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This story post is written by Noree Chamber Soloists’ Resident Musicologist @Jung-Min Mina Lee. Mina has earned her PhD in musicology from Duke University with a dissertation on Korean National Identity and Modern Music after World War II. She has taught music theory, history, and criticism at the Montclair State University and Baekseok Arts University in Seoul. Starting this fall, she will teach courses on Music in Modern Korea and K-pop at the Asian and Middle Eastern Studies Department at Duke University. Parts of this essay were presented during the pre-concert talk at Noree Chamber Soloists’ NYC Concert Series II program on February 15, 2018.
Noree Chamber Soloists’ February concert program was centered around the theme of Romantic exoticism. One of the defining characteristics of Romantic-era music is its focus on expressive and emotional qualities. In order to achieve such qualities, composers engaged with external sources, such as themes from other literary works, artworks, or philosophical thoughts. Composers were also often inspired by sources from less familiar places and evoked milieu of remote places or times using rhythms, harmonies, melodies, or instruments associated with those unfamiliar settings. While this practice, musical exoticism, can be traced as far back as the sixteenth or seventeenth centuries, when trades between and Europe and Middle Eastern or Asian worlds were frequent, the height of musical exoticism can be seen as the second half of the nineteenth century. As composers faced the new era of musical modernism, using foreign sources also served as opportunities for them to explore unusual sounds and techniques.
Although the definition of musical exoticism is seemingly straightforward, if we try to look at it just a little bit deeper than the surface questions such as which composer drew from which culture, or which melody or rhythm borrows from which musical tradition, we run into a myriad of questions that complicate our interpretation. For instance: How much did composers know about the culture they drew from? How much did the audiences know about that culture or what were the stereotypes associated with that culture in the society? Or, what were composers’ motivations when they quoted sounds of specific areas or cultures? As you can see, there are many different ways to think about musical exoticism. (If you are interested in investigating these intricate questions regarding music exoticism, here are some suggested books written by experts on the topic: Georgina Born and David Hesmondhalgh, Western Music and Its Others (2000); Annegret Fauser, Musical Encounters at the 1889 Paris World’s Fair (2009); Ralph Locke, Musical Exoticism (2011); and Locke, Music and the Exotic from the Renaissance to Mozart (2015)).
Pablo de Sarasate’s Carmen Fantasie (1883) is a work that presents interesting questions as to how we should understand the composer’s use of “exotic” Spanish dances. Carmen Fantasie draws from a well-loved operaCarmen by the French composer Georges Bizet. Toward the end of the 1800s, opera fantasies were in vogue in the French music scene: violinist-composers often borrowed materials from popular operas and created virtuosic fantasies for themselves to perform. Sarasate, as one of the most prominent violinists in Europe at the time (along with Joseph Joachim (1831-1907) and Eugène Ysaÿe (1858-1931)), and as the epitome of the French salon virtuoso, was interested in expanding the violin repertoire by creating such opera fantasies based on Don Giovanni, Faust, Der Freischütz, La forza del destino, Romeo et Juliet, and Carmen. Among them, Carmen Fantasieis the only work that remains in the violin repertoire today.
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