Musical Voyages and Their Baggage: Orientalism in Music and Critical Musicology

Abstract

The word “orientalism,” largely as a result of Edward Said’s 1978 book, has in recent decades generated a good deal of attention in musicology, music criticism and in critical writing about the other arts. Inconveniently, though, the word has a long history and more than one meaning. The Shorter Oxford English Dictionary (1973) gives the most traditional one, tucking orientalism under the word orient with the brief, bland definition “oriental character, style, or quality,” with orientalist being “one versed in oriental languages and literature.” This is close to the definition that Said famously interrogated and unpacked, documenting and meditating upon the myriad ways in which the study of the languages, literatures, and cultures of the eastern world could amount to the appropriation, control, and ultimately marginalization and trivialization of those cultures and peoples—which might or might not include those of Africa, but certainly would include the Middle East, Far East, and the Indian subcontinent. Said’s expose study, even given certain flaws and broad-brush oversimplifications, was pathbreaking in that it deconstructed what was often unreflectively considered to be a great constellation of respected academic disciplines, calling attention to their often unacademic—even inhumane— foundational assumptions and (in some measure) imperial goals. It is in this and related senses that “orientalism” is now most often used, and critical perspectives that occupy themselves with orientalism and its consequences have for some time been called postcolonial. Postcolonial criticism, generally speaking, seeks to identify and resistantly read artworks and documents in which an “oriental” flavor or undercurrent is present and thereby working in a subliminal, nonneutral way. Given the relationship of postcolonial music criticism to the broader area of cultural criticism, such “oriental” spice is rarely considered to be benign or beneficial, and this has resulted in a gradual reduction of the complexities and layers of meaning