Where does parody collide?

In literary studies parody is the imitation of an identifiable work, author, or style in a way that foregrounds and comments on the original, often comically or critically, so that the reader holds the target and its distortion in view at once. Hutcheon's A theory of parody reframes it as "repetition with critical difference," not necessarily ridiculing but always marking an ironic distance, and Abrams and Harpham's glossary gives the conventional account. The referent is a critical-imitative relation between a new text and a known model, recognisable through the signalled contrast, and it differs from the Renaissance compositional technique that musicologists call parody even though both rework a prior source.[1][2]

Unit

A single work defined by its signalled imitation of a specific model

Recovery means

Not applicable

Measured by

Identified by recognising the target being imitated and the critical or comic transformation applied to it

In Renaissance musicology parody (as in the parody mass or missa parodia) is a compositional technique in which a composer builds a new Mass by borrowing the entire polyphonic substance of a pre-existing model (a motet, chanson, or madrigal), reworking its voices and textures rather than quoting only a single melodic line. Marisi's The parody mass and the rhetorical-pedagogical principle of imitation situates the practice within Renaissance imitatio, the disciplined reuse of admired models. The referent is a structural method of composition, carrying no mocking intent, and so names a construct quite unlike the critical or comic imitation that literary parody denotes.[3]

Unit

A single Mass setting derived from the full polyphony of a borrowed model

Recovery means

Not applicable

Measured by

Established by matching the polyphonic material of a Mass to its model and analysing how the model's fabric is reworked