Without wishing to hijack this thread to my hobby-horse composer,  Austrians of Mozart's day had considerably fresher memories of Turkish military incursions,  since from 1789 the Austrian army had been trying to dislodge the Ottoman occupation of Belgrade, a city to which the Austrians laid claim.  (Although the city was successfully taken by Colonel Cohenburg,  it was subsequently recaptured by the Turks and razed to the ground in 1791).  These events were set to music by Stephen Storace in 1790 as THE SIEGE OF BELGRADE, which premiered on Jan 1st, 1791.  The recapture of Belgrade that occured after the premiere didn't damage the opera's success, and it remained in repertory for about 25 years.  The score "lifts" Mozart's "Ronda Alla Turca" wholesale* as the opening scene (to the words "Wave our Prophet's fam'd stan-dard of glo-ry on high..",  and there's also a "Janissary March" by Storace himself,  which seems to be in the established "Turkish" style.   Unlike Pasha Selim, the "noble Turk" is a singing role with a Serenade and two colossal arias for audience favourite Mick Kelly in the role - but no hint of any "orientalism" appears in the Seraskier's musical numbers.  (In fact the Act III "battlefield" aria is a proto-Beethovenian number that pushes the stylistic envelope to the limit, with offstage trumpets and astounding modulatary leaps at "Death stalks triumphant o'er the field!" - although it falls-back to a Rossinian tonic-supertonic-dominant-tonic clatter-clatter finale).

Sadly the musical scores of the other two Storace works which may have included "oriental" colour (DIDO, QUEEN OF CARTHAGE, and MAHMOOD, PRINCE OF PERSIA) have both been entirely lost... in fact MAHMOUD remained unfinished when Storace died of influenza at the age of 36.

* there was a very probable reason for Storace doing so - his sister was attempting to secure Royal support for a Concert Tour of Britain by Mozart, who was little-known in Britain at the time; beginning with a planned UK premiere of THE MARRIAGE OF FIGARO, since most of the cast & Da Ponte were in London as refugess from the French Revolution...  Mozart needed the "plug".  "Prinny" eventually put his signature to the project, but sadly, Mozart was already dead by the time the invitation reached Vienna.

Matthew Head finds a way of twisting that fact to serve a narrow agenda; he says that it is ‘disingenuous’ to read the Pasha in Mozart’s Die Entfuhrung aus dem Serail as being ‘a personification of new tolerance and respect for non-European culture’; instead he is ‘commended for behaving like a good Christian, he turns the other cheek; he embodies the liturgically sanctioned fantasy of conversion’ (if the Pasha had acted vengefully, as Osmin would wish, it is hard to imagine that Head would be any less critical – the opera seems damned from the outset simply by being written by a European in his terms). Head also says that ‘To be of Orientalism, Mozart’s Turkish music does not need to advocate imperialism directly. Mozart’s Turkish music is already a way of envisioning, structuring, knowing and – at a textual level – controlling its object’.

This stuff is massively one-dimensional, reflecting an a priori agenda to which the complexities of the work are bent. I'd suggest that some consideration of the different class status of the Pasha and Osmin, and the ways in which their characterisations accord with common musical conventions for representing different social classes, might tell us more about why one is portrayed more sympathetically than the other. But also that there are various nuances that make such a thing far from black and white.

It's a weird situation I find myself in, on one hand trying to refute those sorts of didactic and simplistic platitudes, which you find frequently in academia these days, and on the other trying to uphold the importance of considering questions of orientalism (and gender, and the like) in the company of those musicians outside of academia (and some here) who seem to react violently against the subject being invoked at all, and want us to return simply to 'the music itself' viewed independently of its relationship to the wider cultures and societies it inhabited both in its own time and now.

Indeed so, but in the process one alienates adherents of either entrenched position.

(enough whingeing - just want you to know where I'm coming from with respect to this subject. I'm equally unsympathetic to the type of blanket condemnation of all things involving 'West representing East' that you rightly drew attention to earlier in this thread, and also to the 'music has nothing to do with such sordid things as imperialist ideologies, it's just pure sound' point of view. The starkness of the distinction between these perspectives seems to mirror the thorough stratification between musicology on one hand, and the worlds of composition and performance (and non-specialist listening) on the other; that the two camps are little interested in what each other think hardly seems to me a very productive state of affairs).

Actually, I'm not so sure, on the basis of some comments that have been made.

Not perhaps for you, nor for me, but there is a clash as these things are seen by some others. There really are a significant people out there who do believe one of those entrenched positions, and their positions become all the more entrenched by apprehension of the other, alas. I suppose what gets my back up is the kneejerk reaction you get from some posters to this board who rather aggressively try to shout down any attempts to consider the music of Scelsi, Sorabji or others in terms of its relationship to orientalism, or indeed seem to chip in to declare most issues of the political implications of aesthetics as an irrelevant or unimportant subject for discussion. Apparently it's all right to describe Sorabji in terms of how the music reflects 'the East', but not to look more critically at what all those stereotypes about what 'the East' is might entail. I can't help but suspect a certain preciousness from various quarters concerning a rather narrow perspective on certain music or even music in general, leading to an automatic defensive reaction whenever other perspectives are invoked. Also that some are happy to pronounce in very generalised terms on society as a whole, but do not wish to consider the extent to which their own fields of practices or the work they hold dearest is also a part of that society and may have implications, meanings, and functions in that respect over and above those which are conventionally attributed to it. I would say exactly the same to those for whom any considerations of relative autonomy in music, or arguments that the immanent aspects of a work might exceed any pre-determined social model we might impose upon it, constitute meaningless 'formalism'. I have no problem with the presentation of perspectives very different to my own, though will argue the relative merits of the latter (otherwise one would be subscribing to a relativist position, by which all interpretations are equally valid, and thus none have any real validity at all).


Yes, I know - I'm not the person you should be arguing that to. I reckon that if, for example, I suggested that we might look at the relationship between constructions of modernism and machismo, you would get not sustained arguments that maintain that such a relationship is not palpable, but quite a bit of kneejerk hostility to the very fact of the subject being invoked at all. And I do believe its a subject, or at least a possibility, that is rather wilfully neglected in a lot of discourse about modern music (it's not such a long way from saying 'this is really hard-line' to saying 'I am really hard for liking it').


If only that belief was shared by widely in both the musical and musicological worlds......

Would snappy soundbites and empty rhetoric be better?


Hmmmm, the subject is OK as long as it remains safely in the realms of esoteric debates amongst New Musicologists, and doesn't interfere anywhere else? Actually, the later stages of this thread have brought interesting contributions from all sides.

In many areas of discourse, the demand that all should be kept within the realms of the aphoristic often results simply in the reiteration of cliches. Rather like the net result of demands for 'accessibility' in new music.

I could be an awful lot more direct about certain things on here if I chose, but I don't think that would achieve anything much.

By the way, it's very easy to skip posts or threads that one doesn't like. I don't understand this moral crusade some have to try and legislate on what can or can't be said about certain subjects (including Celan, for example).