parody, in music, originally the creative reworking of several voice parts of a preexistent composition to form a new composition, frequently a mass; in modern musical usage, parody usually refers to the humorous imitation of a serious composition. The earliest known parody masses date from the late 14th century, and the procedure became common in the 15th and 16th centuries. The composer of a parody mass used as his model a vocal work such as a chanson, madrigal, or motet, freely reorganizing and expanding the original material, often inserting new sections between borrowed, modified passages. A parody mass is known by the name of its model; e.g., Missa Malheur me bat by Josquin des Prez, a reworking of Jean d’Okeghem’s chanson “Malheur me bat” (“Misfortune Has Struck Me”).
The process of parody also facilitated arrangements of vocal works for lute or keyboard, such as Peter Philips’ arrangement for virginal (harpsichord) of the chanson “Bon jour, mon coeur” (“Good Day, My Heart”) by Orlando di Lasso.
In more recent times the term musical parody came to signify the humorous application of new texts to preexistent vocal pieces, as well as both serious and ironic references to particular musical styles. Mozart’s Ein musikalischer Spass (A Musical Joke; K. 522, 1787), deliberately violates any number of technical conventions, concluding with glaringly “wrong” notes; the endless, rapid repetitions of the word amen in Hector Berlioz’ oratorio L’Enfance du Christ (The Childhood of Christ; Opus 25, 1854) clearly poke fun at the absurdities of much early 19th-century liturgical music.
Jacques Offenbach in his operettas (e.g., Orpheus in the Netherworld) frequently parodied serious opera. Similarly, Gustav Mahler, Arnold Schoenberg, and others have parodied the styles of predecessors and contemporaries as well as specific genres, including fashionable dances from the valse to the tango and the fox-trot. An American master of musical parody was Charles Ives (1874–1954).