Music and the Exotic from the Renaissance to Mozart

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.

Ralph P. Locke is Professor and former Chair of Musicology at the University of Rochester's Eastman School of Music. His previous books are Music, Musicians, and the Saint-Simonians (1986), Musical Exoticism: Images and Reflections (Cambridge, 2009) and the co-edited Cultivating Music in America: Women Patrons since 1860 (1997). He has published numerous articles and book chapters, and contributed to major reference works, including Grove Dictionary of Music and American National Biography. His study of conceptions of the exotic Other in Verdi's opera Aida (Cambridge Opera Journal) won the H. Colin Slim Award from the American Musicological Society.