I'm just simply bringing that up because that sub-subject arose from my initial comment about different perceptions of artists to do with their class and lifestyle in Britain and Italy, how the aura that surrounds an aristocrat might provoke a lot less awe in an Italian communist than in many British liberals (either category encompasses a wide range of composers in either country). I suspect the situation in America is closer to that in Britain than in Italy.

Well, recurrent tropes of 19th-century orientalism included static harmonies and textures, drones, use of augmented intervals and sometimes microtones (David's Le Désert, parent to so many later orientalist works, required the tenor singing the 'Chant du muezzin' to use microtones, even though these were not notated in the score (David simply instructed the singer how to do them in performance)) and generally an eschewal of dialectical interplay between materials, harmonic and structural progress, and so on. Whilst augmented intervals aren't a particularly prevalent aspect of Scelsi, most of the other things are. In general, such 19th-century exoticism had to do with the representation of a world supposed to be mysterious, sensuous, and quite removed from the rationalist West, in a way that had to do with simultaneous idolisation, fear, and a sense of superiority all at the same time. These sorts of ideologies underlay many Western portrayals of the non-Western world at this time and afterwards (I wouldn't take Edward Said's word for it (I find him a dubious thinker, higher on rhetoric than sustained argument in this context), a better source would be Maxime Rodinson's Europe and the mystique of Islam, looking at this specifically in the context of the Islamic world). These sorts of tropes continue to be prevalent in various aspects of culture, in Scelsi's time and now, certainly colouring quite a bit of the reception of his (and others') work, and I don't think we can really separate it out from them entirely.

To Richard's point - isn't the debate that's going on here a form of thinking for ourselves about the music, even if we aren't Scelsi-virgins (do we have to be in order to be allowed to post to this thread)?

Just one point on this - whether or not Scelsi was 'involved' in politics (and retreating from political action is itself political, as for example amongst those who accomodated themselves to fascism) his music, like that of all others, exists in society and so is involved in a political arena by default.

The attribution question is a tricky one. Also a tricky one for me is that once I had heard (and been blown away by) a few of the pieces such as the Quattro Pezzi per Orchestra, Anahit, Kya, the cello solos and just a few other things I found it hard to hear much individuality in new pieces I came across.

I did also find myself getting a bit peeved by a few people who seemed to have made rather a good thing for themselves out of the Scelsi Industry. But that's just Ollie being unreasonable.

Still, I have no doubt he belongs to the must-hears. However it was put together and even if some of it was indeed by Francesco Pancetta.

True. But does that place these features forever more offlimits?

It isn't that I don't wish to hear these features, more that I don't accept that their presence necessarily implies some kind of patronising or imperialistic attitude towards the "Orient". Félicien David himself, though no great shakes as a composer, was actually a proto-socialist (follower of Saint-Simon) who spent some time living in Egypt, rather than a celebrant of colonialism who derived his "exoticism" by hearsay.

No, it doesn't, that was in response to Evan's question about whether Scelsi's music was in any way related to that of the 19th-century orientalists.


The relationship between artistic orientalism and imperialist attitudes is certainly a much more complex one than is presented in the model given by Edward Said, who said the following:

'For the Orient idioms became frequent, and these idioms took firm hold in European discourse. Beneath the idioms there was a layer of doctrine about the Orient; this doctrine was fashioned out of the experiences of many Europeans, all of them converging upon such essential aspects of the Orient as the Oriental character, Oriental despotism, Oriental sensuality, and the like. For any European during the nineteenth century – and I think one can say this without qualification – Orientalism was such a system of truths, truths in Nietzsche’s sense of the word. It is therefore correct that every European, in what he could say about the Orient, was consequently a racist, an imperialist, and almost totally ethnocentric. Some of the immediate sting will be taken out of these labels if we recall additionally that human societies, at least the more advanced cultures, have rarely offered the individual anything but imperialism, racism, and ethnocentrism for dealing with “other” cultures.' (Edward W. Said – Orientalism, fourth edition, with new preface and afterword (London: Penguin, 2003), pp. 203-204).

Said makes every European who invokes the 'Orient' imperialist by definition, allowing for no possibility of nuance. It is his work that has been hugely influential on the whole field of musicology devoted to the 'exotic', including the work of Jonathan Bellman, Ralph P. Locke, Richard Taruskin, Mary Hunter, Susan McClary, Matthew Head, and many others, who usually cite Said's rhetorical and unsubstantiated assertions as if they were rigorous scholarly truth. Few of these figures have, in my opinion, advanced that much beyond what Carl Dahlhaus had to say on the subject in his book Nineteenth-Century Music:

'Musical exoticism is the attempt to add a musical dimension to a depiction, on stage or in literature, of a remote and alien milieu. In the end, it proved to be a characteristic trend of the nineteenth century. Owing to the lack of a clear-cut definition of the phenomenon, its origins are indeterminable, but they clearly extend far into the past. The monotonously repeated “Allahs” that Lully wrote for the Turkish scene of Molière’s Le bourgeois gentilhomme (1670) differ from those in Félicien David’s ode-symphony, Le désert (1844), only in that Lully thought nothing of repeating a triad verbatim two dozen times, whereas David attempts to relieve the monotony of his choral declamation by varying the orchestral harmonies…The crucial point is not the degree to which exoticism is “genuine,” but rather the function it serves as a legitimate departure from the aesthetic and compositional norms of European music in the context of an opera or a symphonic poem. It is not so much the original context as the new, artificial context which we should examine if we want our analysis to be historical – that is, to pursue the aesthetic and compositional significance of the phenomenon in the nineteenth century. To do otherwise is to lose ourselves in comparative anthropology, which can do nothing more than establish various degrees of corruption in the music or style quoted. In a word, musical exoticism is a question of function, not of substance.' (Carl Dahlhaus - ‘Exoticism, Folklorism, Archaism’, in Nineteenth Century Music, translated J. Bradford Robinson (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1989), p. 302.)

David's situation is complex - certainly he was involved with the rather eccentric pre-Marxist socialists, followers of Saint-Simon, who preached a bizarre combination of quasi-socialism, matriarchy and mysticism (believing they would encounter the female Messiah on their trips to the Middle East). And his travels were undoubtedly a major influence upon Le Désert. But to thoroughly absolve his work of any connection with the types of imperialist ideologies about the Middle East is too easy, merely on the grounds of his socialism and his having spent time in the region. It is possible for a supposedly pro-feminist man to still have unconsciously absorbed various sexist assumptions, and the same goes with respect to those from the imperial nations with respect to the rest of the world.

I've written quite a bit about David (in the context of Finnissy's Unsere Afrikareise, which cites Le Désert very clearly and quite extensively), which I'd be happy to post some of here if anyone's interested. Maybe that would be better in another thread, though. It's a work that was massively popular and influential in its own time (initially greatly admired by Berlioz, amongst others), but is now practically forgotten (only one recording has been available on CD to my knowledge, and that is currently out-of-print).

In the case of Scelsi, particularly in many of the orchestral works, I'm simply not sure how much there is there when the more 'exotic' elements have lost their novelty and mystery.

I think that's putting it a litle more strongly than he did; but as he went on to say repeatedly in Culture and Imperialism, this shouldn't be taken to mean that the resulting artistic works are of necessity morally bankrupt and empty of interest.

To my ears, though, the "orientalistic" aspects of Scelsi manifest themselves most clearly in his piano music and some of the pieces for solo wind instruments, in other words in the less-developed part of his output, while in those works which I and other contributors to this thread have singled out for attention, this aspect takes a distant second place to his exploration of timbre as a structural/expressive device in itself, stripped indeed of superficial exoticism.