AMS Philadelphia 2009 Abstracts - American Musicological Society

Abstracts saturday morning 129
linchpin of social disorder in the opera, poses a very nineteenth-century question about aristocracy
in the form of a seventeenth-century fiction. Although set in the Versailles of Louis
XIV, the opera’s ironic treatment of nobility also reflects the political history of nineteenthcentury
France and the persistent social authority of the aristocracy in the period around the
founding of the Third Republic.
RESTORING LOST MEANINGS IN MUSICAL
REPRESENTATIONS OF EXOTIC “OTHERS”
Ralph Locke
Eastman School of Music, University of Rochester
Western art music abounds in works that evoke an exotic locale or culture. But, with the
passing years and the fading of cultural memory, any work tends to lose its connection to
the contexts and accepted images that shaped it. Recent discussions of musical exoticism (or,
as some put it, exotic musical “topics”) by Bartoli, Bellman, Betzwieser, Bohlman/Radano,
Born/Hesmondhalgh, Dahlhaus, Day-O’Connell, Locke, Monelle, Scott, Taylor, Taruskin,
and Whaples have not adequately addressed the ways in which two types of contexts—(1)
musical and (2) extramusical—can help recover lost meanings of an exotic work.
1. A given exotic work often relies upon a listener’s (critic’s, scholar’s, performer’s) familiarity
with well-established musical signifiers of Otherness. Prior exotic pieces that are particularly
relevant to the work in question can help us listen with something closer to a “period ear.”
The unprecedented heterophonic opening of Beethoven’s chorus of Turkish-Muslim dervishes
(from The ruins of Athens, posthumously published in 1846) is, I propose, closely echoed in
the opening of Balakirev’s islamey (1869) and of Musorgsky’s Night on the Bare Mountain
(1867, a work never mentioned as having exotic resonances).
2. Many exotic works specify their intended locale through a title or program, or (in stage
works) through sets and costumes. Yet exotic portrayals in music—e.g., symphonic poems
or ballets—are often performed and disseminated with no reference to these basic clues. CD
booklets for Ketèlbey’s in a Persian Market regularly fail to reproduce the composer’s published
(and closely narrative) program. Likewise, concerts including Ravel’s “Laideronnette,
impératrice des pagodas”—from Ma Mère l’oye—rarely provide the audience with the score’s
vivid seventeenth-century epigraph about chattering little East Asian gods and goddesses.
The second half of my paper examines in detail the exotic resonances of important passages
from two major ballet scores of 1911–13.
—In Ravel’s daphnis et Chloé, exotic meanings (proposed by Kramer, 1995) can be made
more specific in regard to the war dance of the (North African, I argue) pirates.
—In Stravinsky’s Petrushka, moments associated with the Moor and with the Asian Magician
have gone unnoticed or else have been misconstrued by critics and scholars. Danced
performances also have mangled crucial dramatic details (e.g., what Petrushka should mime
during the manifestly Eastern-sounding passages in the famous tableau where he is alone in
his dark cell).
Evidence to be considered regarding the intended exotic overtones in both ballets includes
(in accord with point 1 above) closely comparable musical features from six exotic works as
well as (point 2) drawings and photos of the original stagings and sets. The six exotic works
that I adduce as particularly relevant were all well familiar to musicians and music lovers at the
time: Mozart’s Rondo alla turca, Beethoven’s Turkish March (from the aforementioned ruins