Peopling the Stage: Opera, Otherness, and New Musical Representations in the Eighteenth Century

Abstract

T began my musical career as a teaching assistant my freshman year in college, where the music department needed a couple of students to assist in an introductory music theory course. I remember trying to teach students scales and modes, including the three minor scales. In reviewing the harmonic minor scale before the exam, one of the students clearly experienced some kind of revelation: it's Arabian! he exclaimed. He was referring to the augmented second in that scale, which to this day, if his observation has any validity outside that Vermont classroom in 1980, and I'm sure it does, still signifies the Orient to the Western ear.' In this essay, I want to consider how this particular musical sign and others that signify non-Western Others entered the