Reconsidering East Asian Influence in Early Twentieth-Century European Music

Home , Georgina Born, Haruomi Hosono, Jane Bathori, Jonathan Hay (publicist), Les Apaches, Maurice Delage

BEYOND ORIENTALISM: RECONSIDERING EAST ASIAN INFLUENCE IN EARLY TWENTIETH-CENTURY EUROPEAN MUSIC

DONG JIN SHIN

A DISSERTATION PRESENTED TO THE GRADUATE SCHOOL OF THE UNIVERSITY OF FLORIDA IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OF DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY

UNIVERSITY OF FLORIDA

2020

To Leah

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

There were many amazing people who made this dissertation possible. I owe debts of gratitude to my advisor, Silvio dos Santos, who had faith in me, had my back, and cheered me on until I crossed the finish line. Jennifer Thomas’ critical reading was invaluable in polishing this dissertation; I can’t say enough about how much she has cared for me with all her heart. Paul Richards kindly offered me an individual study for a semester and encouraged my humble ideas. When I first visited Ann Wehmeyer, she readily agreed to be on my committee and kindly helped with all the degree processes.

Also, I would like to thank my musicology colleagues, especially Heather Bergseth,

Michael Vincent, and Heidi Jensen, who showed their friendship and helped with my

English. I appreciate the School of Music at the University of Florida, which has supported my research travels, presentations, and all the stages of this dissertation.

It was a long and difficult journey for me to complete this dissertation due to considerable language and cultural barriers. Through the hardships, I learned valuable lessons that enabled me to grow into a better person. During my doctoral degree, I have tried not to neglect my duty as a mom and to become a good model to my daughter

Leah, whose presence helped me to remain hopeful and become a stronger person. I thank my husband, Hong Jae Kim, for having been there for me through many troubled times together. Numerous people at St. Patrick Catholic Church have sent prayers with such love that brought me joy. I give thanks to God, who has led me to be humble in every place and grateful in every moment. Every step in my journey has truly been a blessing; there has been nothing I could do without His hand.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

page

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS ...... 4

LIST OF TABLES ...... 7

LIST OF FIGURES ...... 8

LIST OF MUSICAL EXAMPLES ...... 9

LIST OF ABBREVIATIONS ...... 11

ABSTRACT ...... 12

CHAPTER

1 DISTANCING EAST ASIA FROM “ORIENTALISM” ...... 14

Problematizing US-Centric Musicology ...... 17 Scope and Methodology ...... 19 Images and Receptions of East Asia in Western Music ...... 22 Japonisme in fin-de-siècle Paris ...... 28 Les Apaches and Avant-gardism ...... 32 Literature Review: Orientalism and Exoticism in Musicology ...... 35 Overview of Chapters ...... 43

2 RAVEL’S MALLARMÉ SONGS AND IMAGINED ASIA ...... 46

Ravel’s Musical Representations of Asia ...... 47 Ravel’s Conflict with Société Nationale de Musique ...... 52 “Stupendous Project” with Pierrot lunaire ...... 56 Search for Sonority through Soloist Instrumentation ...... 59 Representations of Asia in Trois poèmes de Mallarmé ...... 63 Conclusion...... 82

3 STRAVINSKY’S THREE JAPANESE LYRICS AND TWO-DIMENSIONAL MUSIC ...... 83

Compositional Process and Setting of the Songs...... 85 Research Review on Three Japanese Lyrics ...... 89 Cubist Music vs. Two-Dimensional Music ...... 94 Conclusion...... 103

4 DELAGE’S SEPT HAÏ-KAÏS AND HAIKU MUSIC ...... 105

Debussy’s Representations of Asia...... 106

Delage’s Experiments with Asian Materials ...... 111 Poetic Symmetry into Sept haï-kaïs ...... 115 Haiku in Western Music ...... 132 Conclusion...... 137

5 SADAYAKKO IN WESTERN CELEBRITY CULTURE ...... 139

Sadayakko vs. Cio-Cio-san ...... 140 The Kawakamis to the West ...... 143 Image of Geisha in the West ...... 146 Marketing Ambivalent Exoticism ...... 151 Construction of A Celebrity Actress...... 153 Fuller’s Hybrid Production ...... 157 Performing East Asian Culture as Feminism ...... 161 The Kawakamis’ Performing Art as High Culture ...... 164 Conclusion...... 165

