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Studies of musikalische Terminologie have helped make scholars aware of the changing nature of the words we use in our own writings and in words we encounter in the musical world around us (e.g., in music journalism). The present article studies the terms (or concepts) "exoticism" and "Western classical music" as well as the interrelationship between them. Also explored are sometimes-hidden implications with regard to ethnic identity and "race." Is Tan Dun writing exotic music when he is evoking his own people's history for New York's Metropolitan Opera?
To sail away to half-discovered places,
To see the secrets so few eyes have seen,
To see moments of enchantment on our faces:
The moments when we smile and those between.
(Radames in the Act 1 Radames-Aida duet "Enchantment Passing Through," from Elton John and Tim Rice's Aida, 2000)1
The literary, visual, and musical representations of culturally distant regions that fill our museums, opera houses, concert halls, and airwaves are hopelessly inadequate reflections of the places and peoples supposedly being depicted. How, then, does one talk about these distorted representations and understand the power they continue to exert?
Scholars who study literary works and the visual arts have, for several decades now, treated such questions with much sophistication. But music has lagged behind, stuck in simple black-and-white conceptions about the relationship between a work and its social/ cultural context, instead of exploring the shades of grey: different possible aspects of this relationship. For example, writers as different as Julian Budden, John Rosselli, and Fabrizio Della Seta emphatically deny that even a hint of Western imperialist attitudes might be at work in Verdi's Aida.2 They seem to feel the need to defend an important and admired exotic work from potentially politicized critique.
It does not help that discussions of the issue often limit themselves to one of a small number of well-known operas and concert pieces-such as Rameau's Les Indes galantes, Mozart's "Rondo alla turca," Beethoven's Turkish March (from Die Ruinen von Athen), Carmen, Saint-Saëns's Samson et Dalila, Borodin's In [the Steppes of] Central Asia, Rimsky-Korsakov's Sheherazade, and Puccini's Madama Butterfly and Turandot-when thousands of once-loved and still interesting works await study. Nor does it help that the field of musicology has long tended to avoid...