This post is in response to one by autoharp on some issues to do with supposed Eastern elements in Sorabji's music, but it would be nice if the subject could be broadened to look at musical orientalism in general (especially in 20th century music, where it has been least investigated).


I am wary about Western writers declaring on what constitutes 'the influence of the East' (the East only exists from the perspective of the West, and of course is a totally vast area with a huge range of musical cultures, often only known to Westerners through the work of Western ethnomusicologists and more recently the commodification of such music by the culture industry). What Habermann describes are some of the most bog-standard of orientalist tropes, I'm afraid.


That can be the case with a number of composers; the things many pick up on most readily are those appropriated from others, especially when in a relatively unmediated form. Sorabji's allusions to those composers is not unmediated, certainly, but renders them rather more anonymous (same is true with Knussen's borrowings). Harmonic progression is certainly not an essential prerequisite for music, it's a particular Western construction which is not necessarily that fundamental to some Liszt, say (where figuration and timbre assume a more central role, or rather enter into a dialogue with relatively repetitive harmonic patterns) or even Chopin (where contrapuntal tension enables expansion and development of similar harmonic progressions). Harmonic distinctiveness is a different matter, though.


Errrrrrrrr - that comment constitutes orientalism par excellence as well! All about aura, really.


'Exotic' is the operative word here. Yet again, Busoni reiterates almost manneristic tropes with respect to a music perceived as 'different'.


Ravel's Sheherezade was one in a long line of pieces (particularly from French composers), beginning with Felicien David's Le Desert, depicting the supposedly sensuous, exotic, East, as being manifested in female form; supposed Eastern feminine sensuality seen as mysterious, enticing and dangerous, the counterpart to Western rationalism. It does in the end say more about the representor than the represented. Many related aspects of such a musical language developed upon such principles can be found in various of the other pieces mentioned.

In general, a lot of orientalist discourse about music centres primarily on the perceived subject (or rather representation of a subject) in terms of its difference to the West. I would point out that Sorabji was a British citizen who lived most of his life in that country.


There are many composers who have achieved drama through other means than thematic or tonal development (one need only look at some minimalists for the most obvious example). But in most such cases (e.g. Feldman, who you mention below) do so in the context of musical material which is itself distinctive and also develop very subtle ways of maintaining the drama through micro-changes to the smallest elements, even sometimes in a merely linear fashion, and so that the transformations are practically imperceptible (as in the Feldman works I mentioned in the Sorabji thread), thus creating a sense of a material undergoing very gradual transmutation, but maintaing the tension through the timing, the sheer sense of presence of the material itself, and so on. Trying to recreate actual Indian music in a radically different social and cultural environment seems a pretty fruitless thing to do, though its techniques can certainly be learned from in the process of creating something new. Neither the techniques, of the type described by Rapoport, nor the material itself to which they are applied (and I'm fully aware that such a dichotomy between material and its transformation is often problematised by various works which blur the distinction) have much distinctiveness or intricacy in Sorabji, compared to Feldman or Radulescu, let alone Debussy (who could find an infinite number of expressive nuances out of a few harmonies).

That is somewhat steering away from the issue of orientalism. The ideal of music as mass spectacle, hypnotic process, collective ritual, and all the other functions that derive from archaic pre-capitalist civilisations, do have quite different resonances nowadays in the West when such things are the primary means for the dissemination of propaganda, advertising, and so on (as well as being the mainstay of the culture industry). That is something I find sinister; the meanings and uses of such varieties of ritualistic experience in the early 20th century are obvious and for that reason are treated with some scepticism in their most naked form; when they are brought in by the back door dressed as orientalism or primitivism (see Sontag on Riefenstahl), I'm not sure there's much difference. Now of course, the same processes are at play in a rave, for example; but that is surely merely a form of entertainment for those who want a way of 'switching off' (whatever Adorno said, I'm not going to deny the importance of that for some people). But I don't imagine we would dignify rave music by calling it 'art'; nor new age rituals and all the rest of the (not so atavistic) hocus-pocus stuff. What makes Sorabji or others who employ orientalist strategies in pursuit of at least the latter ends particularly different?

Another of your essays, Ian! I particularly liked the reference to The Sackbut magazine of 1924.

I'm afraid I don't know any of Sorabji's music but might I suggest Laideronnette, Empress of the Pagodas from Ravel's Mother Goose Suite as a less obscure starting point? I love that music but sometimes I wonder how authentic it is and whether it bears any relation to what I can only think of calling pantomime music.

