Pastiche takes its name from an Italian pie stuffed with mixed fillings
Imitating another artist's style sounds like cheating, yet pastiche is built on affection rather than mockery. The word comes from pasticcio, an Italian pâté of assorted ingredients, and it now covers Sherlock Holmes stories by other hands, Sondheim songs that echo Gershwin, and even a named exception in European copyright law.
A pastiche borrows the manner of one or more earlier artists, whether in painting, fiction, theatre, music or buildings. What separates it from parody is intent: parody ridicules its model, while pastiche honours it. It also differs from allusion, which merely points at another work and relies on the audience to catch the reference, whereas pastiche actually reproduces the style. The English sense of the word was first recorded in 1878. For a long time it implied a derivative muddle, but postmodern critics recast it as knowing, playful tribute.
Literature is full of examples. Writers kept producing Sherlock Holmes adventures long after Arthur Conan Doyle, and Robert E. Howard's Conan was continued without his consent by L. Sprague de Camp and Lin Carter. David Lodge's 1965 novel The British Museum Is Falling Down mimics Joyce, Kafka and Virginia Woolf. Alexandra Ripley's Scarlett of 1991 tried and failed to become the accepted follow-up to Gone with the Wind, while Ben Schott's 2018 Jeeves novel carried the Wodehouse estate's approval.
Music offers its own versions. Grieg built the Holberg Suite as a salute to an older age, and George Rochberg abandoned serialism for pastiche after his son died in 1963, producing his String Quartet No. 3 in 1972. Queen's Bohemian Rhapsody counts twice over, since it stitches many distinct styles into one song. For the 1971 musical Follies, Stephen Sondheim wrote more than a dozen numbers channelling Broadway writers of the interwar decades, including Cole Porter and Irving Berlin. A pastiche Mass assembles movements, say a Kyrie and a Gloria, from different composers' settings.
Film and law have taken notice too. Sergio Leone's Once Upon a Time in the West reworks earlier American Westerns, and Quentin Tarantino borrows from Leone, making a pastiche of a pastiche. In the EU, a 2001 copyright directive lists pastiche alongside caricature and parody as an exception, and the Court of Justice, in a case against Pelham GmbH, said it can cover works that evoke existing ones while staying noticeably different. In architecture the label is often an insult; Alain de Botton called it an unconvincing copy of past styles.
Source: Pastiche
