Parody As a Borrowing Practice in American Music, 1965–2015
Parody as a Borrowing Practice in American Music, 1965–2015 A dissertation submitted to the Graduate School of the University of Cincinnati in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the Division of Composition, Musicology, and Theory of the College-Conservatory of Music by John P. Thomerson BM, State University of New York at Fredonia, 2008 MM, University of Louisville, 2010 Committee Chair: bruce d. mcclung, PhD ABSTRACT Parody is the most commonly used structural borrowing technique in contemporary American vernacular music. This study investigates parody as a borrowing practice, as a type of humor, as an expression of ethnic identity, and as a response to intellectual trends during the final portion of the twentieth century. This interdisciplinary study blends musicology with humor studies, ethnic studies, and intellectual history, touching on issues ranging from reception history to musical meaning and cultural memory. As a structural borrowing technique, parody often creates incongruity—whether lyrical, stylistic, thematic, evocative, aesthetic, or functional—within a recognized musical style. Parodists combine these musical incongruities with other comic techniques and social conventions to create humor. Parodists also rely on pre-existing music to create, reinforce, and police ethnic boundaries, which function within a racialized discourse through which parodists often negotiate ethnic identities along a white-black binary. Despite parody’s ubiquity in vernacular music and notwithstanding the genre’s resonance with several key themes from the age of fracture, cultivated musicians have generally parody. The genre’s structural borrowing technique limited the identities musicians could perform through parodic borrowings. This study suggests several areas of musicological inquiry that could be enriched through engagement with parody, a genre that offers a vast and largely unexplored repertoire indicating how musical, racial, and cultural ideas can circulate in popular discourse.
[Show full text]