VV(18): A political cast ...

[Dave Monroe]

"Somehow the performance had taken on a political cast.  Orientalism--at 
this period showing up all over Paris in fashions, music, theater--had been 
connected with Russia in an international movement seeking to overthrow 
Western civilization.  Only six years before a newspaper had been able to 
sponsor an auto-race from Peking to Paris, and enlist the willing assistance 
of all the countries in between.  The political situation these days was 
somewhat darker.  Hence the turmoil which erupted that night in the Theatre 
Vincent Castor." (V., Ch. 14, Sec. ii, p. 412)

"Porcepic's music was striking, as usual; highly dissonant.  Lately he had 
been experimenting with African polyrhythms." (V. Ch. 14, Sec. i, p. 402)

"Porcepic sat at the Piano, playing Adoration of the Sun.  It was a tango 
with cross-rhythms." (V., Ch. 14, Sec. ii, p. 404)

"The Russian influence in Porcepic's music was usually traced to his mother 
..." (V., Ch. 14, Sec. ii, p. 404)


Aesthetics 'n' politics.  From Glenn Watkins, Pyramids at the Louvre: Music, 
Culture, and Collage from Stravinsky to the Postmodernists (Cambridge, MA: 
Harvard UP, 1994), "Preludes and Postulates," pp. 1-12 ...

"Pierre Boulez has correctly pointed to Stravinsky's love for manipulating 
musical objects, a delight in taking things apart and putting them together 
again in a different fashion, thereby giving them 'significance.'  For 
Stravinsky the invocation of a known and one's expectations regarding it 
became the starting point of the creative process.  In this gloss of 
pre-existent material, however, Stravinsky was obliged to define his own 
voice with increasing precision.  A personal style was thus coined not so 
much through the appropriation of ingredients from a particular historical 
or cultural model as through their fracture and purposeful reassemblage: 
criticism of received materials becomes the modus operandi for the creative 
act."

[see Pierre Boulez, "Stravinsky: Style or Idea?" in Orientations (Ed. 
Jean-Jacques Nattiez.  Trans. Peter Cooper.  Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 
1981).  By the way, I've the more recent Boulez-conducted Le Sacre du 
Printemps (c/w Petrouchka, The Cleveland Orchestra, on Deutsche Grammophon, 
1992), but anyone have any ideas on just what recording(s) Pynchon might 
have listened to?  What might have been the standard at the time?  Anyway 
...]

"Yet while Primitivism may appear to relate to the issue of the authority of 
the past (backward in time) and Orientalism to authorities of the present 
(geographically outward), both involve recognition of forces at some remove 
from the here-and-now implied in the modish stem of Modernism's name.  The 
Western idea of the Orient in the early twentieth century was not only of a 
physically displaced Other imbued with the qualities of the exotic but of 
one that quickly came to be fused with a search for the primitive, for an 
elusive 'first times' containing the roots of expression....  During the 
first two decades of the twentieth century, then, not only was there an 
attempt to congest ethnic diversity into a primal, global vision, but the 
authority of first times was collapsed to include the present." (pp. 3-4)

"Other fictive constructions that aided in this interpretive realignment 
centered on the temptation, voiced from the time of its premiere, to view Le 
Sacre du Printemps as a kind of musique negre, paralleling the taste for art 
negre in the visual and literary domains.  The perception of Africa as the 
quintessential locus for Primitivism in turn gave rise to further attempts 
at promoting fusions between European folk primitive and American popular 
expressions.... Europe's increasing awareness of Afro-American musical 
developments in ragtime and jazz ..." (p. 4)

"For the feverish embrace of this Afro-American musical expression was 
surely due not only to the visceral attraction of its rhythms and timbres 
but also to the weight of social interference which it carried both at home 
and abroad." (p. 4)

"... the ideal model for a new foundation was hypothesized.  Following an 
avalanche of such reassemblages, the critic's interpretive game--the search 
for a contemporary meaning in the sum of these fragments--began." (p. 5)


See maybe ...

http://www.oxy.edu/departments/rs/maeda/lintro.htm

http://www.oxy.edu/departments/rs/maeda/lmisrpsnt.htm

http://www.oxy.edu/departments/rs/maeda/loriental.htm

http://www.oxy.edu/departments/rs/maeda/lmusclogy.htm

http://www.oxy.edu/departments/rs/maeda/lethnomusicology.htm

As well as ...

Bellman, Jonathan, ed.  The Exotic in Western
   Music.  Boston: Northeastern UP, 1997.

Toop, David.  Exotica: Fabricated Soundscapes
   in a Real World.  London: Serpent's Tail, 1999.

Hayward, Philip, ed.  Widening the Horizon:
   Exoticism in Post-War Popular Music.
   Sydney: John Libbey, 1999.

Nifty essays on Esquivel, Van Dyke Parks, Korla Pandit, et al., in the 
Haywardd.  Toop is the Wire columnist/recording artist/Rap Attack author.  
See maybe e.g. Cooke, "The East in the West: Evocations of the Gamelan in 
Western Music" in the Bellman anthology.  But to continue  ...


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