6 CONCLUSION: A PROPOSAL FOR ADDRESSING THE RECEPTIONS OF EAST ASIAN MUSIC AND CULTURE ...... 167

LIST OF REFERENCES ...... 174

BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH ...... 187

LIST OF TABLES

Table page

2-1 Comparison of the instrumentations ...... 58

4-1 Overview of Delage’s Sept Haï-kaïs ...... 116

4-2 Text of Song no. 2 “Les herbes de l’oubli” ...... 120

4-3 Japanese poetry in 1910-20s French music ...... 135

4-4 Overview of Messiaen’s Sept Haïkaï ...... 137

LIST OF FIGURES

Figure page

1-1 Bracquemond’s sketch and Hokusai’s Manga...... 30

1-2 Japanese art collection in Maurice Delage’s Pavilion...... 34

2-1 The Impossible Kiss or the Vase, sketched by Rae Beth Gordon...... 75

3-1 Comparison of Brandt’s Russian and Bethge’s German translations...... 87

3-2 Stravinsky’s original sketch of “Akahito”...... 91

4-1 Tiersot’s “Notes Taken in the Exposition Universelle of 1900”...... 108

4-2 Cover of Debussy’s La Mer and Hosokawa’s The Great Wave...... 110

4-3 Debussy’s studio with Hokusai's The Great Wave on the rear wall...... 110

4-4 Delage’s haiku composition ...... 115

5-1 Sadayakko in Japanese and Western clothes...... 153

5-2 Advertisement of “Kimono Sada Yacco”...... 156

5-3 Loïe Fuller Theatre at the Paris Universal Exposition of 1900...... 158

5-4 Picasso’s La Danseuse Sada Yacco and Sada Yacco...... 160

LIST OF MUSICAL EXAMPLES

Example page

2-1 An excerpt from Ravel’s “Asie” of Shéhérazade...... 50

2-2 An excerpt from Ravel’s “Laideronnette” of Ma Mère l’Oye...... 51

2-3 Ravel, “Soupir,” mm. 5-6...... 66

2-4 Ravel, “Soupir,” mm. 9-10...... 67

2-5 Ravel, “Soupir,” mm. 21-26...... 69

2-6 Motivic transformations in Ravel’s “Placet futile”...... 71

2-7 Motive of “Asie” in Shéhérazade...... 73

2-8 Motives of “Princesse” and “Nommez-nous” in “Placet futile” ...... 73

2-9 Ravel, “Asie,” mm. 1-3...... 77

2-10 Ravel, “Surgi de la croupe et du bond,” mm. 1-5...... 78

2-11 Ravel, “Surgi de la croupe et du bond,” mm. 6-10...... 80

2-12 Ravel, “Surgi de la croupe et du bond,” mm. 22-24...... 81

3-1 Transcription of the bracket in Figure 3-2...... 92

3-2 Published version of “Akahito,” mm. 1-4...... 92

3-3 ‘Motive-a’ in “Akahito,” mm. 1-7...... 95

3-4 ‘Motive-a’ in “Forget-me-nots,” mm. 1-6...... 96

3-5 “Forget-me-nots,” mm. 7-10...... 97

3-6 Comparison between “Akahito,” m. 9 and “Mazatsumi,” m. 17...... 98

3-7 ‘Motive-a’ in the vocal melody of “Mazatsumi,” mm. 23-33...... 98

3-8 Beginning and ending harmonies of the piano in “Mazatsumi”...... 99

3-9 “The Dove” of Two Balmont Poems, mm. 5-9...... 100

3-10 “The Dove” of Two Balmont Poems, mm. 13-16...... 101

3-11 Three motives in “Tsaraiuki,” mm. 1-8...... 102

3-12 Structural pitches of the three motives in “Tsaraiuki.” ...... 103

4-1 “Lahore” of Quatre poèmes hindous, mm. 1-5...... 112

4-2 “Lahore” of Quatre poèmes hindous, mm. 43-48...... 112

4-3 Delage, Song no. 1 “Préface du Kokinshiou” from Sept Haï-kaïs...... 118

4-4 Delage, Song no. 2 “Les herbes de l’oubli” from Sept Haï-kaïs...... 121

4-5 Delage, Song no. 3 “Le coq” from Sept Haï-kaïs...... 123

4-6 Three layers in Song no. 4 “La petite torture” from Sept Haï-kaïs...... 125

4-7 Delage, Song no. 5 “La lune” from Sept Haï-kaïs...... 127

4-8 Symmetrical structure of Song no. 6 “Alors” from Sept Haï-kaïs...... 129

4-9 Delage, Song no. 7 “L’eté” from Sept Haï-kaïs...... 131

4-10 “Tejakakja,” mm. 1-6, from Alexandre Tansman’s 8 mélodies japonaises...... 134

4-11 John Cage's sketch, “Haiku I, For My Dear Friend, Who,” in 1950...... 136

5-1 Puccini’s Borrowing of Echigo jishi in Madama Butterfly...... 141

5-2 Tiersot's transcription of Sadayakko’s koto playing...... 142

