Music and the Exotic from the Renaissance to Mozart

Ralph P. Locke provides fresh insights into Western culture's increasing awareness of ethnic Otherness during the years 1500–1800.

Ralph P. Locke (Author)

9781108448413, Cambridge University Press

Paperback / softback, published 9 November 2017

471 pages, 53 b/w illus. 25 music examples
24.5 x 17 x 3 cm, 0.85 kg

'A much-needed addition to the literature. It is the first sustained study of specific [exoticist] works composed during the years 1500–1800, while it also highlights broader trends in composers' approaches to the exotic and audiences' reception of their music … Locke's book, along with his Musical Exoticism [Cambridge 2009], thus essentially redefines the exotic in relation to music and provides a model for how scholars might interpret it. … Among Locke's most insightful chapters are those treating eighteenth-century staged works. … Locke approaches [Mozart's operas] from new angles and offers fresh, thought-provoking insights into them. Engagingly written, free of jargon and lavishly illustrated with reproductions of many artworks that are little known and not readily available. … Indispensable to anyone interested in investigating exoticism in early music.' Catherine Mayes, Eighteenth-Century Music

During the years 1500–1800, European performing arts reveled in a kaleidoscope of Otherness: Middle-Eastern harem women, fortune-telling Spanish 'Gypsies', Incan priests, Barbary pirates, moresca dancers, and more. In this prequel to his 2009 book Musical Exoticism, Ralph P. Locke explores how exotic locales and their inhabitants were characterized in musical genres ranging from instrumental pieces and popular songs to oratorios, ballets, and operas. Locke's study offers new insights into much-loved masterworks by composers such as Cavalli, Lully, Purcell, Rameau, Handel, Vivaldi, Gluck, and Mozart. In these works, evocations of ethnic and cultural Otherness often mingle attraction with envy or fear, and some pieces were understood at the time as commenting on conditions in Europe itself. Locke's accessible study, which includes numerous musical examples and rare illustrations, will be of interest to anyone who is intrigued by the relationship between music and cultural history, and by the challenges of cross-cultural (mis)understanding.

Part I. Introduction: A Rich and Complex Heritage: 1. Images and principles
2. Exotic in style?: paradigms and interpretations
Part II. The West and its Others: 3. The early cultural background
4. Encounters
Part III. Songs and Dance-Types: 5. Popular songs
6. Dances and instrumental styles from (or 'from') elsewhere
Part IV. Exotic Portrayals on Stage, in Concert, in Church: 7. Courtly ballets
8. Distinctive developments in Venice and other Italian cities and courts
9. Oratorio and other religious genres
10. Early opera and partly sung stage-works
11. French and Italian serious opera, especially Lully and Handel
12. Eighteenth-century comic operas and short danced works
13. Obsession with the Middle East: from the Parisian fairs to Mozart
Afterword: a helpfully troubling term.

Subject Areas: Ethnic minorities & multicultural studies [JFSL1], Colonialism & imperialism [HBTQ], Social & cultural history [HBTB], Early modern history: c 1450/1500 to c 1700 [HBLH], Opera [AVGC9], Medieval & Renaissance music [c 1000 to c 1600 AVGC2], Theory of music & musicology [AVA], Music [AV], Dance [ASD], Theatre studies [AN]