European Itinerant Opera and Operetta Companies Touring in the Near and Middle East

Τ‎his chapter focuses on the activity of musical theatre companies touring in south-eastern Europe, the Near East, the Caucasus and Central Asia during the 19th and early 20th centuries. It investigates cultural transfer and amalgamation between the metropolitan culture of the West and the Orient in the domain of opera and operetta. Greece, in particular, functioned as a cultural crossroads between East and West. From 1840 onwards, Italian opera companies began to tour in Greece and its new theatres, and even further towards the Near East; they were followed, from 1870 onwards, by French operetta and vaudeville companies. In the last decades of the 19th century, these French artists expanded their itineraries towards the East, beyond familiar geographical boundaries, tracing their own small odysseys on the map. The chapter charts and presents these traces, attempting to shed light on an unexplored area of the world history of music and theatre.

Orientalism in the Art Music of the Ionian Islands

The Ionian Islands were at an early stage cut off from the Eastern Roman Empire, experienced the changes that came with the Renaissance, actively participated in the Enlightenment and were in contact with the multifarious ideologies of the 19th century. These factors transformed their art music, which followed the ‘western’ trends. In this context, ‘orientalism’ appeared as an additional creative element in certain indigenous composers’ works. Its use ranged from the stereotypical ‘western’ approach regarding the Orient to the employment of ‘oriental’ elements as media of political (especially during the struggles for the Islands’ annexation to the Greek Kingdom), national (as a conventional ‘Greek characteristic’) and social statements, and as a way for the works’ entrepreneurial promotion to a larger audience. The chapter discusses these changing—and often concurrent and diverging—attitudes through case studies; it stresses that ‘orientalism’ never became a compositional fixation for Ionian Islands composers.

The ‘Nautch’, the Veil and the Bayadère: The Indian Dance as Musical Nexus

During the early period of mercantile contact with India, the exotic spectacle of the Bayadères or Nautch Girls seized the imagination of western sojourners and inspired an abundance of artistic production back in Europe. The ‘dancing girl’ is found everywhere in late 18th- and 19th-century orientalist paintings, poetry, novels, and of course, ballets, operas and other musical compositions. Although there are substantial studies exploring musical orientalisms in western art music, little attention has been paid to the role of real-life performances in such musical creation. This chapter explores the influence of the colonial interaction with Indian dance performances over the long 19th century. It argues not only for a nuanced and historicised approach to musical encounter but also, given the centrality of the Nautch in the Indian context, for the crucial inclusion of dance in the global history of music.

Mysticism’s Musical Modalities: Philosophies of Audition in Medieval Persian Sufism

For many Persian poets, Sufis in particular, the ethereal modes through which music communicates with its listeners embodied the somatic ‘taste’ (ẕauq) of the suprasomatic divine realities. Through a dialectic of revelation and concealment—or in the Qur’anic terms often employed by the Sufis, ẓāhir and bạ̄tin, exoteric and esoteric—proper musical experience (samāᶜ) becomes both a means of accessing the transcendent harmonies of the cosmos and conduit to the very transcendence of music itself. Proper hearing is not delimited by the audible range of the material ear, for this external sense (ḥiss-i ẓāhir) must yield to an internal sense (ḥiss-i bāṭin), signified by the gūsh-i jān and gūsh-i dil, the ‘ear of the soul’ and ‘ear of the heart’. These auricular metaphors express a deeply Pythagorean but specifically Persianate philosophy of audition, one not (only) grounded in the rationality of mathematical ratios, but (also) modelled upon Pythagoras’ cosmic auditory powers, bestowed through ritual purity.

Listening between the Lines: Alexander’s Musical Legacy in Italy (13th–15th Centuries)

This chapter consists of three examples of sound and music tales in Alexander’s life as transmitted in Italian medieval literature, and a coda pertaining to the early modern era. It deals with the Italian segment of Alexander’s musical legacy in medieval European literature, elaborated from vulgarisations and adaptations of the so-called Alexander Romance. Three main topics are focused on: human voice vs non-human voice, music education for a king and sonorous mirabilia. Two features are introduced: the significant role of music in shaping Alexander’s knowledge and his image as a chivalric king; the impact of the literature on Alexander upon 13th–14th century travellers by Europeans in Asia. The coda concerns the possibility that Alexander was imitated as idealised patron of the sciences and arts in the musical performance (intermedi) organised for the 1589 Florentine wedding of Ferdinand I de’ Medici and Christina of Lorraine.