Alistair, I'm trying to move away from just discussing Sorabji's music (I made only a couple of comments on it in that post) - we've done that to death in the other thread - rather to try and broaden the discussion to wider considerations of orientalism, exoticisms, and constructions of such things as exhibited in some of the texts that autoharp gave. I certainly know that essay in Around Music and what Sorabji had to say about orientalism in general; nonetheless I think his music reiterates various broad aspects of it, albeit in different forms. I didn't say that Sorabji set himself up as an 'Oriental' composer as such, though he never ceases banging on about his racial heritage. Having one Asian parent and growing up in Chingford is a rather different matter to being raised in Mumbai, Karachi or Tehran. An awful lot of British people seem to like to make a lot of their exotic ethnic roots when such things exist; personally I'm relatively uninterested in such things for the most part (except when they obviously become an issue because of racial discrimination). Much of what you say (about Sorabji not trying to meld Orient/Occident, Eastern influences being incidental, etc.) I thoroughly agree with.

But maybe let's talk more widely about musical orientalism or even wider exoticism?

On this topic, I was wondering if anyone would be able to suggest any "oriental" music that is focused not on pentatonics or gamelan-related features, but rather on Indian (Indianische Tagebuch doesn't count! ), middle-eastern, or other distinct styles from eastern countries?  (especially, but not exclusively, I would be interested in hearing about older examples of piano or chamber music).

I would be also interested to hear if anyone has anything to say about early Japanese composers writing in the western-style ?  (my knowledge doesn't extend any time beyond Ifukube, about whom I can regrettably say no more than that I find his Japanese Rhapsody quite charming).

There are many examples from the nineteenth century, which are often very consistent in their stylistic devices - the following is a partial list I'm including works with Middle Eastern settings which may or may not draw upon actual Middle Eastern music - the extent to which many of these do so is often debatable):

François -Adrien Boieldieu - Le calife de Bagdad (1800)
Gioachino Rossini - L'italiana in Algeri (1813)
Albert Lortzing - Ali-Pascha von Janina (1824)
Giacomo Meyerbeer - Il crociato in Egitto (1824)
Carl Maria von Weber - Oberon (1828)
François-Espirt Auber - Le dieu et la bayadere (1830)
Luigi Cherubini - Ali-Baba (1833)
Félicien David - Mélodies orientales (1836)
Franz Hünten - Fantasie arabe (precise date unknown)
Mikhail Ivanovich Glinka - Ruslan and Ludmilla (Naina's melody in Act 3, apparently based on a Persian melody) (1837-42)
Johann Friedrich Burgmüller  - La péri (1843)
Giuseppe Verdi - I Lombardi alla prima crociata (1843)
Félicien David - Le Desert (1844) (an extremely important work in the development of this idiom; after this there were countless others, especially in France)
Hector Berlioz - Ruth (1843-46, rev. 1871)
Hector Berlioz - L'enfance du Christ (1850-54)
Charles Gounod - La reine du Saba (1861-62)
Aleksandr Nikolayevich Serov - Judith (1861-63)
Félicien David - Lalla-Rouke (1862)
Georges Bizet - Les pêcheurs de perles (1863)
Georges Bizet - 'Adieux de l'hôtesse arabe' (1866)
Anton Rubinstein - Der Thurm zu Babel (1868-69)
Mily Balakirev - Islamey (1869, rev. 1902)
Alexander Borodin - Prince Igor (1869-1887)
Georges Bizet - Djamileh (1871)
Giuseppe Verdi - Aida (1871)
Edvard Grieg - 'Song of the Odalisque' (1872)
Nikolay Andreyevich Rimsky-Korsakov - Mlada (1872)
Modest Petrovich Mussorgsky - 'Dances of the Persian Slave Girls' from Khovanshchina (1872-80)
Edvard Grieg - 'Arabian Dance' and 'Anitra's Dance' from Peer Gynt (1874-75, revised 1885, 1888, 1890-92)
Alexandre Luigini - Ballet égyptien (1875)
Pierre de Bréville - Stamboul (1875)
Camille Saint-Saëns - Samson et Dalila (1875)
Karl Goldmark Die Königin von Saba (1875)
Alexander Borodin - In the Steppes of Central Asia (1880)
Camille Saint-Saëns - Suite algérienne (1880)
Emmanuel Chabrier - Mauresque (1881)
Eduard Lalo - Namouna (1881-82)
Richard Wagner - Parsifal (garden scene conjured up by Klingsor, Act 2) (1882)
Jules Massenet - Hérodiade (1883)
Nikolay Andreyevich Rimsky-Korsakov - Scheherazade (1888)
Camille Saint-Saëns - Africa fantasy (1891)
Pyotry Il'lich Tchaikovsky - 'Danse arabe' from The Nutcracker (1891-92)
Mikhail Ippolitov-Ivanov -Caucasian Sketches (1894)
Jules Massenet - Thaïs (1894)
Camille Saint-Saëns - Fifth Piano Concerto (1896)
Arthur Fotte - Four Character Pieces from the rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam (1900)