5-3 Benedictus’s transcription of Sadayakko’s koto playing...... 142

5-4 Scores of “The Amorous Goldfish” and “Chin Chin Chinaman”...... 150

LIST OF ABBREVIATIONS

AMS American Musicological Society

GMO Grove Music Online

SMI Société Musicale Indépendante

SN Société Nationale de Musique

Abstract of Dissertation Presented to the Graduate School of the University of Florida in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy

BEYOND ORIENTALISM: RECONSIDERING EAST ASIAN INFLUENCE IN EARLY TWENTIETH-CENTURY EUROPEAN MUSIC

Dong Jin Shin

December 2020

Chair: Silvio J. dos Santos Major: Music

This dissertation problematizes the application of Edward Said’s concept of

Orientalism in researching East Asian influence in Western art music and reassesses the instrumental receptions and representations of East Asia in Western music. It argues that, by taking Said’s concept Orientalism as a self-reflexive tool, Western scholars have taken a privileged position in judging the Other’s victimhood and benefitted their scholarly position in US-centric academia. Many studies on cross- cultural influences criticize the cultural appropriations and derogative representations of

East Asia in Western music based on the premise of power imbalance between two cultural areas. This study focuses, however, on the positive impact of East Asian culture in early twentieth-century French music by means of Japonisme.

Alongside Debussy’s followers in the social group Les Apaches, Ravel founded an independent organization to provide a free environment for progressive composers and projected concerts that crossed stylistic and national boundaries. Using the same instrumentation of Schoenberg’s Pierrot lunaire, Ravel composed Trois poèmes de

Mallarmé based on his earlier construction of an imagined Asian sound; at the same time, Stravinsky composed Three Japanese Lyrics by emulating the two-dimensionality

of Japanese woodblock prints in his compositional process. At the center of these creative activities was Maurice Delage, who brought original musical sources from Asia and synthesized them within the French musical language. For these composers, Asia was not an Orientalist object but a means of reassessing their compositional methods.

As I argue, East Asia was influential in the aesthetic changes of Western modernism and not simply a victim under Western power. This is reinforced in a case study of the

Japanese geisha Sadayakko’s success on Western stages. I assert that research on

Western music influenced by East Asian culture should be dissociated from West- centered postcolonial criticism and conducted interculturally and in conjunction with internal Asian history.

CHAPTER 1 DISTANCING EAST ASIA FROM “ORIENTALISM”

As an East-Asian woman, should I feel guilty if I express that Puccini’s Madama

Butterfly (1904) is my favorite opera? Since the 1980s, many American musicologists have condemned the colonialist portrayal of the fragile and helpless Japanese female character Cio-Cio-san.1 Beyond Puccini and in the same vein, postmodern composers and popular musicians have been problematized for appropriating Asian culture up to this day.2 Though Asian-American music scholar Ellie M. Hisama warns us “to assess critically what we hear rather than to valorise it [orientalist representation in music] because we like the tune,” I cannot help but enjoy “Un bel dì, vedremo,” Cio-Cio-san’s signature aria.3 As an East Asian, having lived almost my entire life in South Korea, I may not be able to fully understand the rage and frustration of Asian Americans, to whom I express my deep sympathies for their enduring racism in the United States.