Persian ‘Snap’: Iranian Dancers in Gandhāra

A series of reliefs from ancient Gandhāra (Peshawar Valley and neighbouring areas, North Pakistan) show dancers in Iranian (sometimes Hellenistic) attire accompanied by musical instruments of western (Near Eastern, Iranian, Greek) origins. A distinctive trait of these figures is the fact that each of them joins his/her hands to produce a snap (the ‘Persian snap’), meant to mark the time. The Gandharan reliefs are the starting point of an overview of the iconographic evidence of similar dance scenes in diverse artistic traditions (first and foremost, in Classical vase painting and Hellenistic terracottas), in which Iranian-garbed dancers, captured in postures closely comparable to those witnessed in Gandhāra, perform the ‘Persian snap’ which, however, had never been recognised as such in previous studies.

The Middle East in Music History: An Ethnomusicological Perspective

A glance at the ethnomusicology of the Muslim-majority Middle East might suggest it is peculiarly exposed to historiographical problems now familiar thanks to decades of orientalism critique. Namely, that music is understood in this part of the world via a peculiarly objectivising colonial ethnography, that it is understood in ways that deny its historical circumstances, and that it is subject to a relentless aestheticisation, which is to say, treated in analogous way to the Islamic art objects and miniatures ripped out of context and put on display in the museums of the western metropolis. The history of ethnomusicology suggests a long line of exceptions to this ‘rule’. The chapter explores the work of Villoteau, Lachmann and more recent work in and around sound archives asking to what extent we might see this work prefiguring recognisably modern and critical dispositions towards ethnography.

Bridging the Safavid–Ottoman Divide

In both Persian and Turkish art-music traditions, despite their significant current differences, the musical idiom of the 15th-century Timurid court is regarded as a significant forbear. Late 15th-century theoretical literature, however, refers to regional variations across the Middle East; these were exacerbated by a lack of continuity in Safavid and Ottoman court patronage during the 16th century, resulting in loss of repertoire and eventual replacement. Yet in the late 17th century commonalities between Safavid and Ottoman art-music practices re-emerge. Although not identical, indeed partly divergent, these practices share a core of frequently used modes and rhythmic cycles and use the same structures for complex song-settings; they even have elements of vocal repertoire in common, while certain Ottoman instrumental pieces are labelled ‘Persian’. There is evidence for the maintenance in both traditions of aesthetic constants in the domains of modulatory practice and formal articulation that can be observed much earlier.

The Music of the Modern Greeks in Western and Eastern Music Literature, from the 9th to the 19th Centuries

This chapter concerns the interactions between Eastern and western music from the ninth to the 19th century. Through observations of western writers (such as Zarlino, Burney, Martini, Villoteau, Fétis) about the music of their contemporary Greeks, it is shown that most of the Eastern terms and concepts described in western treatises of the 9th century (when the East influenced the West) have been preserved almost unchanged in the Greek church over the centuries. By the end of the 18th century, westernisation of the East and the spread of nationalism brought great political and cultural changes to the population of Asia Minor. In Constantinople, music theory and the notation of the Greek chant were then rationalised (westernised). In the books of the reformer, Chrysanthos of Madytos, the strong influence of the French Enlightenment is most evident, side by side though with, still vivid, Eastern concepts and ideas.

Musical Instruments and World History: A Case Study of the Guitar in the Republic of Turkey

This chapter present a preliminary study of the emergence of the guitar in the music, culture and society of Turkey, a transcontinental Republic founded in 1923, noting also the instrument’s presence within Ottoman music culture. It argues that the rise of the guitar in Turkey constitutes a transformative moment in the history of the instrument, if not Turkish music, with the emergence and development of local playing styles and physical modifications made to suit local musical practices, aspirations and sensibilities. Crucially, in reaching back to the near past, the study employs both ethnographic and oral historical techniques of research, including in-depth interviews with key musicians, whilst also drawing attention to the importance of the past—its interpretation, negotiation, contestation and fabrication—in the present.