(before these, there are of course the numerous works in the alla turca style, including numerous by Mozart (most importantly Die Entfuhrung aus dem Serail, the last movement of the Fifth Violin Concerto, and the 'Rondo alla turca'), Haydn, Beethoven, Gluck, and so on. Some argue that this style morphed into the style hongroise, though I've never been quite convinced by those arguments).

You might like to check out the chapter by Ralph P. Locke, 'Cutthroats and Casbah Dancers', in Jonathan Bellman (ed) - The Exotic in Western Music, for more on Middle Eastern allusions in the nineteenth century. Also the former's book Music, Musicians and the Saint-Simonians. And the rather more mixed article 'Orientalism and Musical Style' by Derek B. Scott, which can be read here: http://www.leeds.ac.uk/music/Info/CMJ/Articles/1997/02/01.html

Ravel's Sheherezade was one in a long line of pieces (particularly from French composers), beginning with Felicien David's Le Desert, depicting the supposedly sensuous, exotic, East, as being manifested in female form; supposed Eastern feminine sensuality seen as mysterious, enticing and dangerous, the counterpart to Western rationalism. It does in the end say more about the representor than the represented.

Quote from Ian's first post; I think I agree with the second sentence!

Roussel is a composer who (largely) avoided the "sensuous East" trap, partly because he had travelled extensively in Indo-China. The settings of Chinese poems are written in a Rousselian language rather than a quasi-Chinese language and Padmavati is stylistically not too far removed from the 2nd Symphony (by some way the most interesting of the four).

Having just written about Chinese young musicians on the PMD thread, I was interested to read - Ian again -Trying to recreate actual Indian music in a radically different social and cultural environment seems a pretty fruitless thing to do, though its techniques can certainly be learned from in the process of creating something new. I wonder how that relates to a scenario whereby the Chinese appropriate Western art music in the decades to come. I must confess to some discomfort at reading Ian's words and substituting mine at suitable points. What seems on the one hand to be a reasonable position - how can we Westerners create a music that isn't part of our culture - takes on sinister overtones when we try to argue against a role reversal!

However, I think these are two different issues, albeit distantly related. As Autoharp remarked, there is a 70 - 80 year time difference between the two positions being discussed here, and whilst one can (indeed must) interpret the past through the perspective of the present, one must also be conscious of the past's perspective too... one cannot blame Ravel for not having a 21st century view of orientalism!

I didn't see this modified post until now:


The point about harmonic progressions I was trying to make was not to insist on directional harmony as an essential prerequisite for a piece of music - far from it, there are many positive examples of music where this is not a primary factor - but that Sorabji's harmonies, even taken in isolation, lack distinctiveness. In terms of the other point you make, I was suggesting that while some composers take pre-existing harmonic languages as their starting point and individuate them, Sorabji renders most of them into a sort of nothingness. When anyone's music generates attention and positive acclaim primarily at the moments when it sounds like that of someone else, there are real questions to be asked about what that says concerning the composer's personality, and whether they can do more than simply be a pale shadow of their models. Sorabji sometimes sounds like his models, otherwise more like this harmonically anonymous nothingness I describe. Comparing, say, Faure or Scriabin's harmonies to those of Chopin, a clear influence on both, makes to me the distinction quite clear.

As far as the other quotes are concerned, I am certainly reading them 'against the grain', not in terms of the intentions, but in terms of what else they reveal about stereotypical ideas of the 'Orient' and the 'exotic'. I am quite surprised, not least in light of the fact that this whole mode of discourse is fundamentally rooted in imperial attitudes, that you think the matter is irrelevant. What do you think of Mozart's portrayals of the Turks and their music in Die Entführung aus dem Serail, say? It amazes me sometimes how some musicians supposedly on the left refuse to even engage with this sort of issue, or more broadly with the fact that culture of past eras might reflect something of the ideologies of those eras. Actually, I take a quite moderate line on this compared to lots of musicologists who specialise in it, and have been sharply critical of some of their didactic moralism in writings. Try reading the writings of Miriam Whaples, Mary Hunter or Matthew Head if you want to see what really harsh critiques of musical orientalism are like.


