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RECONSIDERING AN EARLY EXOTICISM: VIENNESE ADAPTATIONS OF HUNGARIAN-GYPSY MUSIC AROUND 1800
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 03 August 2009
Abstract
Westernized Hungarian-Gypsy music (or the so-called style hongrois) has invariably been described as exotic. Although such a characterization is appropriate for later nineteenth-century compositions, I argue that it is inadequate for many of the earliest Viennese adaptations of Hungarian-Gypsy music. I focus in particular on representative examples from the sphere of Hausmusik, in which early adaptations were most numerous, yet which has received the least scholarly attention. Although these adaptations evoke a foreign place and foreign people through their descriptive titles, they are not, in most instances, exotic in style.
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References
1 Anonymous, ‘Nachrichten: Pest in Ungarn, d. 6ten Febr.’, Allgemeine musikalische Zeitung 12/24 (14 March 1810), columns 370–371. Unless otherwise noted, all translations are my own.
2 August Ellrich, Die Ungarn wie sie sind: Charakter-Schilderung dieses Volkes in seinen Verhältnissen und Gesinnungen (Berlin: Vereins-Buchhandlung, 1831), 149. David Rosen has suggested in a personal communication that this may be a reference to Johann Gottfried Schnabel's 1746 novel Der im Irrgarten der Liebe herumtaumelnde Kavalier.
3 Ellrich, Die Ungarn wie sie sind, 151–152.
4 I also use the phrase ‘Westernized Hungarian-Gypsy music’ to distinguish Western European adaptations of Hungarian-Gypsy music from the original music on which these adaptations were ostensibly based. Since the publication of Jonathan Bellman's book The ‘Style Hongrois’ in the Music of Western Europe (Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1993) the term style hongrois has become widespread, yet it has no historical or historiographical foundation. Although most published music and reviews from the turn of the nineteenth century simply identified or discussed ‘Hungarian’ national music or dances, the role of Gypsies in creating and performing this music is undeniable, a contribution acknowledged through the designation ‘Hungarian-Gypsy’.
5 Ferenc Bónis, in his edition of the 12 Hongroises (Ungarische Tänze für Klavier – Hungarian Dances for Piano (Vienna: Doblinger, 1993)), indicates that the dances were originally composed for two violins and bass for the coronation of Franz II as King of Hungary on 1 June 1792.
6 Bellman, The ‘Style Hongrois’, 13; Jonathan Bellman, ‘The Hungarian Gypsies and the Poetics of Exclusion’, in The Exotic in Western Music, ed. Bellman (Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1998), 101. Gerhard J. Winkler, among others, adopts a position similar to Bellman's when he asserts that the style hongrois and music alla turca ‘dürften in der Musik der Klassik eine ähnliche Rolle spielen, indem sie den Platz des exotischen, osteuropäischen folkloristischen Elements, sozusagen das Moment des Nicht-Domestizierten in der Kunstmusik, besetzen’ (played a similar role in that they take the place of the exotic, Eastern European folk element, the function of the non-domesticated in art music, so to speak); see Winkler, ‘Der “Style hongrois” in der europäischen Kunstmusik des 18. und 19. Jahrhunderts’, in Musik der Roma in Burgenland, ed. Winkler (Eisenstadt: Burgenländische Landesregierung, 2003), 66. See also Shay Loya's recent comments about the style hongrois as an ‘exotic topos’ in ‘The Verbunkos Idiom in Liszt's Music of the Future: Historical Issues of Reception and New Cultural and Analytical Perspectives’ (PhD dissertation, King's College London, 2006), 27.
7 As Shay Loya agrees in a recent article, Bellman's ‘lexicon’ of the style hongrois (The ‘Style Hongrois’, chapter 5) appears to draw at least in part on Liszt's description of Hungarian-Gypsy music in his Des Bohémiens et de leur musique en Hongrie (Paris: Librairie Nouvelle, 1859); see Loya, ‘Beyond “Gypsy” Stereotypes: Harmony and Structure in the Verbunkos Idiom’, Journal of Musicological Research 27/3 (2008), 258. Liszt's monograph was conceived explicitly as an explanation for his Hungarian Rhapsodies.
8 Miriam Karpilow Whaples, ‘Exoticism in Dramatic Music, 1600–1800’ (PhD dissertation, Indiana University, 1958), 6.
9 Carl Dahlhaus, Nineteenth-Century Music, trans. J. Bradford Robinson (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1989), 302.
