Representations of the Orient in Western Music: Violence and Sensuality (review)

In Representations of the Orient in Western Music, Nasser Al-Taee proposes a reexamination of Orientalism in musicological scholarship in order to "situate music within a wider interdisciplinary study of knowledge and power" (p. xi). His book surveys musical works from the late eighteenth century to the present. In his preface, Al-Taee argues that musicologists have shied away from confronting the "cultural, political and racial significance of Orientalist compositions" (p. xvi). Certainly, he is not the first to make this claim. Building on the writings of scholars such as Rose Rosengard Subotnik and Richard Taruskin, Ralph P. Locke argues against an "autonomist position" and insists on the study of "crucial elements" surrounding the music, such as "stylistic background, extramusical associations, societal function" and context (Ralph P. Locke, Musical Exoticism: Images and Reflections [Cambridge: Cambridge Uni versity Press, 2009], 16). Despite his intentions, Al-Taee does not implement a nuanced approach for examining musical representations of difference. As a result, he perpetuates the stereotyping of the Orient that he so strongly criticizes.

Al-Taee focuses on the fetishization of violence and sensuality, two categories that he views as persistent themes in Western representations of the Orient (p. xi). However, he never questions that these seemingly straightforward terms contain a variety of meanings and significations both today and throughout history. Furthermore, he neglects to investigate how these two categories function as powerful tools in representing the Other; that Orientalist discourse depends on the subjectification of the Other through the fixity and fantasy of the stereotype as a form of knowledge and identification based on what is "already known" and what "must be anxiously repeated" (Homi Bhabha, "The Other Question," in The Location of Culture [London: Routledge, 1994], 95).

Following the preface, the book is divided into four parts, beginning with an introduction in which Al-Taee reviews a wide range of publications on Orientalism and exoticism, both within and outside music scholarship. He draws heavily from Edward Said's theory of Orientalism; however, he fails to clarify his own understanding or usage of the term. Al-Taee argues that Orientalist musical works are not merely "decorative" and "innocent," and urges scholars to engage with the political contexts and complex issues encapsulated in the East-West binary (p. 14). Unfortunately, he falls short of offering an effective model for doing just this. He treats notions of East and West as stable categories that have tenaciously persisted throughout history. He writes that "Orientalist works were inherited from the times of the Crusades and continue to fuel tensions between East and West" (p. xv).

Instead of interrogating the complex categories and populations of Orient and Occident, Al-Taee reinforces the reductive stereotypes of these imagined spaces. He insinuates that all Arabs and inhabitants of the Ottoman Empire are Muslims (p. 72) and naively presents "Western colonialism" as a monolithic project that "has always argued for its 'moral obligation' to liberate the Orient and its people from their tyrannical and corrupt system" (p. 69). Likewise, he uses essentializing vocabulary to describe specific musical works. In his analysis of Haydn's Symphony no. 100 in G major, he interchanges words such as "serpentine" and "noisy" to denote "Oriental" music (p. 104) and states that the alla turca style emulated the "shrieking sounds" and "lack of rationality, balance and awkwardness" of Ottoman music (p. 93). Al-Taee describes a melodic minor song "spiced" by an augmented second (p. 255), the sensuality of a iv-i cadence (p. 245) and the Spanish feel of a minor scale with a flattened second and drone bass (p. 242). This linguistic slippage between categories of identity and value-laden adjectives further reinforces the very binaries and racist language that he wants to dispel.

Al-Taee's book presents the Orient as a passive victim that did not participate in the promotion of Orientalist works (p. 191). However, Said acknowledged that Orientalism was made possible...