Yes, I know that, and it shows. And also in the fact that it appeals as a nostalgic alternative to modernity. Are you suggesting that one should forget that one is living in the present? Or that it would be nice to return to a time when people didn't worry about such things?


Orientalism, as a pure definition, is the attempt on the part of Westerners to represent 'the East'. I did not say it is 'a bad thing', I just don't think it is unequivocally 'a good thing', either. Orientalism in its actual manifestations has taken on specific forms entailing dominant ideologies about what 'the East' represents. I think we should look a bit more critically at these, and as such I don't accept some of the cliched platitudes represented in some of the quotations you provide.

Here is part of the entry on Orientalism by Ralph P. Locke in the New Grove:

In its strict sense, the dialects of musical Exoticism within Western art music that evoke the East or the orient; the latter is generally taken to mean either the Islamic Middle East (e.g. North Africa, Turkey, Arabia, Persia), or East and South Asia (the Far East, e.g. India, Indochina, China, Japan), or all of these together. Broader and more varied uses of the term are discussed at the end of the article.

Orientalism in music first flourished in various operas of the 17th and 18th centuries with Turkish or Chinese settings, notably Mozart's Die Entführung aus dem Serail (1782; see Turca, alla). In the 19th and early 20th centuries, the Middle East became a prime target for the colonization efforts of the Western powers and, accordingly, a much-favoured locale in which to set operas and other musical works. Various standard ‘Middle Eastern’ musical gestures were first established in the popular Le désert of the French composer Félicien David, who had lived in Egypt for two years, and then exploited by other composers, such as Bizet (Les pêcheurs de perles), Verdi (Aida), Massenet (Thaïs; see illustration) and Richard Strauss (Salome). The ‘Middle East’ was also a favoured setting for ballets (La source, with music by Delibes and Minkus) and modern-dance works (e.g. by Ruth St Denis). Many successful works were also set in East Asia, notably Puccini's Madama Butterfly and Turandot.

Works set in the Middle and Far East are often placed in ancient times or portray ‘timeless’ rituals; temporal displacements heightened the sense of escapism and also avoided the risk of having an opera comment in too parochial or potentially uncomfortable a manner on current political or imperial realities. Social ideology was nonetheless strongly conveyed, not least through what might be called the archetypal orientalist opera plot: a Western male becomes romantically involved with a local female, who is portrayed as sexually inviting and thereby at once attractive and threatening. (Bizet's Carmen played this story out on European soil; dark-skinned gypsies were understood to have migrated from vaguely eastern regions such as Egypt or India.) How such love relationships were worked out in the course of the opera depended on attitudes at the time towards the possible mingling or inherent incompatibility of different ‘races’ (see Parakilas, 1993–4).

...

The similarities between musical works about the Middle Eastern ‘orient’ and travel journals or other literary works describing the region (see Hunter, 1997) or between music and orientalist painting (for example Ingres and Gérôme; see Locke, 1991) are particularly striking. The stereotyped characters seen in these writings and paintings, including the (male) tyrant or Muslim fanatic and the seductive almée (dancing woman), find repeated echoes in musical works, for example in Beethoven's Die Ruinen von Athen (with its Turkish March and Chorus of Dervishes) and in Saint-Saëns's Samson et Dalila and Strauss's Salome, each of which features an extended dance that alternates sultry languor and violent pounding.

As a more general term within musical and other writing, ‘orientalism’ can carry a variety of meanings. The noun ‘orientalist’ is the traditional label for a scholar of Middle Eastern languages, culture and archeology; but the term ‘orientalism’ (and the adjective ‘orientalist’) have frequently been applied (since Said, 1978) to the entire imperialist system that in the past few centuries has defined, ruled or ‘spoken for’ the Middle East. The diverse manifestations of orientalism are now defined to include not just scholarly treatises but also Western colonial regulations, journalistic writings, school textbooks, travel posters, poetry, paintings and operas. Most recently, the term has been used to refer to European or European-derived attitudes towards any other culture, not just one located in North Africa or Asia. Lipsitz, for example, speaks of Paul Simon's and David Byrne's ‘orientalist’ fascination with the musics of sub-Saharan Africa or the Caribbean; Kramer does the same for Ravel's evocation of ancient Greece (the very cradle of Western civilization) in Daphnis et Chloé. In such writings, the term sometimes becomes a near-synonym for ‘exoticist’.

Uh-oh.

Why do I get the feeling I've had this sense of déjà vu before?