10 Ralph P. Locke, Musical Exoticism: Images and Reflections (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009).
11 Locke, Musical Exoticism, 20.
12 Locke, Musical Exoticism, 22.
13 See Hungarian Dances 1784–1810, ed. Géza Papp, Musicalia Danubiana 7 (Budapest: Magyar Tudományos Akadémia, Zenetudományi Intézet, 1986), 27–28; Tibor Istvánffy, ‘All'Ongarese: Studien zur Rezeption ungarischer Musik bei Haydn, Mozart und Beethoven’ (PhD dissertation, Ruprecht-Karls-Universität Heidelberg, 1982), 18–23; and Béla Bartók, The Hungarian Folk Song, ed. Benjamin Suchoff, trans. M. D. Calvocoressi, with annotations by Zoltán Kodály (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1981), xv. I focus on the performance of verbunk by Hungarian-Gypsy musicians not because this was the only music they played, but because it was the Hungarian national music that was adapted by Western composers in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries – the csárdás and nóta (a Hungarian popular song, nóta literally meaning song or melody) developed later in the nineteenth century. J. Krüchten, for example, makes clear that Gypsy musicians had a wide repertoire: ‘Die gewöhnlichen Spielleute der Nationalmusik sind von alter Zeit her Zigeuner; welche jedoch auch wohl andere als blos Nationalstücke spielen, doch auch diese überall ohne Noten’ (the usual performers of national music have long been the Gypsies, who, however, play more than just national pieces, but these too everywhere without scores); see J. Krüchten, ‘Über das Musikwesen in Ungarn’, Cäcilia: eine Zeitschrift für die musikalische Welt 5/20 (1826), 300.
14 László Dobszay has hypothesized that the cimbalom acted as a substitute for a keyboard continuo instrument, and Bálint Sárosi finds a parallel between the importance of string instruments in Gypsy ensembles and in Viennese music of the late eighteenth century. Sárosi notes, however, that verbunk retained stronger ties to traditional music in rural settings than it did in urban ones. See László Dobszay, A History of Hungarian Music, trans. Mária Steiner (Budapest: Corvina, 1993), 126; Bálint Sárosi, Sackpfeifer, Zigeunermusikanten … Die instrumentale ungarische Volksmusik (Budapest: Corvina, 1999), 59; Bálint Sárosi, ‘Gypsy Musicians and Hungarian Peasant Music’, Yearbook of the International Folk Music Council 2 (1970), 26; and Bálint Sárosi, ‘Parallelen aus der ungarischen Volksmusik zum “Rondo all'Ongarese”-Satz in Haydns D-dur Klavierkonzert Hob. XVIII:11’, in Bericht über den internationalen Joseph Haydn Kongress Wien 1982, ed. Eva Badura-Skoda (Munich: Henle, 1986), 222.
15 See Sárosi, ‘Gypsy Musicians and Hungarian Peasant Music’, 12–13 and 16.
16 Robert Townson, Travels in Hungary, with a Short Account of Vienna in the Year 1793 (London: Robinson, 1797), 440. Pozsony, or Preßburg in German, is now Bratislava, the capital of Slovakia.
17 Julius Kaldy, A History of Hungarian Music (London: William Reeves, 1902; reprinted New York: Haskell House, 1969), 18. Kaldy provides no source for this information. His further claim that ‘Beethoven has used the melody of a slow Hungarian tune of Bihary's in his overture dedicated to King Stephen’ is not confirmed by the thematic catalogue of Bihari's works included in Bálint Sárosi, Bihari János (Budapest: Mágus, 2002).
18 Although it is often cited in scholarly literature, the story of Schubert's Divertissement à l'hongroise, d818, having been inspired by a kitchen maid's singing during his second stay with the family of Johann Carl Esterházy in Zseliz in 1824 – the first was in 1818 – is undoubtedly apocryphal: none of the themes of the Divertissement has a vocal quality. See, in this connection, Maurice J. E. Brown, ‘Schubert and Some Folksongs’, Music & Letters 53/2 (1972), 173–174. Indeed, whether the Divertissement was composed in Zseliz cannot firmly be established; the autograph of the work is lost. The autograph of the two-hand Ungarische Melodie, which became the A section of the third movement of the Divertissement, however, is dated ‘2 Sept. 1824 Zeléz’ in Schubert's hand. See Otto Erich Deutsch, Franz Schubert: Thematisches Verzeichnis seiner Werke in chronologischer Folge (Kassel: Bärenreiter, 1978), 512–514, and Mária Domokos, ‘Über die ungarischen Charakteristiken des “Divertissement à l'hongroise” d818’, Schubert durch die Brille 11 (1993), 53–55. Domokos (56) identifies the Andante theme of the first movement as the one most likely to have been inspired by the kitchen maid's singing.
