In haste - just setting off for a long rehearsal - Ravel Mallarme poems, coincidentally - I want to raise three points:

1 A cut and paste of one I made earlier about Asian musicians performing Western music and how we perceive that.

2 Takemitsu - was his use of Debussy and Messiaen "occidentalism", or did it in some way correspond to his own Japanese thinking?

3 Use of folk music by eg Bartok - isn't that (I'm thinking particularly of Music for Strings Percussion and Celesta) just another form of exoticism?

As I said, brief, but, hopefully, provocative in a constructive way...

Of course it is a far-fetched analogy, for the purposes of the argument. If we were to agree that apartheid permeated most areas of South African society and culture, and as such to insist that a discussion which excluded such a consideration would be woefully inadequate, why then (say) should the situation be any different with respect to patriarchy in the context of European society and culture, past and present?


I cannot speak for everyone who reads these boards, nor could anyone. What I do accept now is that yourself and a few others, are completely uninterested in issues of gender, ethnicity, and so on, in the context of music (I know that you are going to respond by saying that just because you don't want to talk about them doesn't mean that you aren't interested in them, but the fact that various of you seem to want to intervene to declare such subjects 'irrelevant' and so on is very telling). And that various claims I have heard from many quarters, which say that many of the boys club of the left are hugely resistant to considering gender and so on, especially as that would entail a consideration of their own position (much easier to make swaggering statements about geopolitics than to address the fact that one oneself operates within and benefits from a massively masculine-dominated musical world, for example), are not without foundation.


I have no interest in doing so, nor particularly in endearing myself to those jealously guarding the supposed exclusive value of their own narrow mode of discourse on music. You might prefer that one adheres to the prevailing group-think, I know. If I were in a room full of people making bigoted statements about Asians, I would stand my corner even if I was in a minority of one. Similarly, when the worst stereotypical cliches of 'the East' are invoked to explain why Sorabji's music supposedly demonstrates 'Eastern influences', I'll say my bit. If you don't like it, don't read it.


No-one is forcing them to read my posts if they don't want to.

(some preceding questions that led up to the quoted statements are cut for reasons of space)


That should be obvious - a large number of 'orientalist' pieces claim to be giving some sort of representation of people of particular ethnicities, and very frequently of supposed female sensuality as well, from David's Le Desert up to Ravel's Sheherazade and beyond.

(the specific thread topic is Orientalism and music, by the way)


First of all, purely abstract instrumental music, which does not entail a text, programme or other explicit allusions, is and always has been a minority of all music-making. Musical 'meaning' is indeed ambiguous (I prefer overall the word 'resonances' for that reason), but not so much so that any consideration of it is totally arbitrary (few people do not talk about music in terms of some extra-musical resonances, anyhow - the very fact of using language to describe it, as we do here, necessitates some degree of such a thing - the issue usually only becomes contentious when resonances other than those which dominate the received discourse are invoked). Though from a lot of discourse about music in the UK in particular (especially on new music), one would be hard pressed to believe that any of the music amounts to anything more than a 'pack of notes' (or 'pack of sounds') or other collection of exotic novelties; an unwillingness to engage with the emotional content of works (other than occasionally in terms of a certain baby-talk) speaks volumes about characteristic British emotional constipation. Autonomy from 'known' meanings is a noble aim for music to aspire to, I believe, though it tends to be only on exceptional occasions when music achieves this (and that itself does not necessarily imply anything in terms of quality; various forms of mediation can themselves be essentially arbitrary and once again result in little more than exotic novelty).

Your point about music not associating with non-musical trains of thought (in which category I would include the emotions) 'overtly, deliberately, consciously' is an important one in this context; whether or not such associations are willed or not does not really affect whether one can speak of their being a presence in the works, unless one believes the intention is more important than the result. I don't.



Fair enough - I agree with you in large measure and do believe that the total permeation of Lutheran values in Bach's music may be overestimated (I think some scholars have come to similarly conclusions quite recently). And some 'orientalist' works have more far-reaching significance than is contained within their orientalist aspirations. Those that simply spin out a few stock harmonies, timbres, gestures (in which category I would include some works of Scelsi) are often least successful in this respect - other than their 'exoticism', which tends to wear off after the works have been heard a few times or one has encountered the same stock devices aplenty elsewhere, what else is there?


