Music and the Exotic from the Renaissance to Mozart by Ralph P. Locke (review)

This book is a welcome prequel to Ralph Locke's seminal 2009 Musical Exoticism: Images and Reflections. It provides a comprehensive survey of musical exoticism during the years 1500–1800 and employs a highly malleable yet effective theoretical approach. The crucial question posed by Locke is whether music in a work that evokes an exotic place or people must 'sound exotic'—and to whom (p. 17). Using copious examples to explore this question is vital, because musical exoticism in Western art music during this period is not always immediately obvious to twenty-firstcentury ears. Locke takes the reader on a journey to explore the multiple (and sometimes surprising) ways in which distant places and peoples were represented in operas, dramatic oratorios, foreign-derived instrumental dances, courtly ballets, and cheaply printed ballads.

It is often assumed that there were few significant exotic musical portrayals until the mid-eighteenth century fad for alla turca operas. Timothy Taylor, for example, writes that 'western composers before the nineteenth century did not yet possess concepts of authenticity, ethnography, even history, all of which were constructed by late-eighteenth century modernity, and so their transcriptions of the appropriated music look and sound like Western music of the time' ('Peopling the Stage: Opera, Otherness, and New Musical Representation in the Eighteenth Century', Cultural Critique, 36 (1997), 55–88 at 56). Miriam K. Whaples and Thomas Betzwieser outline a common approach to the study of musical exoticism, viewing it less as a way of thinking or artistic approach and more as a catalogue of particular stylistic devices that would have been recognized as 'foreign' by composers and listeners of the period (Miriam K. Whaples, 'Early Exoticism Revisited', in Jonathan Bellman (ed.), The Exotic in Western Music (Boston, 1997), 3–25; Thomas Betzwieser, 'The Turkish Language in Eighteenth-Century Music: Context and Meaning', in Paolo Amalfitano and Loretta Innocenti (eds.), L'oriente (Rome, 2006), 227–55). This widespread view prevents an appreciation of the multiple ways in which the West viewed exotic places and peoples in various musical genres during the years 1500–1800. Locke addresses this skewed understanding by focusing on the ways in which music supported representations of exotic places in characters, costumes, dances, libretto, and stage settings.

The volume comprises thirteen chapters, divided into four parts: the first provides solid theoretical preparation for 'The West and its Others', 'Songs and Dance Types', and 'Exotic Portrayals on Stage, in Concert, in Church'. Part II explains the origins of the exoticist musical works to be discussed. Consequently, it is less focused on music than on prose descriptions and visual images from the eras of the Greeks, Romans, early Christianity, including the time of Europe's struggles with various Arab peoples, and the Ottoman Empire. Locke then turns his attention to Europe's discovery and increasing control over people from far-off lands. Ideas and opinions about East and South Asians and native tribes of the New World are considered through reports from explorers and missionaries. Essays by Montaigne and Voltaire give further insight into the stereotypes that often surfaced in music of the time.

From the outset, Locke re-establishes the importance of two paradigms, which were a central feature of his 2009 book: 'exotic style only' and 'all the music in full context'. He makes clear that the former is particularly suited to musical works that make obvious use of stylistic features connected with the region or people in question, and that these tend to be works from the late eighteenth century onwards. For example, Puccini's Madame Butterfly (1904) contains obvious Japanese stylistic markers that can be easily identified and are intentionally employed by the composer. This is generally achieved by appropriating traditional Japanese tunes and by conveying a Japanese setting through an invented style that is unfamiliar to the Western ear. One gets the sense that Locke does not see too much value in this limiting approach...