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Musical Exoticism: Images and Reflections
A Japanese geisha, a Middle Eastern caravan, a Hungarian-'Gypsy' fiddler, Carmen flinging a rose at Don José - portrayals of people and places that are considered somehow 'exotic' have been ubiquitous from 1700 to today, whether in opera, Broadway musicals, instrumental music, film scores, or in jazz and popular song. Often these portrayals are highly stereotypical but also powerful, indelible and touching - or troubling. Musical Exoticism surveys the vast and varied repertoire of Western musical works that evoke exotic locales. It relates trends in musical exoticism to other trends in music, such as programme music and avant-garde experimentation, as well as to broader historical developments such as nationalism and empire. Ralph P. Locke outlines major trends in exotic depiction from the Baroque era onward, and illustrates these trends through close study of numerous exotic works, including operas by Handel and Rameau, Mozart's 'Rondo alla turca', 'Madame Butterfly' and 'West Side Story'.
- GenresMusic
440 pages, Paperback
First published April 1, 2009
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February 28, 2012
Right from the beginning (i.e., the cover showing Paul Gauguin’s mysterious Tahitian women) the reader is suggested that space or place – something distant, however – is the central theme and symbol of the music that is going to be discussed. So, we deal here with the music referring to exotic places, the music drawn on/composed out of either the knowledge of the exotic, or (rather) the dream of it. This is Ralph Locke’s key, productively helping him to unlock the ambiguous and often not so obvious musics that claimed to depict or comment on remote, paradisiacal, exotic things, situations, characters, landscapes. Yet, from space and the idea of place one naturally moves to the idea of emotion, feelings, atmosphere – because, indeed, if exoticism is not fantasy and emotion, it is nothing. And music can – by striving to – create or actualize whatever one senses/perceives as exotic, since the emotion a music discharges constitutes the real body of any feeling, idea, perception or (ultimately) concept.
There are no youthful expansions of the main concepts; to Ralph Locke, exotic/exoticism is like orientalism: something always remote, distant, outward (never selfness, never the “domestic” otherness), and never rejected, always appealing. There is, in this book, a constant and skilful ballet traced in between the negative/positive, wrong/right, useful/abusive usage of representational terms (such as exoticism, but not only). Ralph Locke reshuffles and vindicates (at a given moment, for example, he even takes the chance of pleading for the appropriateness of the term “cultural imperialism” – in cases of artistic voluminous inputs). Beyond the massive academic discussion, and the emphasis on the social and political meta-meaning(fullness), one never loses sight, through this book, that the role of music is to produce no holistic, truth-based philosophy, but rather pleasure (at any cost). Exotic/exoticism is such a subconscious, psychological tool and cost; it is not so much of a concept, rather an imaginary content or allure, meant to charm and transfer the listener’s psyche in a fantastic/fantasy realm.
Massive, encyclopedic, this volume is in fact a particular re-make of the history of Western music, as well as a splendid history of some cultural ideas and mental representations – as both applied into the arts and discussed by intellectuals. The musicological journey of this book is as fascinating as the subject itself, because Locke surveys an immense trunk of the musical history – of symphonism, of course –, with no disregard to popular, accessible items (French or Italian opera and operetta), with keen regard for less known or even minor compositions. But prior to the detailed tackling of musical topoi and pieces, Locke opens his book with pertinent theoretical pages: the apology or “vengeance” of the musical critic, of the listening, of musicological wording. In fact, I think that Locke’s major contribution is not so much in the minutely survey of works and composers, but rather in the theoretical realm, because he clarifies, thus enlightens and widens the scholarly perception and discussion on whatever is and can be the musical depiction, on exotic or orientalist style, representation, conception (and many other paradigmatic terms).
In their comprehensive reviews, both Lars Christensen and Nina Stoffers (here above) have duly described and discussed the sections and contents of Ralph Locke’s book, reason why I will not resume such type of information and emphasis. Avoiding redundancy, my complementing voice comes here rather to stress the consistency of this book’s contributions, which makes it a compulsory reference for any academic curriculum of both musicology and the history of cultural ideas or constructs. Because it does happen, at times, musicological research and writing to surpass disciplinary self-sufficiency and autonomy; such cases go more often than not unnoticed by academics specialized in cognate or sister disciplines. Extra-signals or different promotional signs should be hoisted in order to “save” our academic community from inertial/typical ignorance. (I refer here, of course, to the habit of many philologists and philosophers to refrain themselves from approaching musicological studies only because those representatives do not have music literacy, also despite the fact that nowadays more and more musicology-based books come out lacking any pitch notes or staffs.) Briefly put, this is not a book to be opened, studied, discussed and taught only by musicologists (of all sorts).
Professor Locke offers indeed a simple and handy conceptualization, also approachable by non-musicologists, i.e. people involved in cultural studies. Such fellows could benefit from what he presents and classifies as capital paradigms: the “exotic style only” and the “all the music in full context”. The entire theoretical discussion – a fight with the massive bibliography of the more or less monographic or eclectic contributions – does not end up with the first section of the book. Part 2, although passing through the history of musical representation of the exotic in musics over centuries, delves deep into the theories and ideas connected to orientalism, as they took on, where applied to or simply rose up from works of arts (literature included) during centuries.
