Gypsy Music in European Culture: From the Late Eighteenth to the Early Twentieth Centuries

3 | Gypsy Music and Exoticism

chapter three ••••• Gypsy Music and Exoticism The Category of Exoticism in European Musical Culture Exoticism in music typically falls into two categories: “distant” exoticism, or music mainly of the East but also including Africa, the Americas, and other locales beyond Europe; and “near” exoticism, or music produced in the European purview but that is, for various, often geopolitical reasons, marginalized. The first of these categories is closely connected with discussions of the Orient in literature, as explored famously by Edward Said and Timothy Mitchell. The secondcategoryinvolvesafascinationwithpreviouslyunknown,“local”musical cultures that dwell at the nexus of folklore and exoticism. “Distant” Exoticism Although we cannot demarcate exactly the line between exotic and nonexotic music, we can agree that the arousal of interest in non-European musical culturesoriginatedinthesixteenth-centuryeraofgreatdiscoveries.Travelerson colonial expeditions, and later the missionaries and administrators who joined them, devoted much attention in their diaries and monographs to the musical customs they observed. Jacques Cartier (1491–1557), reporting on his visits to the New World in the mid-1530s, wrote about dance and music practices. In 1578, Jean de Léry (1534–1611), describing Brazil in Histoire d’un voyage faict en la terre du Brésil (1578), included examples of antiphonic singing and dancers in feather-bedecked costumes. In the seventeenth century, particularly its second half, world-political dynamics spurred an increased interest in Turkish music. The writer Giovanni Batista Donado, for example, included three Turkish tunes in his pioneering publication on Turkish literature. In 1686, one of the first European operas Gypsy Music and Exoticism 87 on a Turkish theme appeared: Johann Wolfgang Franck’s Der glückliche GrossVezier Cara Mustaphaen, composed a mere three years after the siege of Vienna (Ringer 1965, 117). The Marquis de Ferriol, the French ambassador to Turkey in 1707–1708, recorded the details of the famed dervish dance, as mentioned in Franz Joseph Sulzer’s 1781–1782 work, Geschichte des transalpinischen Daciens. In 1782, Mozart also referenced Turkish subject matter in his opera The Abduction from the Seraglio. Central European awareness of the Turkish style (alla turca) focused on the battlemusic played by Turkish military bands.Elementsofthis style includeda 2/4meter,duplicatedmelodyinoctaves,andgracenotesoftenmovingonetone lower or higher, all based on a spread tonal chord with the occasional addition ofanaugmentedfourthaswellassimpleaccompanimentutilizing,inprinciple, a basic triad (Scott 2003, 158). The Turkish style often favored an excessive use of consonance of a third interval as well as a fixing on minor keys (Bellman 1991, 218). By the mid-eighteenth century, the European reader could become acquainted with a wide range of Turkish instruments, as drawn up by Charles Fonton in 1751. A shortened form of this report appeared in the 1831 essay “Essai sur la musique orientale” in Revue et gazette musicale. TheEnlightenmentperiodsawanincreasedinterestinexoticmusicalcultures, joinedbyintensifiedresearchandmorepublicationsonthesubject.MungoPark (1771–1806), for instance, shed light on the music and dance of African peoples in his Travels in the Interior Districts of Africa Performed in the Years 1795, 1796, and 1797, while Captain James Cook (1728–1779) described musical practices observed among inhabitants of the Pacific islands in Voyage to the Pacific Ocean . . . in the Years 1776, 1777, 1778, 1779, and 1780. These observations, and the popular opinions and scientific projects associated with them, would leave a mark on European musical productions. Such works typically reflected generalized, idealized views of “exotic” cultures rather than encounters with their complex realities. Quotes of melodies and other direct cultural references were, therefore, rather rare. The prevailing major-minor scales were used instead of the pentatonic scale. Writing of Henry Purcell’s opera The Indian Queen (1695), an adaptation of a play by Robert Howard and John Dryden on Peru and Mexico, the eminent twentieth-century biographer Jack A. Westrup explains that the work was devoid of “attempts to enhance the music with local colour. For all the music tells us, the action might be taking place in St. James’s Park” (Westrup 1995, 142). Likewise, in Jean-Philippe Rameau ’soperaLesIndesgalantes(1735),thePersiansappeartobenodifferentfrom Purcell’s Peruvians (Scott 2003, 157). Sometimes these efforts yielded comical 88 Two Models of Discourse results.Referencingtheexotic,forexample,NicolasDalayrac(1753–1809)based the middle part of the overture to Azemia, ou les sauvages (1786) on Rameau’s equally inauthentic Les sauvages, from a half-century earlier. Yet indeed, this lack of subject unity was common in drama of the era dealing with nonexotic matters as well. In this context, the theater decorator and costume designer had the principal responsibility of crafting...