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  • The Other Worlds of Hector Berlioz: Travels with the Orchestra by Inge van Rij
  • Francesca Brittan
The Other Worlds of Hector Berlioz: Travels with the Orchestra. By Inge van Rij. pp. xii + 357. (Cambridge University Press, Cambridge and New York, 2015. £74.99. ISBN 978-0-521-89646-7.)

Inge van Rij's study of Berlioz's 'other worlds' is rich and free-wheeling, offering us a series of new contexts in which to place a famously difficult composer, while also ranging beyond Berlioz studies into wider theoretical and historical arenas. At its heart is a sustained contemplation of Otherness itself: racial, sexual, temporal, generic. Drawing on familiar postcolonial ideas as well as less-travelled cultural histories, van Rij shows how Berlioz plays with alterity to conjure alluring and titillating spaces—how his imaginary worlds are also marginal, exotic, and imperial ones. These places are drawn into being, she argues, in part via modern forms of musical technology, including new instruments, experimental timbres, and the widening resources of the Romantic orchestra. Berliozian instrumentality, for her, is inextricably yoked to Otherness: it is the composer's orchestral machine that transports listeners to unknown worlds, crossing the boundaries between self/other, physical/metaphysical, now/then. And Berlioz himself also hovers between these worlds; he is, 'a perennial outsider—an Other whether in Italy, Germany, or France' (p. 125). In pursuing this collection of ideas van Rij blurs biographical, analytical, and historical approaches, stretching established Berliozian paradigms as well as contributing to emerging bodies of scholarship on nineteenthcentury instrumentation, musical narrative, and Romantic mechanism. Her work, though at times kaleidoscopic, shifting quickly from one collection of materials to another, is nonetheless persuasive and will appeal to a variety of readers from the specialist to the cross-disciplinary browser.

A study of centres and margins has palpable importance for van Rij, who is writing from New Zealand, a place both distant from Berlioz and from the origins of academic musicology and—as she demonstrates in her opening pages—surprisingly close. She begins by reporting on Berlioz's own fascination with the island nation, captured in his story of an exotic New Zealand encounter. Allegedly taken first-hand from the explorer Vincent Wallace, Berlioz's tale recycles many of the tropes of Romantic travelogues, including violence, sexual licence, and cannibalism, while also emphasizing an explicitly musical element: the near-irresistible song of Tatea, daughter of a Maori chief. Published as part of the 1852 collection Les Soirées de l'orchestre, Berlioz's story implicitly links the allure of the exotic 'other' with the power of the European orchestra. This connection propels van Rij's first chapter, which examines Berlioz's Traité d'instrumentation, and his wider commentary on instruments, through the lens of travel writing. The composer himself, as she points out, figures orchestration as 'a foreign language which has become fashionable' (p. 54). Her chapter concretizes the idea, showing how rhetorics of Otherness underpin his description of certain instruments: the bass drum, serpent, and antique cymbals, for instance. Also, the ways in which a vaguely Linnaean taxonomy (the zoological classification system familiar to Wallace and his explorer contemporaries) influences his description of instrument families and types. In the Traité, Berlioz promises that instruments themselves will materialize unknown geographies: 'oceans, tropical hurricanes, volcanoes, and virgin forests' (p. 66). And Van Rij sees this potential realized in his song La Captive, whose exotic locale is largely invisible/inaudible in the original keyboard version, but emerges with increasing clarity in the series of later orchestrations. Far from merely adding colour, instrumental technologies in the Captive settings become vehicles of ontological invention, 'perfectly encapsulating the status of an Other world sui generis' (p. 52).

The figure of the exotic/ethnographic orchestrator expands, in chapter 2, into that of the controlling and conquering conductor. Here, the imperial overtones of the composer's 'other worlds' are explored, particularly in the Symphonie funèbre and Harold en Italie. The textural and rhythmic complexities of these works not only demand authoritarian leadership but themselves impose an aggressive 'civic unity' (p. 87) on their players—what van Rij describes memorably (borrowing from William H. McNeill) as a form of 'muscular...

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