was unknown before Paix’s use of it. Ambros’s innocent reference in Geschichte der Musik (iii, 1868) to Paix’s Missa parodia in his description of what has come to be termed ‘parody technique’ is the source of the general currency it has acquired, particularly since Peter Wagner’s Geschichte der Messe (1913).
The technique of borrowing more than one voice from a model has a history that stretches back to the 14th century, but in early examples, such as Antonio Zachara da Teramo’s Gloria ‘Rosetta’ (based on his ballata Rosetta che non canci), entire blocks of material are quoted in a manner that resembles more the technique of contrafactum than the parody of the 16th century. In the later 15th century, occasional use of the other voices of a polyphonic model can be found in mass settings, mostly in combination with a cantus firmus structure, as in Obrecht’s Missa ‘Fortuna desperata’ and Missa ‘Rosa playsante’, where substantial passages from the chanson models are introduced when the cantus firmus ceases in the tenor parts.
In Renaissance music the borrowing of material from one composition as the basis of another was commonplace. The essential feature of parody technique is that not merely a single part is appropriated to form a cantus firmus in the derived work, but the whole substance of the source – its themes, rhythms, chords and chord progressions – is absorbed into the new piece and subjected to free variation in such a way that a fusion of old and new elements is achieved.
By the early 16th century the principle was well established as Josquin’s Missa ‘Mater Patris’ (printed 1514) and the Missa ‘Ave Maria’ by Antoine de Févin (d 1512) show, although there was now an increasing tendency to use motets as source material in addition to secular forms such as chansons and madrigals. Parody masses form a large proportion of the masses of such composers as Gombert, Crecquillon, Morales, Victoria, Lassus and Palestrina. Two of the best-known examples of composers using material from their own motets are Palestrina’s Missa ‘Assumpta est Maria’ and Victoria’s Missa ‘O quam gloriosum’; the Sanctus of Monte’s Missa super ‘Cara la vita’ and the madrigal of Wert on which it is based are printed in HAM (no.146). Occasionally a double parody appears, as in G.M. Nanino’s mass based on Palestrina’s madrigal and mass Vestiva i colli. The last significant example of the parody mass was Monteverdi’s of 1610 based on Gombert’s motet In illo tempore.
Brief allusions to the technique of parody (though not to the term itself) occur in theoretical writings by Vicentino (1555), Zarlino (1558) and Pietro Pontio (1588 and 1595) long after the method was well established. But the fullest account (an elaboration of Pontio) is found in Cerone’s Melopeo y maestro (1613). Cerone suggested that the beginning of the model should be used, with varied contrapuntal treatment, at the beginnings of the five main movements of the mass and that their endings should similarly correspond to its close; subsidiary motifs from the model should be employed elsewhere in the mass, although the beginning of the second Kyrie and parts of the Agnus Dei might be freely invented. In practice there was a tendency to allow the beginning, middle (often the opening of the second part if the model was a motet in two parts) and end of the model to reappear at corresponding points in each main movement. Sub-sections such as the ‘Qui tollis’ and ‘Osanna’ were derived from the middle portion, and the whole was drawn together by newly composed sections, which might still be motivically related to the model. Later composers often broke the model down into more sections, but these usually reappeared in the derived mass in their original order.
It has been suggested (Lockwood, 1964) that parody technique of the 16th century and later can be distinguished from earlier examples of borrowing more than one voice from a model because 16th-century parody is based on the structural technique of points of imitation. In Lockwood’s view, the change of polyphonic model from the 15th-century chanson with its easily extractable single lines to the motivically structured 16th-century motet, chanson and madrigal created parody technique. Others, however, have argued that there is no causal relationship between the rise of the imitative style in polyphonic models and this type of parody. Debates concerning parody technique have centred on its relationship to the concept of ‘imitatio’ in the Renaissance. Brown (1982) argued that the idea in the 15th and 16th centuries of creating, by a variety of means, entirely new musical works based on pre-existing models grew from the venerable rhetorical tradition of ‘imitatio’ as elaborated particularly by the humanists. Meconi (1994), however, argued that there is no real connection between the practice of polyphonic borrowing and rhetorical theories of ‘imitatio’. The question of the relationship of parody technique to this important aspect of Renaissance thought therefore remains open.
Parody technique, though primarily associated with the mass, was not uncommon in other areas of 16th-century music. It is found in settings of the Magnificat, and chansons were written parodying other chansons. Keyboard and consort pieces, though often mere intabulations of vocal works, sometimes break the model into fragments and expand it by inserted material, as in Giulio Severino’s Fantasia … sopra ‘Susane un jour’ in Molinaro’s Intavolatura (Venice, 159918), which is based on Lassus’s well-known chanson, or Cabezós Tiento sobre ‘Malheur me bat’, based on a chanson by Ockeghem in the Odhecaton. Other examples depart from the model to a greater extent, perhaps making significant use only of its opening section. Parody, whether vocal or instrumental, had its dangers, since it could become compilation rather than composition, and some parodies represent no more than a competent manipulation of scissors and paste. But handled with skill and imagination it could be a genuinely re-creative exercise in free variation.
Although the use of borrowed material persisted through the Baroque period, to employ the term ‘parody’ in connection with it is in many ways unfortunate since the particular techniques of 16th-century parody are often not in evidence. Purcell’s Trumpet Tune ‘Cibell’ is a parody of a piece by Lully, but Francesco Durante’s duet versions of some of Scarlatti’s solo cantatas and most of Bach’s or Handel’s transformations of their own or others’ music are perhaps better described as reworkings or arrangements when they are not simply contrafacta.
The type of borrowing implied in parody was discredited during the 19th century when originality was sought of a kind that would admit little more than symbolic quotation in major works. Mendelssohn’s, Schumann’s and later Busoni’s arrangements of Bach, or Grieg’s toying with Mozart, cannot usefully be compared with the parody mass, which had constituted a main stream in Renaissance music with a contemporaneity quite distinct from that of the Romantic era’s intermittent manipulation of music from its remoter past. A creative engagement with earlier music, as opposed to mere pastiche, has been one of the concerns of 20th-century music. But again, works like Stravinsky’s The Fairy’s Kiss and Pulcinella, though exhibiting the kind of interaction of composer and model that was characteristic of 16th-century parody, at the same time indulge a stylistic dichotomy far removed from it. The remoteness in style of the model from that of the idiom in which it is placed in works like Peter Maxwell Davies’s Taverner fantasias, which represent a preoccupation with music based on borrowed material, similarly engenders a conflict foreign to the total synthesis that was the aim of 16th-century parody.
See also Borrowing, §§5–6.
ReeseMR
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A.P. Leverett: ‘Song Masses in the Trent Codices: the Austrian Connection’, EMH, xiv (1995), 205–56
MICHAEL TILMOUTH/RICHARD SHERR