Orientalism and musical style

Musical Quarterly

Volumn 82, Issue 2, 1998, Pages 309-335

  Scott, Derek B ^a  

^a NONE

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[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 0141899631     PISSN: 00274631     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1093/mq/82.2.309     Document Type: Article

References (56)

1. "[A] myth derives its significance not from contemporary or archaic institutions of which it is a reflection, but from its relation to other myths within a transformation group." Claude Lévi-Strauss, The Raw and the Cooked: Introduction to a Science of Mythology, trans. John and Doreen Weightman (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1986), 51, n. 5
2. Edward W. Said, Orientalism: Western Conceptions of the Orient (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1978
3. J. A. Westrup, Purcell (London: Dent, 1937; reprint, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995), 142
4. Carolyn Abbate, Unsung Voices: Opera and Musical Narrative in the Nineteenth Century (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1991), 4
5. Jonathan Bellman, The "Style Hongrois" in the Music of Western Europe (Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1993), 13-14; see also 31-32
6. Bence Szabolcsi is concerned to trace ethnographic sources for Mozart's exoticisms and to rebut the accusation of "lighthearted toying" on Mozart's part ("Exoticisms in Mozart," Music and Letters 37 [1956]: 323-32). To rescue Mozart from this charge, Szabolcsi attempts to convey a sense of Mozart's dignifying folk music by raising it to the level of art. The question, "What are the ideological implications of revoicing these 'foreign' elements through the Viennese style?" is not asked. His theoretical model is not of Self and Other, but of Art and Folk; he thinks, therefore, in terms of elevation rather than mediation
7. Bellman, The "Style Hongrois," 14
8. For fuller discussion, see Miriam Karpilow Whaples, "Exoticism in Dramatic Music, 1600-1800" (Ph.D. diss., Indiana University, 1958)
9. Thomas Bauman, W. A. Mozart: Die Entführung aus dem Serail (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987)
10. Alfred Einstein, Essays on Music, rev. ed. (London: Faber, 1958), 211
11. The Gipsy in Music, trans. Edwin Evans (1881; reprint, London: William Reeves, 1960), 301
12. Ralph P. Locke, "Constructing the Oriental 'Other': Saint-Saëns's Samson et Dalila," Cambridge Opera Journal 3, no. 3 (1991): 267
13. The work cited is Francis Affergan, Exotisme et altérité: Essai sur les fondements d'une critique de l'anthropologie (Paris: Presses universitaires de France, 1987), 103-4
14. Number 2 of her Sabbath Lays of 1853. The words of this song reflect upon a biblical text, Revelation 12:1 and 4. For details of this tune's dissemination in France, see Ralph P. Locke, "Cutthroats and Casbah Dancers, Muezzins and Timeless Sands: Musical Images of the Middle East," in The Exotic in Western Music, ed. Jonathan Bellman (Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1998), 104-36 and 116
15. Supposedly composed by the New York Congressman Sol Bloom for an Egyptian dance at the Chicago World's Columbian Exposition in 1893; see Derek B. Scott, The Singing Bourgeois (Milton Keynes: Open University Press, 1989), 106
16. See Said, Orientalism, 191
17. Richard Taruskin, "'Entoiling the Falconet': Russian Musical Orientalism in Context," Cambridge Opera Journal 4, no. 3 (1992): 253-80, 255
18. reprinted in Bellman, The Exotic in Western Music, 194-217
19. Alexander Korda, London Films, U.K., 1940
20. Roy M. Prendergast, Film Music: A Neglected Art, 2d ed. (New York: Norton, 1992), 69
21. Prendergast, Film Music, 126
22. Carl Maria von Weber, 2d ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1976), 241-42
23. "Mother, O! Sing Me to Rest" (1830), words by Felicia Hemans, music anon
24. "A Bandit's Life Is the Life for Me!" (1872), words and music by E. Harper
25. "The Bandolero" (1894), words and music by Leslie Stuart [Thomas Augustine Barrett]
26. It has often been remarked that Bizet was influenced by Spanish music in this opera; for example, that his Habañera is based on Sebastián Yradier's El Arreglito and the entr'acte to act 4 on an arrangement by Manuel García of a Spanish polo, and that other tunes are taken from a Paris edition of Spanish songs. For a discussion of Spanish music in Carmen, the extent to which it was already mediated before Bizet appropriated it, and how far he altered it to suit his own purpose, see Susan McClary, Georges Bizet: Carmen (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 51-58. Bizet's Orientalism, however, is evident in this music's treatment (especially in his harmony and orchestration) and the decisions he takes as to who sings in this style - for example, Don José is Spanish, but musically he is French
