[Discussion] West Meets East (Again): A Defense of the New Orientalism

[Paksoy, Hb]

West Meets East (Again): A Defense of the New Orientalism
Paul Mitchinson
ANDANTE
26 September 2002

        With Asian music and culture on display in
concert halls across North America, some critics are
grumbling about the dangers of cultural appropriation,
but Paul Mitchinson says just relax ? and enjoy the
show.    In the past decade, Asian music and culture
has spread throughout the West like poppies. Yo-Yo
Ma's nomadic Silk Road Ensemble
<http://www.silkroadproject.org> has been encamped
near the top of the Billboard charts for over three
months now, and its concerts sell out regularly. Paris
and New York have staged historic performances of the
ancient Persian religious drama, the Ta'ziyeh .
Meanwhile, composers from Bright Sheng to Terry Riley
have been weaving Eastern idioms into the tapestry of
their Western-produced scores. One of the most
spectacular products of this impulse was Ang Lee's
2000 film-epic Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, which
used a shimmering soundtrack by Tan Dun as a backdrop
for its gravity-defying martial-arts sequences. But
that grumbling you hear isn't just the sound of Tuvan
throat singers. Some in the West have complained that
the exotic trappings of the Silk Road Project have
obscured what is essentially a commercial vehicle for
a Western celebrity performer. In the New York Times,
John Rockwell suggested that Silk Road Ensemble
audiences were being treated like "imperialist
wanderer[s] in a field of gorgeous but mystifying
blossoms." The Ta'ziyeh has provoked similar
objections. Edward Rothstein worried that the work has
been completely decontextualized in its Western
performances, and that the result was merely
"undistinguished melodramas spiced by intriguing
melismas and mediocre town-band-style accompaniments."
According to Hamid Dabashi, chair of the Middle
Eastern and Asian languages and cultures department at
Columbia University, the Ta'ziyeh had been
"theaterized, stylized, orientalized, anthropologized
and ultimately museumized."  These are troublingly
familiar charges. Orientalism, imperialism and
cultural appropriation have long been recognized as
Very Bad (Western) Things. Edward Said, the
Palestinian-American activist and classical music
critic for The Nation, has famously condemned Western
"Orientalism," which he describes as a "Western style
for dominating, restructuring, and having authority"
over the East. Colonial rule was often "justified in
advance by Orientalism," which provided a critical
tool for the spread of Western imperial power. And
included in Said's indictment are paintings, novels
and operas, many of which "lent support to the global
enterprises of European and American empire." Even the
New Grove Dictionary now concedes that
nineteenth-century operas often reflected the West's
"colonialist and male-dominated outlook." It's enough
to make you wonder: is our current fascination with
Asia simply perpetuating a pattern of imperialist
exploitation? Before you throw away those tickets to
Madama Butterfly (and cancel that pre-concert meal at
Wagamama), you might want to consider one episode in
the history of musical "Orientalism." Three centuries
ago, Europe was obsessed with "Turkish" music. Ottoman
ambassadors visiting Europe often brought along their
own ceremonial bands called mehter. The musicians blew
piercing wind instruments, crashed cymbals and
triangles, and most dramatically, thumped on an
enormous bass drum. For those accustomed to the more
refined sound of European court orchestras, the effect
was thrilling. Before long, Turkish fashion swept
European capitals. Many European courts employed their
own mehter, and Western music underwent subtle (and
not so subtle) changes. The piccolo grew in orchestral
prominence, while fortepianos came accessorized with
pedals that could operate "Turkish" cymbals or bells.
The Turks, meanwhile, did some cultural appropriation
of their own, abandoning their straight trumpets for
the looped-tube variety invented in Europe. "Alla
turca" music became the rage. Mozart's 1782 opera, The
Abduction from the Seraglio, is one of the best-known
examples, though countless symphonies and sonatas of
the time were also embellished with "Turkish" themes
or movements. By the time of Beethoven,
experimentation with Turkish instruments hardly raised
an eyebrow ? they had been swallowed up in the
standard European orchestra. When was the last time
you heard the ecstatic finale of Beethoven's Ninth,
and identified the section with bass drum, triangles
and cymbals as a "Turkish" march? There's much to
celebrate in this story. Both cultures were enriched
by their encounter, both were changed, both were
"guilty" of cultural appropriation. Cultural
promiscuity is almost always a profoundly creative
act. Music and the arts thrive when they open
themselves up to foreign influences. When they remain
insulated and protected, they often become fossilized
rituals devoid of emotional relevance. Of course,