19 David Gramit includes an interesting discussion of this topic in the chapter ‘Scholarship and the Definition of Musical Cultures’ in his Cultivating Music: The Aspirations, Interests, and Limits of German Musical Culture, 1770–1848 (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2002), 27–62.
20 In addition to those already cited, the most important contemporary accounts include: Anonymous [Heinrich Klein], ‘Ueber die Nationaltänze der Ungarn’, Allgemeine musikalische Zeitung 2/35 (28 May 1800), columns 609–616; Anonymous, ‘Geschichte der Musik in Siebenbürgen’, Allgemeine musikalische Zeitung 16/46 (16 November 1814), columns 765–772, and 16/47 (23 November 1814), columns 781–787; Krüchten, ‘Über das Musikwesen in Ungarn’, 299–304; Christian Friedrich Daniel Schubart, Ideen zu einer Ästhetik der Tonkunst (1806), reprinted with an Index and Preface by Fritz Kaiser and Margrit Kaiser (Hildesheim: Olms, 1969); ‘Vorbericht’ (Foreword), signed ‘Der Sammler’ (The Collector), to four anonymous volumes of Originelle ungarische Nationaltänze (1806–1811), reproduced in Hungarian Dances 1784–1810, ed. Papp, 356; Franz Paul Rigler, ‘Anmerkung’ to his 12 ungarische Tänze (no date – four of the dances were included as a supplement in the Allgemeine musikalische Zeitung 2/35 (28 May 1800)), reproduced in Hungarian Dances 1784–1810, ed. Papp, 348–349; and Richard Bright, Travels from Vienna Through Lower Hungary with Some Remarks on the State of Vienna During the Congress, in the Year 1814 (Edinburgh: Archibald Constable, 1818).
21 ‘Not long ago a band of five musicians, with black hair and white teeth, arrived in Vienna from Galánta [a small town near Pozsony], whose music-making, without the printed music, was listened to with amazement. … [They] play with such great proficiency that the inn where these people perform is full with people gathered in amazement, and they do the innkeeper a lot of good’ (as given in Bálint Sárosi, Gypsy Music, trans. Fred Macnicol (Budapest: Corvina, 1978), 68–69). According to Townson's ‘A List of Home and Foreign Newspapers and Journals, which are to be had at the General Post-Office at Vienna, postage free, with their prices’ (Travels in Hungary, 30), the Magyar Kurir was still available in Vienna in 1793 (for eleven florins a year) and was important enough to be listed in his travelogue.
22 ‘Fast alle Stücke, die in den Zirkeln der N.[ational] Ungarn gespielt werden, sind das augenblickliche Produkt der Phantasie’; Anonymous [Klein], ‘Ueber die Nationaltänze der Ungarn’, column 612.
23 ‘ihre Uebergänge schlängeln sich in lauter halben Tönen wunderbar in einander’; Anonymous, ‘Nachrichten: Pest in Ungarn, d. 6ten Febr.’, column 370.
24 ‘ihre Wirkung ist dann die der ausdruckvollsten Harmonie’; Anonymous [Klein], ‘Ueber die Nationaltänze der Ungarn’, column 614.
25 ‘dass das Charakteristische aller ungarischen Tänze und Lieder meist in dem Accent, der gewöhnlich nicht auf die erste Note der guten Taktzeit fällt, liege’; Anonymous, ‘Geschichte der Musik in Siebenbürgen’, Allgemeine musikalische Zeitung 16/46 (16 November 1814), column 771.
