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)


Again, from Glenn Watkins, Pyramids at the Louvre: Music, Culture, and 
Collage from Stravinsky to the Postmodernists (Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 
1994), Ch. 1, "'And the Moon Descends over the Temple That Was," pp. 13-37 
...

"I would like to see Persia and India and then China ..." (p. 13, quoting 
Tristan Klingsor in an epigraph) ...

"From earliest times a tradition persistent in the West that ceremonies 
performed at dawn toward the rising sun carried a special power resulted in 
the orientation of temples and sacred buildings to the east." (p. 13)

"... Russia has continued to loom as an equivocal or marginal entity--a 
chameleon whose capacity to assume Eastern or Western colors changed 
according to context." (p. 14)

"... one of the principal lures of the Orient fro literature, art, and music 
has resided in the capacity first to be imagined (reverie in life or art), 
experienced (the voyage), and finally recalled (reconstituted through travel 
diaries, pictures, novels, musical portraits, and other creative 
reminiscences) in a fashion closely tied to purely aesthetic needs." (p. 15)

"It is not surprising that this view from a distance has promoted the 
natural tendencyy to blur distinctions between the peoples and cultures of 
non-Western civilizations ..." (p. 15)

"As a companion for Primitivism, Orientalism in the early twentieth century 
soon began to place less emphasis upon the exotic a a source of local color 
and to attach and enhanced significance to those qualities which could 
transcend national boundaries and historical chronologies." (p. 16)

"... the notion that the consideration of an alien culture could provide new 
sources of authority and aid in the expansion of resources, sonorities, and 
themes in the search for global values." (p. 16)

"On the level of visual color alone, the Orient was alive with possibilities 
that seemed to be missing from the Western palette.  Chinese red, for 
example, implied not just an orangy cast but a sheen attributable to the 
qualities of a lacquered surface, familiar in the West in any number of 
objets d'art of Sino-Japanese origin." (p. 17)

[cf. "black pieces of primitive sculpture, lamp in the shape of a dragon, 
silks, Chinese red." (V., Ch. 14, sec. ii, p. 406)]

"And embrace of the Orient in the world of sound through the invocation of a 
pentatonic scale was deductive precisely because the tuning of its five 
notes could only be approximated in the equal temperament of western music 
and because its use left audible gaps in the familiar diatonic octave.  
Timbral or sonic color codes ... were also developed as cohorts in conjuring 
up the Orient." (pp. 17-8)

"The Russian musicians' fascination with the Far East, the Near East, and 
Southeast Asia was pronounced throughout the nineteenth century. " (p. 18)

"The Paris International Exhibition of 1889 ..." (p. 19)

"Throughout the nineteenth century the West ahd been attracted to portraying 
the seductive and even the violent aura of the Orient ..." (p. 21)

Debussy (p. 22 ff.)

Mahler (p. 28-9)

Ravel (p. 28-32)

Diaghilev (pp. 32-7)





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