Yes, indeed - but then a large number of pieces also don't - how's almost the entire string quartet repertoire for starters? - so I'd like to see a more appropriately proportioned approach to this issue in the light of that fact, rather than an attempt to assume that, just because a lot of works may be seen to have rather more overt connections with such extra-musical issues, they therefore all do.

Sorry! I stand (or rather sit) duly corrected...

I accept much of what you write here, except that I would not include the emotions amongst the otherwise "non-musical trains of thought" of which I wrote; emotions are likewise almost impossible to account for and describe adequately in words and, in the sense, emotions and music seem to me to have a far closer relationship to one another than does music and gender, music and ethnicity, music and politics, etc. If I could sit down and write an essay on the emotional motivations behind a piece of music I was to write, I'd probably write the essay rather than the piece...

I take your points in that part that I've not quote here but cannot resist quoting just this one bit - at the risk of seeming suddenly frivolous - since the position of a hyphen can make all the difference to one's meaning, can it not?! ("same-sex inclined" as distinct from your "same sex-inclined", if you'd not figured it out...)

Yes but, apart from those latter bits that most victims of any kind of fascism might not necessarily be expected to recognise and understand, that sounds to me pretty much like an example of a totalitarian model, however much such a notion may ostensibly have been "abandoned by historians and political thinkers from about the 1960s onwards".

Best,

Alistair

One more point for Alistair: when Sorabji writes the following about Busoni:

In his playing that immense lofty aloofness, that curious sense of existence in some superhuman Deva-chan world (to borrow an idea from Brahmanic thought), that extraordinary cold white fire of intellectualized and sublimated emotion, emotion so great, so intense, and at once so intellectualized and sublimated as to transcend and wholly obliterate the commonplace physical and nervous sensations that are dignifed by the name, that almost terrifying personal and mental power all made together of Busoni, compared with other pianists, what one feels a great Brahmin Rishi would be, alone in his Himalayan hermitage, compared with the peripatetic yogis, fakirs and jugglers, who will perform their tricks, mystifying and marvellous enough for what they are, where and whenever there is prospect of reward.

(that's quite enough of that lurid claptrap! )

why is that any more meaningful or valid than, say, McClary associating the recapitulation of Beethoven's Ninth with rape (which she did withdraw)?

If you think I'm fishing for vehement responses, you are very wrong indeed. I just do think there is a virtue in at least temporarily dislodging various sacred cows, and also in introducing some perspectives (even when I don't particularly agree with them) that otherwise go unheard (within reason). That does seem in keeping with the spirit of dialectics.

Thus speaks Ollie the self-styled moderator. I don't particularly care any longer what kind of response I get from a few of you who are implacably hostile to certain subjects even being raised, it's true. As for as a 'soapbox', I think you'll find most posts constitute replies to others.

Actually, there have been dialogues on this thread, which I have contributed to (and in particular Alistair's responses are very interesting, however much we may disagree violently on numerous things). Maybe your time would be better spent contributing to them rather than attempting to legislate on how one is supposed to behave on forums?

No, Ian, I am "ignoring" nothing of the sort. Of course the pieces on your list evidence varying degrees and qualities of attempts by Western composers to forge some kind of relationship between the compositional activities of the Westerner and matters "oriental"; all I say in addition is that this does not, of itself, prove that ALL music must evidence overt, conscious, deliberate attempts to meld musical creativity and ethnicity or gender.

I was not "thinking of " "orientalist string quartets"; here, it seems, it is you that - wilfully or accidentally - misrepresent me by assuming that I may have been trying to imply the very opposite of what I actually wrote, for my reason for mentioning a large proportion of the string quartet repertoire is that it has no obvious connections with matters of gender, ethnicity, politics, etc. (ergo with "orientalism", either) - and for the avoidance of doubt, I do not in this particular context mean "the entire strinq quartet literature" (for that would have been inaccurate) but "a large proportion of the string quartet literature.