26 See Ungarische Tänze für Klavier, ed. Bónis, 3, as well as Bónis's Revisionsbericht und Quellennachweis in this same edition for information about the distribution and advertising of the Ballet hongrois. Like so many published Hungarian-Gypsy dances, the advertisement for it appeared in the Wiener Zeitung; in 1784 this same newspaper also announced the distribution in manuscript copy by Johann Traeg of Bengraf's XII Magyar Tántzok. This collection was printed in 1790 by Artaria (see Bónis, Revisionsbericht and Hungarian Dances 1784–1810, ed. Papp, 346–347). As Alexander Weinmann explains in his study Der Alt-Wiener Musikverlag im Spiegel der ‘Wiener Zeitung’ (Tutzing: Schneider, 1976), the increasing number of advertisements for dance music in general in the Wiener Zeitung reflected the ever-increasing demand for such music in Vienna (48). The most extensive information about the publication of Hungarian-Gypsy dances is in Géza Papp, ‘Die Quellen der “Verbunkos-Musik”: Ein bibliographischer Versuch’, Studia Musicologica 21/2–4 (1979), 151–217; 24/1–2 (1982), 35–97; 26/1–4 (1984), 59–132; 32/1–4 (1990), 54–224; and 45/3–4 (2004), 331–406.
27 They are invariably of the Folge (series or succession) type, meaning that the collections do not have an overall tonal or other organization; see Walburga Litschauer and Walter Deutsch, Schubert und das Tanzvergnügen (Vienna: Holzhausen, 1997), 109–124, for a description of various organizational strategies in Viennese dance collections. Some Hungarian-Gypsy dances were also included in collections along with other dances; see, for instance, Alexander Weinmann, Vollständiges Verlagsverzeichnis Artaria & Comp. (Vienna: Ludwig Krenn, 1978). This is only one among many publishers' catalogues that Weinmann has compiled and that contains such examples. A few Hungarian-Gypsy dances also appeared in the contemporary press, including the Allgemeine musikalische Zeitung, Hadi és más nevezetes történetek (Military and Other Notable Stories) and the Musikalisches Wochenblatt.
28 See ‘Notes’, in Hungarian Dances 1784–1810, ed. Papp, 346–362, for detailed listings of these correspondences.
29 Ilona Mona, ‘Hungarian Music Publication 1774–1867’, Studia Musicologica 16/1–4 (1974), 261.
30 See The Corvina History of Hungary: From the Earliest Times until the Present Day, ed. Péter Hanák (Budapest: Corvina, 1991), 60 and 78, and A History of Hungary, ed. Ervin Pamlényi (Budapest: Corvina, 1973), 192–194 and 200–203.
31 See ‘Notes’, in Hungarian Dances 1784–1810, ed. Papp, 346–362; Papp indicates (26–27) that it was only in the early 1820s, when the Pest firms of Lichtl and Miller began to publish more consistently, that Viennese publishers were gradually replaced.
32 As listed in the first three instalments of Papp's exhaustive and invaluable ‘Die Quellen der “Verbunkos-Musik”’.
33 See, for example, István Halmos, ‘Towards a Pure Instrumental Form’, Studia Musicologica 19/1–4 (1977), 63–84; Géza Papp, ‘Stilelemente des frühen Werbungstanzes in der Gebrauchsmusik des 18. Jahrhunderts’, in Musica Antiqua III: Acta Scientifica (Bydgoszcz, 1972), 639–677; Bellman, ‘A Lexicon for the Style Hongrois’, in The ‘Style Hongrois’, 93–130; Csilla Pethő, ‘Style Hongrois: Hungarian Elements in the Works of Haydn, Beethoven, Weber and Schubert’, Studia Musicologica 41/1–3 (2000), 199–284; and Istvánffy, All'Ongarese.
34 Another instance is the tremolos notated in the four-volume collection of Originelle ungarische Nationaltänze, which are reminiscent of those of the cimbalom (hammered dulcimer), an integral part of most Hungarian-Gypsy ensembles. Although the ‘collector’ of these dances has clearly marked with an asterisk the notes on which these tremolos should be executed, they are so rare that they seem like merely token gestures. See Hungarian Dances 1784–1810, ed. Papp, 208, for an example.
35 For an explanation of these terms see William E. Caplin, Classical Form: A Theory of Formal Functions for the Instrumental Music of Haydn, Mozart, and Beethoven (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998).
36 For more on the bokázó figure see any of the authors and works listed in note 33. Pethő, in particular, provides a meticulous analysis of this and other melodic figures commonly encountered in published dances, along with many examples.
37 Liszt, Des Bohémiens, 223.
38 The accompaniments, however, do not become correspondingly more complex, but remain as they were in the pre-1800 dances; the homophonic texture of these dances did not change over time.