27. On this subject, see James Parakilas, "The Soldier and the Exotic: Operatic Variations on a Theme of Racial Encounter," Opera Quarterly 10, no. 2 (1994): 33-56
28. Interestingly, Italians almost become the cultural Other in Tchaikovsky's Capriccio italien (1880), so that some pe ople find the piece suggests Spain rather than Italy
29. Donald J. Grout, A Short History of Opera, 2d ed. (New York: Columbia University Press, 1965), 321-22, 328
30. and Locke, "Constructing the Oriental 'Other'," 265-66
31. See "The Story of Ali Baba, and the Forty Thieves Destroyed by a Slave," in Arabian Nights' Entertainments, ed. Robert L. Mack (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995), 764-87
32. Rexton S. Bunnett, Chu Chin Chow, CD booklet (EMI 0777 7 899392 6, 1984), 6
33. Russians, too, associated the Orient with sex; see Taruskin, "'Entoiling the Falconet'," 259-61
34. Oscar Asche, foreword to Chu Chin Chow, reproduced in Bunnett, Chu Chin Chow, 8
35. Program, Miss Saigon, Theatre Royal, London, 1993, n.p
36. For example, Rimsky-Korsakov, Scheherazade, mm. 8-13
37. See Taruskin, "'Entoiling the Falconet'," 277
38. Scheherazade, third movement, mm. 162-64, provides an example
39. For a well-balanced account of these positive and negative factors, see Ralph P. Locke, "Cutthroats and Casbah Dancers," esp. 105-8
40. In this case, musical Orientalism operates as a sort of musical fancy dress. Consider the following comment on Oriental masquerade: "Stereotypical and inaccurate though they often were, exotic costumes marked out a kind of symbolic interpenetration with difference - an almost erotic commingling with the alien." Terry Castle, Masquerade and Civilisation: The Carnivalesque in Eighteenth-Century English Culture and Fiction (London: Methuen, 1986), 61-62. I am grateful to Marian Gilbert Read for drawing my attention to this point and to the passage quoted
41. Sometimes Oriental fancy dress moves to the mainstream: Leon Bakst's "Oriental" designs for the Ballets Russes transformed Paris fashions in the second decade of the twentieth century; see Colin McDowell, "Choreographer of Change," Sunday Times, Culture section, 28 Jan. 1996, 14
42. For Bakhtin's theory of the carnivalesque, see Mikhail Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World, trans. Helene Iswolsky (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1984)
43. Remark attributed to Alan Clark, former British Government Minister for Defense, in an Amnesty International advertisement (Guardian, 16 Mar. 1996, 13.)
44. Herbert Spencer, Principles of Biology, part 6, chap. 12, sec. 363 (1864)
45. See Christine Bolt, "Race and the Victorians," in British Imperialism in the Nineteenth Century, ed. C. C. Eldridge (London: Macmillan, 1984), 126-47, 133
46. She cites D. A. Lorimer, Colour, Class, and the Victorians (Leicester: Leicester University Press, 1978), chap. 7
47. J. E. Ritchie, The Night Side of London, 2d ed. (London: William Tweedie, 1858), 207. The term "costermonger" originally described a person who sold fruit from a market barrow (a costard was a type of large apple), but about this time it began to be used for any street seller and tended to conjure up the image of a "typical" London working-class Cockney
48. See Scott, The Singing Bourgeois, 99 and 101
49. Consider Ernest Gold's music for Exodus (1960)
50. Miklós Rózsa's music for King of Kings (1961)
51. or Alfred Newman's score for The Greatest Story Ever Told (1965)
52. Archibald T. Davison and Willi Apel, Historical Anthology of Music, vol. 1 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1946), 227. The piece may be found on p. 108
53. Denis Stevens pointed out that it "becomes intelligible when the upper string of the lute is tuned a semitone higher according to instructions." Musicology: A Practical Guide (London: Macdonald, 1980), 175. The instruction to tune the chanterelle a semitone higher is given above the tablature
54. Hugh Macdonald, "Something Borrowed, Something New," Pelléas & Mélisande, Opera Guide 9 (London: John Calder, 1982), 7
55. Tovey is reminded of the "Homeric seas" in the coda to this movement; see Essays in Musical Analysis, vol. 2, Symphonies (ii) (1935; reprint, London: Oxford University Press, 1989), 81
56. Eric Blom, comp., Everyman's Dictionary of Music, 5th ed., ed. Jack Westrup (London: Dent, 1971), 720