Music and Orientalism in the British Empire, 1780s-1940s: Portrayal of the East, and: Representing Non-Western Music in Nineteenth-Century Britain (review)

The books under review here have several thematic and theoretical concerns in common: they take as their main subject the transcultural encounter, variously played out in the fields of music, between Britain and its colonial lands during the long nineteenth century, with the Victorian period receiving the bulk of the page time. Both studies thus bring to bear on their specific geographic-temporal areas critical-theoretical agendas such as orientalism, race, and empire that have occupied humanistic and music studies for, respectively, roughly a quarter of a century and a decade.

As the titles of both books make clear, the predominant position from which they speak is the metropolitan British representation of the non-West. There are a few exceptions to the direction of this gaze. In Music and Orientalism, the essays by Martin Clayton (on music histories), Lakshmi Subramanian (on music critics in colonial India and Indian elite identities), and Gregory Booth (on Hindi cinema's own orientalist tropes) proceed from the East—in these cases, India. Clayton's embryonic sketch, "Musical Renaissance and its Margins in England and India," for example, attempts what he calls a "relational view of music history" (73–74), revealing the mutual historiographical influences of English and Indian national music histories of the late-Victorian and Edwardian worlds. But too often the encounters that these books seek to detail read like one-way traffic. If one of postcolonial studies' most profound projects has been to decenter the West's narratives, then Music and Orientalism's essays, many of which present the potential for such readings, collectively fail to take up the challenge of doing so.

In the better of Music and Orientalism's contributions, the destabilizing effects of the colonial musical encounter are indeed addressed; this is also the explicit theme of the final section on translation in Bennett Zon's Representing Non-Western Music. Nicholas Cook's chapter (in Music and Orientalism) on "Hindostannie Airs," voguish colonial transcriptions of subcontinental songs, interprets the practice not simply, as one might expect (and previous scholarship has done), as an exercise in orientalist representation but as British musicians' "empirical engagement with an alien culture" (17), an engagement that importantly disrupts the British musician's own style (and therefore "self"). Cook's nuanced, theory-savvy work should serve as a model, and as the book's first essay it sets high expectations.

Unfortunately, many of the other essays, particularly in the sections "Interpreting Concert Music" and "The Orientalist Stage," are for the most part too literal in their interpretations and somewhat naive in their nod to cultural theory, with which scholarship tackling the weighty issues of race and power must by force engage. The essays dealing with British composers Edward Elgar and Granville Bantock and with orientalist music theatre and opera are, however, valuable as empirical studies on little-researched topics or for bringing their subjects within the interpretative ambit of the collection's concerns.

As stated in the collection's title, its overriding concerns are musical orientalism and its relationship to empire. Discussions of orientalism in many of the essays are typically, and always in the first instance, positioned vis-à-vis Edward Said's original formulations. Given the many subsequent debates and reworkings of Said, I found Music and Orientalism's constant referral to Said somewhat tired (though the tone is not always deferential; some of the essays critique what Cook calls the "received Saidian model" [15]). Other than Cook's arguing for a more empathetic scholarship of colonial cross-cultural encounter, and Philip Bohlman and Ruth Davis's "Jewish Music and the Journey to the East," which speaks (in a tentative manner) of the mobility of music...