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2. The Transpacific Gaze Orientalism, Queerness, and Californian Experimentalism While the Anglo elite exerted considerable energy and allocated valuable resources to recreate European-styled bourgeois concert culture in the new state, other Californians were finding inspiration in the bounty of nonwestern musics transplanted into the American soil. In the first decades of the twentieth century, California experienced tremendous changes, with immigrants in the hundreds of thousands arriving from the rest of the United States and the world. Even as the power structure struggled to maintain the status quo by disenfranchising minority populations, state officials and the Chamber of Commerce constructed and projected the image of California as a multiethnic haven, of a region that could claim a special relationship with the Orient unavailable to the East Coast. Californian composers likewise looked to Asia to forge an experimental ideology that was distinct from the musical culture of the Atlantic, thereby defining the Pacific Rim as a space for the propagation of alternative musical discourses. Henry Cowell, John Cage, Lou Harrison, and Harry Partch adopted orientalism as a subversive strategy, circumventing many of the fundamental precepts governing Western music through the deployment of Asian-inspired concepts and sounds. In the first half of the twentieth century, experimental orientalism became the very basis and the common point of reference within the wide range of music produced by the Californian avant-garde. Racial difference underscored the real and metaphorical distance between California and the Atlantic coast and hinted at the possibility of defining the self in other non-normative ways. Orientalist elements in Western music started to appear as early as the eighteenth century and became increasingly common at the turn of the twentieth century.1 From the exotic locales that dressed up Giacomo Puci -xii_1-192_Yang.indd 33 1/7/08 9:52:02 AM 34 california polyphony cini’s operas to the emulation of gamelan sounds in Claude Debussy’s L’Isle joyeuse, mystical fables, pentatonic themes, unusual instruments, and other fantastical wonders captivated Western composers and audiences in search of new sources of titillation. In California, such orientalist tropes permeated operas and symphonic works of the fin-de-siècle. Joseph Redding, lawyer and one-time president of the Bohemian Club, wrote a critically acclaimed opera, Fay-Yen-Fah, based on a Chinese legend, that evoked an imaginary landscape populated by mythical creatures. The composer, who most likely had little direct contact with Chinese culture, peppered the opera score liberally with pentatonic passages and other musical markers of orientalism. Henry Eichheim, another Californian composer, traveled extensively in Asia, experiencing the indigenous musics of various East, Southeast, and South Asian cultures directly, and later wrote “adaptations” of these exotic musics to conform to Western harmonic and metrical frameworks.2 Beginning with Cowell, there was a notable shift in the usage of Asian sources. The composers associated with Cowell invoked Asia in their experimental rhetoric to a degree hitherto unknown, frequently inverting the relationship between the two spheres by privileging the East, imagined as a site of ancient wisdom, over the West, weighed down by the burden of outworn traditions.3 The change in attitude toward Asia from earlier musical orientalists to Cowell’s circle is not just one of degree, however, but of kind, actuated by stylistic, regional, socioeconomic, and perhaps even sexual rebellions against established practices and mores. Triply marginalized by the musical establishment—as ultramodern, Californian, and gay—Cowell, Cage, Harrison, and Partch pitted Asia against Europe, California against New York, and orientalist ellipsis against heteronormative assertions. In his groundbreaking book Orientalism, Edward Said contends that the fascination Western intellectuals bring to the exploration of Eastern cultures is coextensive with Western imperialistic designs and that the knowledge of the Oriental other is constructed within a network of colonialist discourse that reflects and maintains the unequal power relations between the East and West.4 In response to Said’s unequivocal indictment against orientalism, J. J. Clarke, in Oriental Enlightenment, calls for more nuanced analyses of individual orientalist projects, pointing out that while orientalist discourse is grounded in historically and politically specific contexts, it is by no means uniform in its support or agreement with imperialistic ideologies. The Californian experimentalists imbibed the imageries and rhetoric of California boosterism but promulgated their own iconoclastic version of Californian exceptionalism in the promotion of West Coast music. They were in effect following a long tradition that, according to Clarke, had accompanied the i-xii_1-192_Yang.indd 34 1/7/08 9:52:02 AM [3...

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