other examples of musical "Orientalism" can be more
troubling. Madama Butterfly might be a tragic love
story set to exquisite music, but the fact that it
quotes a dozen authentic Japanese folk melodies, and
is orchestrated with tubular bells, a glockenspiel and
a tam tam, does not make it a reliable guide to
Japanese culture. Butterfly's plot exemplifies the
narrative conventions of Western operatic exoticism,
as capably sketched by Ralph Locke: Young, tolerant,
brave, possibly naive, white-European tenor-hero
intrudes, at risk of disloyalty to his own people and
colonialist ethic, into mysterious, dark-skinned,
colonised territory represented by alluring dancing
girls and deeply affectionate, sensitive lyric
soprano, incurring wrath of brutal, intransigent
tribal chieftain (bass or bass-baritone) and blindly
obedient chorus of male savages. On the other hand,
those who have condemned such operas as ideological
weapons in the service of Western political hegemony
miss a larger point. Butterfly's world premiere at La
Scala took place in February 1904 ? one week after
Japanese torpedo boats launched a surprise attack on
the Russian navy in Manchuria. By the following year,
Japan had annihilated two Russian fleets, setting in
motion events that would lead to the downfall of the
Russian empire, and the decolonization of the Far East
over the course of the twentieth century. In other
words, if Madama Butterfly was an Orientalist weapon
for dominating and having authority over Asia, it
proved about as effective as a squirt gun. Bullets and
bayonets ? not Japanese bells ? are the true weapons
of imperialism. Which is why it's worth remembering
that cultural appropriation is a much broader, and
less alarming, phenomenon than many theorists of
"Orientalism" would have you believe. Butterfly is
regularly denounced for its cartoonish stereotypes of
Japanese culture. But Puccini's Girl of the Golden
West, which performs similar offences against American
culture, earns only indulgent smiles. Similarly, Aaron
Copland's bold acts of cultural appropriation are
universally admired ? even though they're rarely
recognized as such. Rodeo, Appalachian Spring, and The
Tender Land have become iconic musical works embodying
the traditional values of the American heartland ?
despite being written by a gay, socialist,
Brooklyn-born Jew. And Copland's own music was
brilliantly "re-appropriated" in 1998 by the
African-American film director Spike Lee. In He Got
Game, Lee created a moving tribute to urban black
culture (and to basketball, its unofficial sport) with
the help of Copland's soaring music. This tangle of
appropriations might be one reason why music is often
misleadingly called a "universal language." The
organizers of recent performances of Asian music have
certainly tried to present their concerts in such a
light. Ma has stated
<http://www.silkroadproject.org/about/vision.html>
that by "listening to and learning from the voices of
an authentic musical tradition, we become increasingly
able to advocate for the worlds they represent. . . .
We discover transnational voices that belong to one
world." That's a worthy goal, to be sure, though it's
difficult to conceive how music can promote the kind
of understanding that makes effective "advocacy"
possible. Maybe it's better to keep things simple, and
to think about what musicians throughout the centuries
(in both East and West) have asked themselves when
faced with the unusual or exotic: how can we use it? A
sure sign that art is speaking to us is if we also
want to speak through it. In that respect, perhaps the
Ta'ziyeh is simply too strange for us, or doesn't
answer a need in the West's political or artistic
conscience. We are uneasy about glorifying martyrdom,
suspicious of mass emotion. Or perhaps the Ta'ziyeh
simply needs better salesmanship: the Silk Road
Project benefits from the leadership of Yo-Yo Ma, one
of the greatest cultural tour guides in history. The
Project's enormous commercial and artistic success
suggests a deep resonance with its Western audience.
What is the West getting out of its encounter with
Asian music? One hint can be found in David Brooks'
Bobos in Paradise, a merciless dissection of the
West's new upper class of "bourgeois bohemians."
Bobos, writes Brooks, try to "get away from their
affluent, ascending selves into a spiritually superior
world." They relish "People Who Really Know How to
Live ? people who make folk crafts, tell folk tales,
do folk dances, listen to folk music." This is gentle
mockery, but it also illuminates a basic truth.
Cultures need to evolve in order to thrive, and
outside influences often contribute fresh and
necessary ways of thinking or expression. In this
respect, Asian music, which has captivated, inspired,
and changed Europe and North America for centuries,
has now become as essential a part of Western culture
as the symphonies of Mozart and Beethoven. Maybe it's
time to stop feeling guilty about it.  If you would
like to respond to this essay, please write to
letters@andante.com <mailto:letters@andante.com>.