Just like "a little knowledge", a double negative can be a "dangerous thing"; let's make sure we understand from which side you're firing here...(!)
I'm with you on pretty much all of this except that last bit; since we all respond to different pieces of music in different ways and at different times (and that such varities of respose are expanded still farther by the factor of different performances of those pieces), your argument that what the listener "processes and interprets" when emotional states are induced in and by the composer's work "can frequently be conceived relative to constructions of gender, ethnicity, and so on", whilst not necessarily wrong per se, is simply unhelpful, as it tells us nothing beyond reminding us of the fact that we composers can never be certain how any individual listener may react to our work at any time or, for that matter, what extra-musical constructions he/she may put on it following those listening experiences. However, this brings the matter (by your own hand) into the different arena of "listener processing and interpretation" as distinct from composer intent - and what you have achieved by so doing is illustrate that there can be - and indeed almost always are - some differences of approach and response between composer and listener. To return to the particular aspect of the subject that led us to this interesting, valuable but ultimately temporary digression, however, the way I see it is that one simply cannot meaningfully codify listener responses or composer intent in ways that will provide, as a direct consequence, incontrovertible and universally recognisable proof that this, that or the other piece constitutes a part of some kind of expression of ethnicity, gender, politics or what you will. As a final comment on this, I can say in all honesty that, apart from a couple of "Scottish"-oriented piano works that were commissioned as such (where conscious reference to some kind of Scottish identity may be read into what I wrote), I have never been either conscious or desirous of "expressing" anything to do with gender, ethnicity, politics or whatever else when composing.

Of course not, but that is the case whether the gun-toter toes his/her gun under orders from a fascist régime or whether he/she does so as an all-too-common criminal wanting to coerce his/her victim into giving up his/her wallet, mobile phone, etc., at least if the victim is left uncounscious. My remarks were in any case about the more general understanding of specific concepts rather than in reference to criminal acts committed under the orders of a fascist régime. The kinds of misunderstanding that can arise from this kind of problem are, it seems to me, not so far from the situation that enable the absurd and meaningless phrase "the war on terror" to be coined and have wide currency and credibility. By this I mean that, when someone shoots someone in the street in UK, they break the law, yet when someone does the same in a country which has a régime where such an act might not necessarily be considered to be againt the law in all cases, the effect is precisely the same and an intrinsically criminal act has taken place in each case.

The distinction that you draw here is valuable and, indeed, undeniable. The point that I am making, however, is that, despite those significant differences that you rightly observe between Hitler's Germany and Stalin's Russia (you might have added Mao's China, etc.), they were all, to my mind, fascistic régimes. That said - and whether or not you or other may agree with me on that point - where does that get us and what does it prove or disprove to us in purely musical terms, let alone in relation to orientalism? Of course one could cite such examples as the experiments on composer victims in Terezin and elsewhere, or the acceptance by Franz Schmidt of a commission for a work in celebration of the (pre-WWII) achievements of the Third Reich (which occurred only because the composer knew he was dying and would never have to write a note of it or be persecuted for failing to do so), or re-present the ever-weakening and now largely discredited arguments about Richard Strauss the capitulatory Nazi-puppet-composer - one could likewise cite the effects of various Soviet Russian dictators on the works of composers in Soviet Russia at different times; the cases of composer victims of fascistic régimes apart, however (and, believe me, I am not undermining that importance of this in terms of its own context), there's really not much more to say in general terms, for very few composers have ever willingly set out consciously and deliberately to promote such régimes with their work.

The dilemma that I now face is whether to get on with some work or whether I should first go and milk a sacred cow or three?...

Best,

Alistair

I'm sorry you have not enjoyed Busoni's works - have you managed to hear DOCTOR FAUSTUS?  If not, I do commend it to you, despite the difficulty in getting hold of it... it's not, I agree, an opera one encounters often.

What slightly surprises me here, Syd - in all seriousness and with our conventional jousts laid aside - is that in his mature period, Busoni was considered the great "hope" of those opposed to Schoenberg's dodecaphonic tendencies, and in fact he championed a school of composition (becoming resident in Berlin for the purpose) which included such diverse voices as Varese, and Kurt Weill (who had, in fact, decamped from Schoenberg, whose pupil and advocate he had been).

