A pastiche (;
The word pastiche is the French borrowing of the Italian noun , which is a pâté or pie-filling mixed from diverse ingredients.[ Oxford English Dictionary
]
Allusion is not pastiche. A literary allusion may refer to another work, but it does not reiterate it. Allusion requires the audience to share in the author's cultural knowledge.
By art
Literature
In literary usage, the term denotes a literary technique employing a generally light-hearted tongue-in-cheek imitation of another's style; although jocular, it is usually respectful. The word implies a lack of originality or coherence, an imitative jumble, but with the advent of
postmodernism, pastiche has become positively construed as a deliberate, witty homage or playful imitation.
For example, many stories featuring Sherlock Holmes, originally penned by Arthur Conan Doyle, have been written as pastiches since the author's time.
A similar example of pastiche is the posthumous continuations of the Robert E. Howard stories, written by other writers without Howard's authorization. This includes the Conan the Barbarian stories of L. Sprague de Camp and Lin Carter.
David Lodge's novel The British Museum Is Falling Down (1965) is a pastiche of works by James Joyce, Franz Kafka, and Virginia Woolf. In 1991, Alexandra Ripley wrote the novel Scarlett, a pastiche of Gone with the Wind, in an unsuccessful attempt to have it recognized as a canonical sequel.
In 2017, John Banville published Mrs. Osmond, a sequel to Henry James's The Portrait of a Lady, written in a style similar to that of James.
Music
Charles Rosen has characterized Mozart's various works in imitation of
Baroque music style as pastiche, and
Edvard Grieg's
Holberg Suite was written as a conscious homage to the music of an earlier age. Some of Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky's works, such as his
Variations on a Rococo Theme and
Serenade for Strings, employ a poised "classical" form reminiscent of 18th-century composers such as Mozart (the composer whose work was his favorite).
Perhaps one of the best examples of pastiche in modern music is that of
George Rochberg, who used the technique in his String Quartet No. 3 of 1972 and Music for the Magic Theater. Rochberg turned to pastiche from
serialism after the death of his son in 1963.
"Bohemian Rhapsody" by Queen is unusual as it is a pastiche in both senses of the word, as there are many distinct styles imitated in the song, all "hodge-podged" together to create one piece of music.
A pastiche Mass is a musical Mass where the constituent movements come from different Mass settings. Most often, this convention has been chosen for concert performances, particularly by early music ensembles. Masses are composed of movements: Kyrie, Gloria, Credo, Sanctus, Agnus Dei; for example, the Missa Solemnis by Beethoven and the Messe de Nostre Dame by Guillaume de Machaut. In a pastiche Mass, the performers may choose a Kyrie from one composer, and a Gloria from another; or choose a Kyrie from one setting of an individual composer, and a Gloria from another.
Musical theatre
In musical theatre, pastiche is often an indispensable tool for evoking the sounds of a particular era for which a show is set. For the 1971 musical
Follies, a show about a reunion of performers from a musical
revue set between the World Wars,
Stephen Sondheim wrote over a dozen songs in the style of Broadway songwriters of the 1920s and 1930s. Sondheim imitates not only the music of composers such as
Cole Porter,
Irving Berlin,
Jerome Kern, and
George Gershwin but also the lyrics of writers such as
Ira Gershwin,
Dorothy Fields,
Otto Harbach, and Oscar Hammerstein II. For example, Sondheim notes that the torch song "Losing My Mind" sung in the show contains "near-stenciled rhythms and harmonies" from the Gershwins' "The Man I Love" and lyrics written in the style of Dorothy Fields.
Examples of musical pastiche also appear in other Sondheim shows including
Gypsy,
Saturday Night,
Assassins, and
Anyone Can Whistle.
Film
Pastiche can also be a cinematic device whereby filmmakers pay homage to another filmmaker's style and use of
cinematography, including camera angles,
lighting, and mise en scène. A film's writer may also offer a pastiche based on the works of other writers (this is especially evident in
historical films and
documentaries but can be found in
non-fiction drama,
comedy and
Horror film films as well). Italian director
Sergio Leone's
Once Upon a Time in the West is a pastiche of earlier American
Westerns. Another major filmmaker, Quentin Tarantino, often uses various plots, characteristics, and themes from many films to create his films, among them from the films of Sergio Leone, in effect creating a pastiche of a pastiche. Tarantino has openly stated that "I steal from every single movie ever made."
Director
Todd Haynes' 2002 film
Far from Heaven was a conscious attempt to replicate a typical
Douglas Sirk melodrama—in particular
All That Heaven Allows.
Architecture
In discussions of
urban planning, the term "pastiche" may describe developments as imitations of the building styles created by major
architects: with the implication that the derivative work is unoriginal and of little merit, and the term is generally attributed without reference to its urban context. Many 19th and 20th century European developments can in this way be described as pastiches, such as the work of
Vincent Harris and
Edwin Lutyens who created early 20th century Neoclassical and Neo-Georgian architectural developments in Britain, or of later pastiche works based on the architecture of the modernist Ludwig Mies van der Rohe and the
Bauhaus movement. The term itself is not pejorative.
Alain de Botton described it as "an unconvincing reproduction of the styles of the past".
See also
Further reading
