NYT article: Orient and Occident Swapping choruses | Golden Skate

NYT article: Orient and Occident Swapping choruses

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NYT article: Orient and Occident Swapping choruses

June 1, 2003
Orient and Occident, Swapping Choruses
By MICHAEL BECKERMAN
NY Times

EDWARD SAID'S "Orientalism" is one of the most influential academic books of its generation. It points out, in various ways, how the East was "Orientalized" by the West, how the subtlety of life in places as diverse as Japan, Java and the Middle East was seen through lenses that robbed it of its individuality, and how the East was stereotyped as a place of "romance, exotic beings, haunting memories and landscapes, remarkable experiences."

One outgrowth has been a lot of West-bashing scholarship, setting out from Mr. Said's notion of Orientalism as "a Western style for dominating, restructuring and having authority over the Orient"' and linking like-minded artistic impulses to imperialism. Thus, the "exotic," whether in Mozart's seraglio or Rimsky-Korsakov's, is today a suspect category: intriguing and alluring, to be sure, but at its core an example of colonialist appropriation.

What could be more welcome and stimulating in this context than "Dream of the Orient," a Deutsche Grammophon Archiv recording that mingles Orientalist works by Gluck, Mozart and lesser lights like Johann Martin Kraus and Franz Xaver Süssmayr with the authentic East? Concerto Köln, led by Werner Ehrhardt, performs with Vladimir Ivanoff's Sarband, a Turkish ensemble, both using "original instruments."

A rousing performance of Mozart's Overture to the "Abduction From the Seraglio" (with more percussion than you've ever heard) is followed by Turkish music notated and published by the Marquis de Ferriol in Venice in 1787, both played by the combined ensembles. Excerpts from Kraus's "Soliman II" follow a transcription of a Janissaries' March transcribed by one Dimitrie Cantemir, a Moldavian prince who spent time in Constantinople at the beginning of the 18th century.

These juxtapositions are jarring. Mozart's overture sounds strict and formulaic after a traditional Turkish introduction, and another Turkish number that follows it seems even more sinuous and flexible. Our usual vantage point is restored after 30 seconds or so, but the effect of these musics on each other is potent.

The album represents a coming together in other ways less audible. In a note, "How Our Dream of the Orient Came True," Mr. Ehrhardt describes the difficulty each ensemble had in playing the other's music: "The European players kept pressing forward and leaving behind their Turkish colleagues, who had a completely different and more relaxed approach to the question of tempo." He mentions how puzzled the Turkish players were by rests in the percussion parts: "For them it was completely absurd . . . to stop playing for whole bars."

One wishes there were more in the notes — much more — about the process of putting the recording together and especially about the Turkish pieces themselves. This is one of the few weaknesses of a project that cries out for greater explanation and contextualization.

At the center of the "Dream" experience is the specter of a naïve Western distortion of a subtler original. Mr. Ivanoff, in his note, speaks of figures who notated Turkish music in the 17th and 18th centuries: "Thanks to their writings on Turkish culture and their collections of music, these . . . contemporary witnesses allow us to hold up the mirror of European exoticism to its actual real-life object."

I have as much confidence in my specialized knowledge of Turkish music as I do in my ability to illuminate the past precisely, which is to say, not much. But I can state without fear of contradiction that Ferriol's "Turkish Concerto in the Hijaz Scale" is not a real-life object in any sense. How could it be?

First, it is a centuries-old transcription of a living music by a foreign observer. We know how even the most sensitive local observers transform musical substances according to their own predispositions. Leos Janacek, for example, an expert on Moravian folk speech and song, tended to impose his favorite interval patterns on his "scientific" transcriptions. Even the most gifted listeners hear what they want to hear and what they are trained to hear.

In addition, given that Mr. Ivanoff has himself arranged the transcription and that Concerto Köln is playing along, what you have is simply another level of exoticism. Strangely, parts of this track sound not unlike a Hollywood harem fantasy.

Speaking of Hollywood, as I ponder these issues, "The Recruit" is showing on the airplane, and its theme, reiterated several times by Al Pacino, runs to "Nothing is what it seems to be." In the film, it refers to the C.I.A. spooks' art of deception, but it also rings true in the world of exoticism and in music in general. Most of us don't need reminders to be skeptical of Gluck's attempt, in his Overture to "The Unexpected Meeting," to frame the Orient, but we might forget to apply the same skepticism to pieces played by Sarband.

Although Mr. Ivanoff's arrangements may be closer to "authentic" Turkish music than Mozart's "Turkish" Rondo, that just makes them more seductive examples of Orientalism. Even as we enjoy them, we should be on our guard and wonder why we want to hear them as some kind of "real" thing when they are, at best, fantastical reconstructions of an irretrievable past.

Describing Süssmayr's "Turkish Symphony," Mr. Ivanoff writes, "Only in the final movement does the European orchestra finally seize control of the coveted Turkish percussion instruments and launch into a Hapsburg victory march."

My own hearing of this movement does not take such an imperial view of matters. The finale is a brief rondo, and while the main idea is an "Abduction" imitation, the interludes are altogether different. For Süssmayr seems to be trying to get closer to the spirit of Turkish music in these middle sections, with their perpetual motion and modal inflections. How fitting! The "more real" Orient is trapped in an inner section like a fly in amber, captured amid the caricature outer part, much the way the Orient is said to have been subdued and abused by the West.


BUT Mr. Ivanoff's mention of the Hapsburgs should remind us of the polyglot strivings of that empire. Instead of reading Orientalism darkly, as is so often done today, one can also happily celebrate the Austro-Hungarian sense of inclusiveness, where pastorale, Bachian counterpoint and the exotic lie cheek by jowl. And ultimately, Mozart's "Turkish" music is about Mozart, being as much a comment on the Orient as Bach's French Suites are a statement about the French.

Though relations between France and Germany are perhaps of less international moment today than those between Orient and Occident, we should resist the temptation to apply tendentious contemporary politics to artistic endeavors of the past. Rather, we might profitably follow the probing and celebratory strivings of Concerto Köln and Sarband, and add our own dreams to them as well.
 
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