Important for a very wide range of musicologists and ethnomusicologists, as well as of people doing cultural studies, are the multiple chapters on Gipsy and gipsyness in music, on popular musical genres and on film music. On the last pages Locke comes up with some solutions to the political incorrectness of some older operas (reshaping of the directing, and especially the re-setting – and consequent singers’ modern-dressing up – of the stages in neutral, non-original places, landscapes, or times). Which is equally brilliant and ridiculous, but how could he avoid saying something also in this respect? As already suggested, Ralph Locke’s work is convincingly complete, a state-of-the-musicological-art that establishes itself as an unavoidable milestone and major reference for any possible/further discussion on music and the exotic or on musical exoticism. More than that, it should be considered from now on a major source and reference for the study of exotic/exoticism/orientalism in general.
(published in the "Revista de etnografie si folclor / Journal of Ethnography and Folklore" 1-2/2010)
There are no youthful expansions of the main concepts; to Ralph Locke, exotic/exoticism is like orientalism: something always remote, distant, outward (never selfness, never the “domestic” otherness), and never rejected, always appealing. There is, in this book, a constant and skilful ballet traced in between the negative/positive, wrong/right, useful/abusive usage of representational terms (such as exoticism, but not only). Ralph Locke reshuffles and vindicates (at a given moment, for example, he even takes the chance of pleading for the appropriateness of the term “cultural imperialism” – in cases of artistic voluminous inputs). Beyond the massive academic discussion, and the emphasis on the social and political meta-meaning(fullness), one never loses sight, through this book, that the role of music is to produce no holistic, truth-based philosophy, but rather pleasure (at any cost). Exotic/exoticism is such a subconscious, psychological tool and cost; it is not so much of a concept, rather an imaginary content or allure, meant to charm and transfer the listener’s psyche in a fantastic/fantasy realm.
Massive, encyclopedic, this volume is in fact a particular re-make of the history of Western music, as well as a splendid history of some cultural ideas and mental representations – as both applied into the arts and discussed by intellectuals. The musicological journey of this book is as fascinating as the subject itself, because Locke surveys an immense trunk of the musical history – of symphonism, of course –, with no disregard to popular, accessible items (French or Italian opera and operetta), with keen regard for less known or even minor compositions. But prior to the detailed tackling of musical topoi and pieces, Locke opens his book with pertinent theoretical pages: the apology or “vengeance” of the musical critic, of the listening, of musicological wording. In fact, I think that Locke’s major contribution is not so much in the minutely survey of works and composers, but rather in the theoretical realm, because he clarifies, thus enlightens and widens the scholarly perception and discussion on whatever is and can be the musical depiction, on exotic or orientalist style, representation, conception (and many other paradigmatic terms).
In their comprehensive reviews, both Lars Christensen and Nina Stoffers (here above) have duly described and discussed the sections and contents of Ralph Locke’s book, reason why I will not resume such type of information and emphasis. Avoiding redundancy, my complementing voice comes here rather to stress the consistency of this book’s contributions, which makes it a compulsory reference for any academic curriculum of both musicology and the history of cultural ideas or constructs. Because it does happen, at times, musicological research and writing to surpass disciplinary self-sufficiency and autonomy; such cases go more often than not unnoticed by academics specialized in cognate or sister disciplines. Extra-signals or different promotional signs should be hoisted in order to “save” our academic community from inertial/typical ignorance. (I refer here, of course, to the habit of many philologists and philosophers to refrain themselves from approaching musicological studies only because those representatives do not have music literacy, also despite the fact that nowadays more and more musicology-based books come out lacking any pitch notes or staffs.) Briefly put, this is not a book to be opened, studied, discussed and taught only by musicologists (of all sorts).
Professor Locke offers indeed a simple and handy conceptualization, also approachable by non-musicologists, i.e. people involved in cultural studies. Such fellows could benefit from what he presents and classifies as capital paradigms: the “exotic style only” and the “all the music in full context”. The entire theoretical discussion – a fight with the massive bibliography of the more or less monographic or eclectic contributions – does not end up with the first section of the book. Part 2, although passing through the history of musical representation of the exotic in musics over centuries, delves deep into the theories and ideas connected to orientalism, as they took on, where applied to or simply rose up from works of arts (literature included) during centuries.
Important for a very wide range of musicologists and ethnomusicologists, as well as of people doing cultural studies, are the multiple chapters on Gipsy and gipsyness in music, on popular musical genres and on film music. On the last pages Locke comes up with some solutions to the political incorrectness of some older operas (reshaping of the directing, and especially the re-setting – and consequent singers’ modern-dressing up – of the stages in neutral, non-original places, landscapes, or times). Which is equally brilliant and ridiculous, but how could he avoid saying something also in this respect? As already suggested, Ralph Locke’s work is convincingly complete, a state-of-the-musicological-art that establishes itself as an unavoidable milestone and major reference for any possible/further discussion on music and the exotic or on musical exoticism. More than that, it should be considered from now on a major source and reference for the study of exotic/exoticism/orientalism in general.
(published in the "Revista de etnografie si folclor / Journal of Ethnography and Folklore" 1-2/2010)
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