So, I was reading through a chapter in John Fiske’s Introduction to Communication Studies, when I ran into the following quote:
“The more popular and widely accessible a work of art is, the more it will contain redundancies in form and content.”
The term “redundancy” in this usage does not necessarily refer to the degree of repetition (as in, it’s redundant to tell someone your name fifteen times in one hour), but to the degree of predictability in a work of art. The film score for Pirates of the Carribean, for example, was pretty darn redundant. John Williams introduced the currently used form for film music with his score, many years ago, to Star Wars IV. Composers in this genre make use of the entire orchestra with Romantically-inspired orchestration and use various types of musical themes to alert the audience to the return of characters or ideas. Zimmer of the Pirates soundtrack used this archetype when composing his version of a soundtrack.
And while there needs to be a good degree of redundancy in any art in order for us, as the audience, to comprehend it, it is the strategic presence of unpredictability (or entropy, to use Fiske’s term) that really catches us. When we listen to a soundtrack, we’re especially aware of what is different about this particular one, and we deliberate about whether we like it.
When I was pondering this, I came back to my question: Why don’t musicologists seem especially interested in strict musical parody? Well, it’s because the music itself is pretty much 100% redundant. Why study something if it’s completely predictable?
There isn’t any way, though, for the music to be completely redundant. Even when someone is singing new words to a recorded back-up track, the timbre and intonation of their voice changes the music. And, in fact, the fun in the musical side of parody is making small changes that have some effect on the listener.
My favorite filk so far–and I’ll use it as an example here–is the Acts of Parody piece found on the Roundworm CD. (I think I’ve mentioned this before.) The artists didn’t just sing new words to the original music–they actually modified the their presentation of the music. It is only fitting that a song about filk should not be sung solo, as in the original Acts of Creation, but as a group with full harmony and with more complex instrumentation. The addition of solo verses occurs as each member of the group gets to add his or her own twenty-five cents to the topic. This is a highly meaningful and effective musical change, and one that I’m pretty sure the group intended. After all, in the bardic circle, each person in turn gets to sing their own piece.
I suppose that my point here is that strict parody song, and especially popular parody song, can be frustrating to study from a musicological standpoint because of the extremely high degree of musical redundancy. What we have to do is dial up our sensitivity to whatever is musically unpredictable, no matter how small, because that’s where we’ll find the truly interesting material.
