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Reviewed by:
  • Beyond Exoticism: Western Music and the World
  • Andrew C. McGraw (bio)
Beyond Exoticism: Western Music and the World. Timothy D. Taylor. Durham: Duke University Press, 2007. 304 pp., musical examples, photographs, bibliography, index. ISBN: 0822339684.

This is Taylor’s third book and follows his Global Pop (1997, Routledge) and Strange Sounds (2001, Routledge). In Beyond Exoticism, Taylor’s theorizing goes deeper than in Global Pop and his historical perspective is significantly broader than in Strange Sounds. The work is almost baffling in its scope and references, ranging from preoperatic forms and the development of tonality to the use of world music in contemporary television advertising, and from standard musical analysis to contemporary theories of hybrid cosmopolitan identities. Taylor is primarily concerned with the West’s representation of its Others, specifically with why, when, and exactly how these representations occur. He is also concerned with notions and negotiations of selfhood and its relationship to real and imagined Others. The work is broadly divided into the historical eras of colonialism, imperialism, and globalization, although the second half of the work is primarily devoted to globalization since the 1990s. [End Page 140]

Chapter 1 is concerned with Europe’s Others in the 17th century, primarily the Ottoman Turks and New World tribes. Here, Taylor theorizes the development of tonality as a system of spatialization standing as a musical metaphor for margins and center “in which Others can be managed at a distance.” Taylor doesn’t argue that Europe’s discovery of others “produced” or “determined” tonality and opera, but that “the exigencies of empire as they were perceived in the early 17th century necessitated mastery of both space and peoples, a mastery that found analogues in music, dance and theater” (35). Similar metaphors, or interdomain cultural schemas as they are sometimes called, have been proposed by several ethnomusicologists: Becker’s (1981) connection of time in gamelan music and concepts of Hindu-Buddhist cosmological time, cultural notions of space and music (Amatzia 2001), and connections between tala and Indic concepts of time (deconstructed in Clayton 2000). These are “simplified world(s) that abstract from the manifold complexities of the real world” and “bring different domains of experience into alignment” (Perlman 2004, 16). But the nature of the connection between music and these metaphors, as in Taylor’s example with tonality, remains somehow unclear. If these are not determinative and are not coincidental, then what exactly is the nature of their relationship? Are these musical structures “naturally selected” out of the myriad of examples found in the flow of human creativity for their iconic connection to social structures and beliefs, or might it be more complex?

But Taylor’s theorizing is always checked by a commonsense appreciation of the subtlety of musical expression as in chapter 2, when dealing with the nuts and bolts of Europe’s representation of its others (Turks and American Indians in Rameau’s and Mozart’s works) when he says, “ . . . a minor key could be a sign of gendered Other or a racialized Other, or may not represent anything at all. Sometimes a minor key is just a minor key” (58). And, importantly, Taylor describes the means by which elements of musical expression used by earlier composers to represent Others (modulations by thirds by Mozart, for example) come to be subsumed and “laundered” in the works of later composers in which they can seem “abstract, pure, untainted” (72). In the following chapter, Taylor explores the well-worn road of influence between French fin-de-siecle composers (primarily Ravel) and world traditions via world expositions. Later, the lens moves to a discussion of American developments, primarily focusing on Ives and Cowell. These discussions are well theorized and nuanced, but this reviewer wonders when aspects of this era which have been less analyzed, such as the late-19th-century world fairs in America (i.e., Chicago), rather than Paris, will receive similar attention.

In his second section, Taylor deals with contemporary globalization. Taylor looks past the “exotica” era in post-World War II music to focus on world music since the 1990s. Consumption and its intersection with identity making and [End Page 141] self-fashioning are among Taylor’s main...

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