Parody Music - Renaissance

Renaissance

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 an 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:

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.

Many of the most famous composers of the 16th century, including Victoria, Lassus and Palestrina, used a wide range of earlier music in their masses, drawing on existing secular as well as religious pieces.