Well, discussion of the ideological relationship of Tristan to other of Wagner's works and ideas would be interesting, but is either for another thread or for elsewhere. Wagner's interest in Buddhism, and plans to write an opera on a Buddhist legend (and Jonathan Harvey's realisation of a project taking this as its starting point, to be premiered this year, I think), would be highly relevant to this thread, but it's not something I know anything much about - anyone else have more information on either Wagner or Harvey in this respect?


Any sort of discussion of music on here admits only of verbal expression (well, we can add pics as well, I suppose!). Music does indeed of potentials that are distinct to those of other artistic media, certainly, but the very fact of constituting some form of 'expression' already places the music in a wider context.


Well, for quite a while Kodály and Bartók have been held up as positive examples of engagements with 'real' folk-music as opposed to their nineteenth-century predecessors (including by Adorno in the case of Bartók and also Janáček), but many of the constructions of this create as many problems as they solve, being predicated on notions of pre-industrial 'authenticity' and the like, the implications of which should be obvious (these sorts of ideologies are intrinsic to most forms of Herderian Romanticism, of course). Sándor once said about Bartók 'Play it like it's Chopin or Liszt; forget about the ethnic elements' (not to me, he said that in an interview). In terms of listening (playing may be a different matter), that's not a bad attitude, I reckon. Though Bartók's own mediations, strategies, and results thus produced generate their own set of expressive resonances. What he does with his sources is frequently as if not more significant than the sources themselves - same is true for Finnissy.


Ah yes, I do remember, and I agree with you there (I often use the example of Knussen and Barraque in a similar manner - which one would one think is straight, which one gay?). Don't really want to go down this line too much in this thread (though maybe it could be discussed in another one); suffice to say that I subscribe to the Vidal view that 'there is no such thing as homosexuality, only homosexual acts' (and would say the same thing with respect to other types of sexual inclinations as well). If one rejects the notion of homosexual identity, then the notion of a homosexual musical sensibility is meaningless. That's not to say that there mightn't be constructions of what a 'gay music' might be in existence, however, and it's not out of the question that the work of same sex-inclined composers might be commonly viewed or judged relative to such constructions - same is true of constructions of gender in music.


The 'totalitarian' model of fascism is not one I accept, and has for the most part been abandoned by historians and political thinkers from about the 1960s onwards. In terms of the relevance of fascism to music: when I use the term 'fascism' I refer to a particular ideology that stresses the primacy of the nation-state, submission to authority and the collective, an essentially aesthetic view of the world which entails the complete squashing of humans that do not correspond to such a view, and in the specific case of the Nazis (Italian fascism is somewhat different, at least in its earlier stages), a cult of the 'natural', the 'authentic', the pre-industrial, the organic society, Blut und Boden, a mythical, idealised view of earlier times, an appeal to mystical occultism, and so on. Various aspects of this ideology overlap so strongly with Herderian romanticism (some early 19th century romanticism was different and anticipates modernity (Lacoue-Labarthe and Nancy's book on early German Romanticism is especially interesting in this context), though Herderian ideas were of course already influential at this time) and also with late 19th-century aestheticism that I do believe that one can say that fascist ideology grew in large measure out of a combination of the two. That is not to condemn out of hand all the music and other art that was deeply informed by such ideologies (i.e. a huge amout of culture from the period), not least because, as mentioned earlier, intention and result do not necessarily coincide, just to suggest that we might look somewhat more critically at such ideologies which continue to be reiterated and appropriated in the present day. I will take this a stage further and say in the very cults of certain manifestations of romanticism and aestheticism, as aesthetic ideologies applied to music appreciation, neo-fascist thinking is a significant presence.

I wonder whether it is really justified to call some of the works in question 'occidentalisms' if they do not entail any actual representation of 'the occident', or at least grow out of a tradition of such things, as with orientalism.

I think the first point in my earlier post today is open to misconstruction, so to save others wading through threads, here are the two relevant earlier posts.