Considering your own distaste for Schoenberg, Syd, I would have thought you might have found common cause with Busoni, and his advocacy of bitonality (as an alternative development to atonality)?   Busoni similarly disliked Wagner, to a rather greater degree than you do, admittedly, but for the reason that he held Wagner responsible for the destruction of tonality...  a dislike so intense that he refused to even speak Wagner's name, referring to him only as "Herr W".

Once again, I must point out the context of the remark, saying that orientalist works frequently entail representation of female sexuality. I don't know on what basis you are imagining I would thus conclude this is true of ALL such works. The original question was to do with what Orientalism had to do with gender (or ethnicity). The response was simply that it often does.


The question was framed as part of a corollary to the previous one, as follows:


itself in the context of whether orientalism had anything to do with ethnicity or gender. If we are talking about non-orientalist works, or those with only tenuous connections to such a genre, than that is a different matter. Nonetheless, I maintain that issues of gender, ethnicity, politics are embroiled in abstract instrumental music as well, including the string quartet repertoire (to consider politics here, consider for a start the whole social basis upon which the genre grew - was the type of music involved entirely unrelated to the demands of the social setting? I think not).


100% agreed on the last clause; performance is embroiled with these wider issues as well.


Every act of listening entails interpretation of some type. And yes, certainly, listener's experiences vary, but not to such an extent that any such interpretations are essentially arbitrary and do not warrant further attention. There will always be exceptional forms of listening experiences (if someone had happened to hear a piece right when a close friend was knocked down by a bus, say, and forever associated it with that, despite any other qualities of the piece, this would be uniquely personal and not really related to anything specific to the piece in another environment) but if it were not possible to gauge some categories of statistically likely responses to music, I'd be surprised if any music would have any power over a wide group of people.


Being conscious or desirous of such a thing is not really the issue (though some degree of conscious cognition of how such things might sediment musical language might give one more chance of negating them if so desired).

When teaching music and gender, I described to some students Lawrence Kramer's arguments concerning 'Pantalon et Columbine' from Schumann's Carnaval - Kramer argues that the opening staccato minor section denotes the masculine Pantalon, and the middle legato major section the feminine Columbine. Charles Rosen takes issue with this, arguing instead that in either section the melody represents the female character when presented in the treble, the masculine when in the bass (so both sections involve an interaction between the two characters). I found this argument more plausible, but played the piece to the students to see what they made of it. Almost without exception their response was to hear it in the manner of Kramer rather than Rosen. Now, that's just a relatively small group of students who may be entirely unrepresentative of a wider community of listeners (also about 90% female), but before we'd even talked about the subject in any detail they certainly felt that music strongly connoted aspects of gender. There is a huge range of musical discourse from many centuries that invokes gender in describing what is going on. Alas, much feminist musicology, emerging as it does from the English-speaking world with its own narrow empirical tradition of thought, does little to transcend reified constructions of gender, usually merely reiterating them with a different value system applied. But the fact that much musical language is descended from that with specific constructions of gender which sediment what results, that in some cases composers have specific gender ideologies they bring to bear upon their work, and especially that a great many listeners of all times seem to perceive music in these terms, certainly suggests to me that it's far from a non-issue. A music that goes beyond such categories (as Schoenberg wished for, in his Harmonielehre) would be very interesting - I'm not so sure that it has been achieved so often, though.


(I do believe fascism is better understood as an ideology adhered to by a group of people, as much as it also constitutes a regime, but that's going even further off onto a tangent). The point was that the nature of fascism can be understood from various perspectives, not all of which were obvious at the time.


Sure - I don't quite see how that relates to the 'war on terror', though?


In the case of Mao's China, that's possible, but I can't accept the category of fascist for Stalin's Russia. Though there are some on the far left who would agree with you. Maintaining the distinction between the categories is crucial to understanding the phenomena, in my opinion, but I'm happy simply to agree to differ on this subject.


It was a tangent that emerged from your assertion concerning fascism, which led to a consideration of the difference between fascism and totalitarianism. Not specifically relating to orientalism, just part of a discussion that branched off into other areas.


I do very strongly disagree with a lot of what you are saying, particularly to do with the sometimes willing or cynical acts of composers in writing musical propaganda for wholly disreputable regimes - it remains to my mind a major issue with music of many eras - but that is for another thread if we want to explore it further.