1 Judy Tsou argues that Puccini’s oppositional musical languages for American and Japanese characters in Madama Butterfly demonstrate Puccini’s colonialist view. Tsou argues that the lyricism and tonality in Cio-Cio-san’s melody shows her striving to assimilate into American culture. However, when the assimilation fails, her melodies change to pentatonic music, associated with Asia. Tsou claims that the depiction of the powerless character reflects the Orientalist image of a Japanese woman, little and fragile like a Japanese doll. Judy Tsou, “Composing Racial Difference in Madama Butterfly: Tonal Language and the Power of Cio-Cio-San,” in Rethinking Difference in Music Scholarship, edited by Olivia Bloechl, Melanie Lowe, and Jeffrey Kallberg (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015), 214-37.

2 American pop start Katy Perri’s staging in 2013 is one of the recent examples that aroused the controversy of cultural appropriation. Her faux geisha performance for her song “Unconditionally” at the American Music Awards portrayed a female’s unconditional devotion, which reminded some of the Orientalist stereotypes of the submissive self-sacrificing Cio-Cio-san in Madama Butterfly. In regard to some defenses excusing her performance as a postmodern expression, W. Anthony Sheppard criticizes, “Labeling a performance ‘postmodernist’ does not make its use of Orientalist representational techniques and stereotypes void of potential Orientalist impact.” Sheppard argues that Perri’s simulacrum is not borrowing Japanese culture but following previous representations formed within white American pop culture. W. Anthony Sheppard, Extreme Exoticism: Japan in the American Musical Imagination (New York: Oxford University Press, 2019), 397.

3 Ellie M. Hisama, “Postcolonialism on the Make: The Music of John Mellencamp, David Bowie and John Zorn,” Popular Music 12, no. 2 (1993): 100. Hisama criticizes the music of John Mellencamp, David Bowie and John Zorn for commercializing the Western stereotypes of East Asian women in American pop culture.

However, I question some critical narratives and discourses on Asian otherness, mostly developed by US-based scholars, which might not cover all different cases and perceptions in cultural borrowings.

The problem surrounding the negative depictions and propagation of the Eastern stereotypes in Western music has a long history. Since Edward Said’s accusation of the

West’s imperialist attitude towards the Eastern world in Orientalism (1978), the concept of Orientalism has been prominent in cross-cultural music research between the West and the rest of the world.4 Said’s theory was influenced by French poststructuralist

Michel Foucault’s argument of knowledge as an expression of power, and also by Italian

Marxist Antonio Gramsci’s discussion on the cultural hegemony of elite control over the masses. Said criticized Western modern scholarship for controlling and manipulating the East to maintain the political imbalance between the self and the Other. In his

Culture and Imperialism (1993), Said applied his sociological theory into musicological research, arguing for the portrayal of an Orientalized Egypt in Verdi’s Aida (1870).5 Art historian John M. MacKenzie criticized Said for “occidentalising the West by

‘essentialising’ the characteristics of European powers,” and musicologist Mark Everist problematized the unified and essentialized view of Orientalism that cannot explain diverse types of orientalisms in different musical works.6 Despite some controversies,

4 Edward Said, Orientalism (New York: Vintage Books, 1978).

5 Edward Said, Culture and Imperialism (New York: Vintage Books, 1993). Musicologist Paul Robinson opposes Said’s discussion on Verdi’s Aida and argues that the exoticized subject is not Egypt but Ethiopian women. Paul Robinson, “Is Aida on Orientalist Opera?” Cambridge Opera Journal 5, no. 2 (1993): 133-40.

6 See John M. MacKenzie, Orientalism: History, Theory and the Arts (Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press, 1995), 5 and Mark Everist, “Meyerbeer’s Il crociato in Egitto: Mélodrama, Opera, Orientalism,” Cambridge Opera Journal 8, no. 3 (1996): 215-50.