The first comes from the surprisingly under-posted PMD speech thread:

Did anyone see the C4 news report last night [Tuesday] about instrumental, particularly violin and piano, teaching in China? The thrust of the report was, that as interest in "classical" music in the West is (quote) waning, it may be in the Far East, and particularly China, where it finds its new home over the coming decades. That almost seems plausible to me, since serious music is SO foreign - and worse, irrelevant - to the majority of people born after, say, 1970 in the UK. We are perilously close, as PMD says, of losing a whole cultural heritage, and the notion of the Asians "rescuing" it from obscurity is perhaps no stranger than the adoption of an interpretation of the world of the Ancient Greeks at the time of the Renaissance. The fact (and it IS a fact - I know several musicians who have come from this background) that the Chinese, in particular, are happy to invest so much time in educating their child with fearsome dedication, in a way that we Westerners would now consider child abuse, a breach of human rights, demonstrates how far our culture is removed from the pursuit of excellence - from a fear, I would suggest, of excelling.

The second is a post on the first page of this thread.

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!

Hopefully that clarifies the link between this thread and my point and perhaps someone will now find something meaningful in my thinking to comment upon.

RM, a few brief points:

Involving oneself in a "foreign" culture doesn't have to amount to appropriation. If Western classical music is being taken up in such a wholesale way in China this might actually be seen as evidence of Western culture becoming an unquestioned hegemonic "lingua franca", involving as it would the assumption, inherited from the colonial period, that Western music is in some way superior to indigenous traditions. And the word "tradition" is important here - as far as I can see, Chinese musical education (in Western music) isn't in the least concerned with artistic innovation but rather with preservation, in so far as the Western traditional canon is being interpreted but not added to.

I found myself in agreement with much that PMD had to say in his speech, but I found his blanket dismissal of pop music rather unhelpful, and the idea that a whole cultural heritage is being lost is to my mind a far too apocalyptic way of looking at things. Anyway, no music or aspect of music (materials, instruments, forms) "belongs" to a particular group of people.

Understanding a particular music involves understanding the human context in which it originated, and of course "understanding" and "respecting" are closely-related ideas in this kind of area.

I don't know if any of that makes sense...

Many thanks for the ideas.

Richard, I think you are absolutely right as far as innovation (non-existent) v preservation. Musical education in China is highly selective, with a strong emphasis on technique, very little concern with music written before 1900, and very little interest even in, say, violin sonatas - students I know who have come to the UK from Beijing can play Tchaikovsky and Sibelius concertos and Paganini caprices flawlessly but have never heard the Beethoven Kreutzer Sonata (for example). So, if the Far East is going to be the new home of Western music, the repertoire is going to shrink! (I exaggerate - a little.) What I perceive happening is an assumption on the part of the Chinese rather similar to that of advertisers in the West - that Western music (or a particular version of it, based on the small repertoire detailed above) is something to aspire towards, will bring some upward social mobility, and in the process, only certain aspects are truly absorbed - your line about "understanding a particular music involves understanding the human context in which it originated" is not high on the agenda in the Beijing Central Conservatoire or in Shanghai. (Some might cynically add that it isn't that high in the UK either...). The tenuous connection with the subject at the start of this thread is that there IS an interpretation of this as the Chinese seeing Western music in just as romanticised a fashion as the Mozarts, Saint-Saens, Ravels etc found the various forms of "oriental" music in the centuries gone by. Times have changed, and the psychology of myth-making is different - where the Westerners found sensual allure or raw primitivism, the Chinese see the possibility of a higher standard of living - and of course we are talking about performance rather than composition, but I do believe that, whatever journeys these lines have thought have taken, they come from a shared root.

Ian - don't for a minute think I'm advocating the physical violence and mental torture that seems to go hand in hand with the teaching techniques I have referred to; but I do sometimes wonder if we have gone too far the other way! That's an aside, however...

Re the Indian music question - I understand that you were writing about composition, but I do wonder how we might view Westerners playing ragas - and presenting it not as a curiosity but as a valid interpretation? Ethno-musicology is emphatically not my area, so for all I know this might be happening all the time - but I suspect not.

And as far as institutions in China teaching Western music go, yes, they were first set up almost a century ago in the 1920s, but Chairman M's rule firstly limited their power and, by the time of the Cultural Revolution, Western music was outlawed. It is impossible to imagine what perception that gives the educated Chinese (ie those in the major cities) of Western music. I absolutely agree that a performance of music by someone from any culture has the potential to be enriching; again, the point I am making is that the motives of those performing (or those who set them on a path towards performing ie this is what the West is about - an end to poverty, aspire towards materialism, etc etc) has a parallel in the Romanticising of the East (this is what the East is about - sensuality, excitement) in the sort of pieces we started this thread by discussing.