39 Walter Salmen has suggested such a possibility with reference to Haydn's works ‘all'Ongarese’; see ‘Diskussionsrunde 1’, in Bericht über den internationalen Joseph Haydn Kongress Wien 1982, ed. Badura-Skoda, 245. Locke agrees that ‘a title or other verbal indication … can easily suggest not just a composed style but also a way of playing’ (Musical Exoticism, 70).
40 As given in Hungarian Dances 1784–1810, ed. Papp, 349.
41 The collection of twelve Contredanses hongroises is reproduced in Hungarian Dances 1784–1810, ed. Papp, 122–133. The Contradanza all'Ungarese is listed in Papp, ‘Die Quellen der “Verbunkos-Musik”’, Studia Musicologica 21/2–4 (1979), 189; this bibliography is the most useful and efficient source for identifying other such instances.
42 Litschauer and Deutsch, Schubert und das Tanzvergnügen, 101.
43 Litschauer and Deutsch, Schubert und das Tanzvergnügen, 144.
44 Rigler's comment suggests, furthermore, that the same was also true of adaptations of other foreign national musics, an assessment of which, however, is beyond the scope of this article.
45 See Peter van der Merwe, ‘The Dances of Central Europe’, §I: ‘The Polka Family’, in Roots of the Classical: The Popular Origins of Western Music (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), 231–238.
46 Dahlhaus, Nineteenth-Century Music, 306.
47 Matthew Head, ‘Haydn's Exoticisms: “Difference” and the Enlightenment’, in The Cambridge Companion to Haydn, ed. Caryl Clark (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 91. Head is not alone in making such an assertion: see Ervin Major, ‘Miszellen: Ungarische Tanzmelodien in Haydns Bearbeitung’, Zeitschrift für Musikwissenschaft 11 (1928–1929), 601, and Bence Szabolcsi, ‘Joseph Haydn und die ungarische Musik’, Beiträge zur Musikwissenschaft 2 (1959), 72.
48 Istvánffy (All'Ongarese, 41) writes: ‘Der Marsch wurde in die Reihe der Analysen nicht aufgenommen, weil er außer dem Namen – so auch Szabolcsi – nichts Ungarisches aufweist. Der Grund für die Benennung ist unbekannt.’ (The march was not included in [my] series of analyses because other than its name – as Szabolcsi also maintains – it contains nothing Hungarian. The reason for its title is unknown.) Its ‘stamping’ half-step motive is not necessarily an exoticism; it occurs, for example, in several of Beethoven's Twelve Contredanses for orchestra (WoO14).
49 This movement, in addition, provides further evidence of the equation of Gypsies with Hungarian musicians: it was subtitled ‘Rondo, in the Gipsies’ style' in the original 1795 Longman & Broderip edition, as well as in the 1796 Artaria edition, but was subsequently renamed ‘Rondo all'Ongarese’ in later editions. See Anthony Hoboken, Joseph Haydn: Thematisches-bibliographisches Werkverzeichnis, volume 1: Instrumentalwerke (Mainz: Schott, 1957), 707–710.
50 Head, ‘Haydn's Exoticisms’, 89–90. Head's language itself, it should be noted, goes a long way towards convincing the reader of the exoticism of the work at hand.
51 Major, ‘Miszellen’, 601–604; Istvánffy, All'Ongarese, 45–48; Winkler, ‘Der “Style hongrois”’, 67. Bálint Sárosi finds parallels in this rondo not only with the dance from 22 originelle ungarische Nationaltänze, but with vocal Hungarian folk music still performed today; see ‘Ungarische Sackpfeifenlied-Variante eines Themas von Haydn’, in Musica Privata: Die Rolle der Musik im privaten Leben. Festschrift zum 65. Geburtstag von Walter Salmen, ed. Monika Fink, Rainer Gstrein and Günter Mössmer (Innsbruck: Helbling, 1991), 353–356.
52 See Miklós Rakos, Veszprém vármegyei nóták (Budapest, 1994; facsimile of the original edition), 42–43, and Ferenc von Brodszky, A Veszprémvármegyei Zenetársaság (Veszprém: Veszprémvármegyei Múzeum, 1941). Brodsky notes that at this time the dissemination of these dances occurred almost exclusively orally or through manuscript copies.
