Introduction

From Mozart and Beethoven, to the desert-level music in Super Mario, generations of Western audiences have been fascinated by the power of Orientalist music to transfer their minds to fantastical renders of Eastern settings. Receiving a tightly packaged medium, inherently absent of visuals, creative elements of the listener’s psychology become not only a compensatory, but amplifying force. This interaction, which creates a vivid setting in the imagination of the listener, inevitably has the side-effect of affirming their stereotypes and fantasies about a location and its culture. Conceived as a soundtrack for a non-existent orientalist film, this album takes the listener on a journey through an imaginary world vaguely extracted from stereotypes of Asia and Asian music. In seeking to encourage critical thinking and reflection by exemplifying patterns of orientalism in music, this project addresses the question: how can Orientalist perceptions be corrected through music?

Literature Review

Widening the Horizon by Philip Hayward informs this project through its overview of instances of post-war musical exoticism. The book specifies musical elements (instrumentation, theory, etc) used by musicians to allude to foreign settings—informing the project’s own motifs and sounds that create an exotic feeling.

Beyond Orientalism by Dong Jin Shin details the complex relationship between the music of French impressionist composers and their oriental influences. To them, Asia served as a means of restructuring their methods to separate themselves from previous tradition and the rigidity of French musical institutions. The project’s approach in filtering ambient music influences through Orientalist tropes is influenced by this tradition.

Methods

Expanding upon the idea of a soundtrack for an orientalist film, two motifs are used throughout the album. The first motif, introduced in the very beginning of the album, is essentially a descension through the pentatonic scale meant to evoke a foreign setting. The second motif, played as a piano countermelody in the first track, is meant to evoke a sense of "zen" tranquility. This parallels the orientalist trope of recycling melodic cliches (such as ascension/descension through double harmonic minor, Dorian 6th, pentatonicism, etc) that signify "the other" without employing a beyond-surface-level understanding the music theory of Eastern cultures. This project consists of pieces composed in a Digital Audio Workstation (DAW) and uses sounds primarily from Roland’s World Music bank in the Zenology synthesizer. Soundscape techniques and granular synthesis are used throughout each track as well.

Audience and Impact

The project aims to challenge perceptions of eastern cultures which are contaminated by Orientalist Western media. The project gives the listener the tools to distinguish between authentic representations of Eastern cultures, between elements of stereotypes, fantasy and imagination.

References

Soy Sauce Music: Haruomi Hosono and Japanese Self-Orientalism. (1999). In P. Hayward (Ed.), Widening the Horizon: Exoticism in Post-War Popular Music. John Libbey Publishing.

The book chapter discusses the Japanese response to American orientalism. Japanese musician Haromi Hosono created a trilogy of albums titled ‘Soy Sauce Music’, which countered American orientalism by mimicking the exotic image of Japan and the Japanese created by American artists. The trilogy reflects a fluctuating identity where the artist is simultaneously the “viewer” and “the viewed”. The book chapter also discusses other Japanese responses to the Western sounds imported to Japan and the subsequent formation of new youth music genres.

Historical examples of orientalism could serve as the background of my work. Hosono’s response to American orientalism could serve as a model for my project, as it serves an explicit socio-cultural purpose carried out through music in a non-exclusively verbal delivery. The source provided me with a meaningful new perspective on cultural appropriation. It also redirected the focus of my project as I found that the academic discussion of orientalism—and even just orientalism as it relates to the country of Japan—is an extensive topic where research could be applied as a project.

Pasler, J. (2020). Revisiting Debussy’s Relationships with Otherness: Difference, Vibrations, and the Occult. Music and Letters, 101(2), 321-342. https://academic.oup.com/ml/article/101/2/321/5710695

The article discusses composer Debussy’s relationship with Otherness as something he grapples with. To the composer, class, nationality and racial separations seem fluid; sameness as well as difference seem to equally inhabit the space of his music. To Debussy, grappling with otherness can relieve external and internal limitations.

Along with the sources by Shin and Reck, this source provides an explanation to the reader of why orientalism has been attractive to composers. It allows one to understand the character of the composers and gives a personal context to the situations that lead to Asian influences and their changing uses.

Acknowledgements

Irene Park—Advisor

Harold Burgess—Advisor