Search Results

This chapter examines six areas of musical performance that were governed or influenced by ecclesiastical decrees or governmental legislation: Asian musics, vernacular‐language vocal music in sacred contexts (such as villancicos), musical practices for Marian devotions, liturgical music and the use of instruments in churches, theatrical performances, and music in processions, celebrations, and feasts. It draws on sources including manuals published by religious orders for the regulation of parochial life, religious statutes and ordinances, Papal Bulls, royal decrees, and archiepiscopal decrees. It also examines musical references found in the proceedings of the Provincial Council of Manila (1771) and the Synod of Calasiao (1773).

The idea that the world contained undiscovered “musical resources” waiting to be exploited by the composer through encounters with the exotic was central to much twentieth-century American music. These resources included new scales, orchestral colors, and forms of music theater. The “excavation” by American composers of Asian music and, later, of African music has taken multiple forms. For some composers, experience with exotic cultures provided an entirely new conception of music; others attempted to immerse themselves in a detailed study of a particular musical culture and to create works within that tradition. The earliest symptoms of an Orientalist contagion in American music occurred at the level of melodic borrowing. Charles T. Griffes (1884–1920) and Emerson Whithorne (1884–1958), contemporaries and friends, employed Chinese, Japanese, and Javanese melodies (acquired through printed transcriptions) in their compositions of the 1910s and '20s, respectively. While Whithorne studied Asian music in the British Museum, Griffes encountered the exotic nearer to Whitman's Broadway. Of the first wave of American Orientalists, Griffes was the most successful.

The chapter deals with the representation of memory about the musical past as represented in the Risalei musiqi by Darweh ‘Ali Changi, music master from Transoxiana (b. c.1547, d. after 1611). This treatise, written in the convention of adab genre, is an exceptional document of an essentially oral tradition, with its ‘unacademic’ way of organising musical knowledge, free from philosophical-scientific discipline and mathematical speculation, immersed in myth, legend and fable, most closely linked to poetry. It represents an attempt to fix in writing knowledge that existed in the form of a non-formalised, free-ranging discourse, testified directly by the memory of living musicians and beyond its boundaries transformed into a mythical complex.

This chapter represents a reverse project in that, instead of deconstructing Western narrative to understand oriental culture, it deconstructs the same to understand Western culture itself. Needless to say, its approach charts the musical narratives pertaining to depiction of the oriental. Edward Said asserted that orientalism is an exclusively male domain and one of sexuality. Nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century music is deeply implicated in the general Eurocentric perception of the Orient, particularly in France and Britain, the countries Said points to as having the longest tradition of orientalism. The revelation of the extent of Britten's engagement with Asian music was important, if only because it also revealed the parochialism of those critics who, in a curious evocation of an essentially imperialist vision of London as center of a Eurocentric world, saw Britten as having cut himself off in his later years, to the detriment of his musical development.