A glance towards the East

Western composers have been absorbing oriental cultures into their music for centuries, says Tom Service, however inappropriate the practice might seem to be

‘That old exoticism trip… can seem like a kind of musical rape’. Composer Steve Reich is stark in his assessment of what the limits of orientialism lie in musical culture. He’s talking about the way that composers have used and sometimes abused the musics of other cultures in the service of their own artforms; and he knows what he’s talking about, having re-made some of the fundamentals of Ghanaian drumming in his own defining works of minimalism, from Drumming to Music for 18 Musicians.

Orientalism: the term is writer Edward Said’s, and means the gaze of the West on the East; a gaze that devours, reinterprets and transplants the cultures and musics of eastern climes into exotic, o en erotic, and mostly male fantasies. There’s plenty of evidence for what Said means in the story of Western classical music, like the tinctures of pseudo-turkish music in Mozart’s opera The Abduction from the Seraglio or Beethoven’s riotous cavalcade of all cultures in the finale of his Ninth Symphony. The ‘exoticism trip’ really gathers pace towards the end of the 19th century: French composers create a sensualised exotic other from Spanish culture, from Bizet’s Carmen to Ravel’s Boléro, while Rimsky-korsakov looks towards the Middle East in his evocation of Scheherazade.

But there is another story to orientalism, which is what happens when the cultures that are ‘othered’ in these ways turn their gaze on the West themselves, and re-make Western cultures in their image. A er the Meiji era began in Japan 150 years ago, and the country began to open up to outside influences, Western folk tunes were used as the basis for a new system of musical education, much of it built on Scottish folk melodies, which is why

The ‘exoticism trip’ really gathers pace towards the end of the 19th century

‘Auld lang syne’ is known as a Japanese tune in Tokyo and Kyoto rather than a Hogmanay dirge, as it is in the West.

And as performers from the

East came to the West, they found themselves shaping their shows around the tastes of their audiences, e ectively collaborating with the orientalist gaze to create new kinds of cultural performance: that’s what Japan’s Madame Sadayakko, whose shows were a direct influence on Puccini in composing Madam Butterfly, did at the start of the 20th century.

In today’s world, the delights and dangers of the orientalising gaze are more extreme than they have ever been. Composers like Ligeti and Unsuk Chin – and Steve Reich! – have used ideas found in music from Africa to Indonesia to remake their musical languages, a process that delves into the fundamentals of musical principles rather than revelling in superficial exoticism. Nevertheless: negotiating the identities and structural workings of the world’s musical cultures is something that no composer can avoid. The old orientalist debate is alive and well.