53 Sebestyén acknowledged as much in an 1824 announcement for the collection appearing in both the Allgemeine musikalische Zeitung, mit besonderem Rücksicht auf den österreichischen Kaiserstaat (‘Gemeinnützige Blätter. Pesth. Vaterländische Ehre’, 8/59 (July 1824), 235) and the Vereinigte Ofner und Pester Zeitung (June 1824, reproduced in Rakos, Veszprém vármegyei nóták), which specified that it contained Hungarian national music written by national composers, and that such music was in danger of being forgotten entirely because it appeared only in a few defective copies (‘fehlerhaften Abschriften’). Perhaps Sebestyén was referring here to published Viennese collections of Hungarian-Gypsy dances, the ‘defectiveness’ of which I have already described at length.
54 One cannot entirely dismiss the possibility that Haydn's rondo was actually the source for the later publications, although in the case of the dances from the Magyar nóták, published with the goal of preserving Hungarian national music, this would certainly be ironic. Such questions of chronological priority pertain to countless works that exist in multiple ‘folk’ and ‘art’ versions.
55 Indeed, the author of an early review of the overture to König Stephan emphasized its simplicity as well; see M., ‘3. Beurtheilungen. Grosse Ouvertüre zu König Stephan’, Berliner allgemeine musikalische Zeitung 5/9 (27 February 1828), 70–71. See also Marjorie W. Hirsch's recent discussion of the aesthetic of simplicity in nineteenth-century folk songs in Romantic Lieder and the Search for Lost Paradise (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), especially the Introduction to part III, ‘The Lost World of Folk Song’, 173–181.
56 Dűvő is a common pattern of accompaniment in Hungarian-Gypsy music in which two chords are articulated in each bow stroke. For further examples and comparisons to esztam see David E. Schneider, Bartók, Hungary, and the Renewal of Tradition: Case Studies in the Intersection of Modernity and Nationality (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2006), 21–24.
57 Liszt, Des Bohémiens, 331–332.
58 Mary Hunter, ‘The Alla Turca Style in the Late Eighteenth Century: Race and Gender in the Symphony and the Seraglio’, in The Exotic in Western Music, ed. Bellman, 49. See also Locke, Musical Exoticism, 56.
59 Locke, Musical Exoticism, 8.
60 Examples include the very title Ausgesuchte Ungarische Nationaltaenze im Clavierauszug von verschiedenen Ziegeunern aus Galantha, as well as the ‘Vorbericht’ (Foreword) to the four-volume collection of Originelle ungarische Nationaltänze, which is signed simply ‘Der Sammler’ (‘The Collector’).
61 Larry Wolff, Inventing Eastern Europe: The Map of Civilization on the Mind of the Enlightenment (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1994). See also Head, Orientalism, Masquerade and Mozart's Turkish Music, 72–73.
62 Townson, Travels in Hungary, 32–33.
63 John MacKenzie, Orientalism: History, Theory and the Arts (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1995), 143 and 150. Orientalism, in the broader sense of the term, may be understood as a reference to any other.
64 Matthew Head, ‘Style Hongrois’, in Grove Music Online <www.oxfordmusiconline.com>, ed. Laura Macy (27 April 2009).
65 This approach was not limited to Western adaptations of Hungarian-Gypsy music. In describing the late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century British repertoire of ‘Hindostannie airs’, Nicholas Cook has recently commented with reference to one particular example that it ‘represents an assimilation of Indian music within the English glee tradition – and, of course, within the metropolitan economy – so complete that the only real traces of its provenance are the significantly prominent designation “Rektah” (a genre of Indian love songs seen from the woman's point of view, from which many Hindostannie airs were taken); the title “Soonre mashookan! be wufa!” (Listen, beloved, unfaithful!); and the ascription to Chanam (Khanam). Raymond Head comments that Biggs's settings “have little to do with India and its music”, and certainly [this example] has little to do with the lexicon of alterity [“modality, pentatonic/gapped scales, parallel fourths/fifths, augmented seconds, and so on”] to which I referred’; see Nicholas Cook, ‘Encountering the Other, Redefining the Self: Hindostannie Airs, Haydn's Folksong Settings and the “Common Practice” Style’, in Music and Orientalism in the British Empire, 1780s–1940s: Portrayal of the East, ed. Martin Clayton and Bennett Zon (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2007), 17.
66 Ludwig Speidel, ‘Konzerte’, Fremden-Blatt (2 March 1888). My translation of this passage is based on David Brodbeck's, who kindly brought this review to my attention.
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