Pastiche

A pastiche is a work of visual art, literature, theatre, or music that imitates the style or character of the work of one or more other artists. Unlike parody, pastiche celebrates, rather than mocks, the work it imitates.

The word pastiche is a French cognate of the Italian noun pasticcio, which is a pâté or pie-filling mixed from diverse ingredients. Metaphorically, pastiche and pasticcio describe works that are either composed by several authors, or that incorporate stylistic elements of other artists' work. Pastiche is an example of eclecticism in art.

Allusion is not pastiche. A literary allusion may refer to another work, but it does not reiterate it. Moreover, allusion requires the audience to share in the author's cultural knowledge. Both allusion and pastiche are mechanisms of intertextuality.

By art

Literature

In literature 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.

Pastiche (disambiguation)

Pastiche is a literary or other artistic genre.

Pastiche may also refer to:

Pasticcio

In music, a pasticcio or pastiche is an opera or other musical work composed of works by different composers who may or may not have been working together, or an adaptation or localization of an existing work that is loose, unauthorized, or inauthentic.

Etymology

The term is first attested in the 16th century referring both to a kind of pie containing meat and pasta (see pastitsio) and to a literary mixture; for music, the earliest attestation is 1795 in Italian and 1742 in English. It derives from the post-classical Latin pasticium (13th century), a pie or pasty.

In opera

In the 18th century, opera pasticcios were frequently made by composers such as Handel, for example Muzio Scevola (1721) and Giove in Argo (1739), as well as Gluck, and Johann Christian Bach. These composite works would consist mainly of portions of other composers' work, although they could also include original composition. The portions borrowed from other composers would be more or less freely adapted, especially in the case of arias in pasticcio operas by substituting a new text for the original one. In late 18th-century English pasticcios, for instance by Samuel Arnold or William Shield, the "borrowed" music could be Irish or British folksongs.