Said’s postcolonial approach has played an important role in deconstructing the Europe- centered hegemonies and diversifying academic topics in music research.

Said’s accomplishment had a tremendous impact in musicology that often criticizes the Orientalization of East Asian women in Western theaters, victimized and eroticized in the plot and represented with oversimplified musical gestures. Then, has

East Asia been a victim under Western power? While European writers, artists, and musicians manipulated the Middle East as a sensual and treacherous East in their works, East Asia was conceived closer to hatred and fear, which suddenly appeared to the globe as a threat to the white race at the turn of the century. The xenophobia against the Asian race intensified through the military conflicts of the Boxer Rebellion

(1899-1901) and Russo-Japanese War (1904-5) that resulted into ‘the Yellow Peril.’7

Indeed, East Asia has received the weak end of the stick in the power structure of the

East-West binary. These historical events raise several questions: Were there any positive influences or receptions of East Asian culture? Have they brought any significant change in the history of Western art music? Instead of criticizing the West’s cultural appropriations of East Asia, I turn my attention to positive cases when the West directly met the East in the early twentieth century.

By examining the early acceptance of Asian music and culture among European composers and reviewing musicological research on that matter, this dissertation proposes a new perspective that considers East Asia in its own right. My concentration

7 Jann Pasler asserts that the French reconsidered the Orientalist’s conventional binary constructions when they saw Japan’s growing military power. She explains that the fear of le péril jaune consolidated European countries and shifted French artists’ interest to India, a safer Other. Jann Pasler, “Race, Orientalism, and Distinction in the Wake of the “Yellow Peril,”” in Western Music and Its Others, edited by Georgina Born and David Hesmondhalgh (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000), 86-118.

on the cases of Europeans’ affirmative receptions about East Asia does not mean that I tolerate derogatory racialization of Asia in the Western music history. Instead of emphasizing the past problems, I pay more attention to the problems in our present-day academic environment and the dominant postcolonial approach centered in the US academia. I claim that putting East Asia under the framework of Orientalism is another type of colonialization, and therefore urge to dissociate East Asia from the broader discourses of Orientalism.

Problematizing US-Centric Musicology

Musicological research in the higher education institutions in the US, particularly the ones sponsored by the American Musicological Society (AMS), has held a degree of authority over the world. Despite increasing efforts to deconstruct conventional frameworks in the scholarship, I still see that cross-cultural research has been mainly authored by Anglican scholars, who have followed traditional European methodologies.

Western scholars’ research in favor of non-Western subordinates has presented their expertise in non-Western topics, and their scholarly act of deconstructing the imbalances between the West and the rest of the world has rather revealed their dominant position in global academia. I would argue that the West-centered perspective has emasculated East Asia for the sake of academic achievement, and the use of post-

Orientalism as a self-reflective tool has confirmed the fixed ideas of cultural hierarchies.

I want to ask who has spoken for whom, and for what in American musicology.8

8 Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak’s classic text problematizes the Eurocentric representation that constitutes the subaltern Other of Europe as anonymous and mute. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, “Can the Subaltern Speak?” in Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture, edited by Cary Nelson and Lawrence Grossberg (University of Illinois Press: Urbana, 1988), 271-313.

Some may question the rationale of my research, challenging the old concept of

Orientalism that has birthed many subfields over forty years. However, the focus should be on the questions: what has been improved with using the concept of Orientalism in music criticism? Are cultural and racial differences well understood in today’s world of equality? If the constant criticism of prominent scholars was to no avail in minimizing geographical and racial disharmony in the society, I claim that the meaning and the goal of their scholarly exercises need to be reconsidered to improve the social problems. We can see this in the global spread of the COVID-19, which President Donald Trump racialized as “Chinese virus.” This attribution has aggravated racial and geographical conflicts through the megaphone of social media. Literary scholar Joey S. Kim emphasizes that “Orientalism needs to be restated for this moment,”9 and history professor Ibrahim Al Marashi argues that the Orientalist stereotypes exacerbate geopolitical tension under the pandemic.10 In addition, the social movement ‘Black Lives

Matter’ problematized systemic racism in academia, and the white Schenkerian theorists’ responses to African-American theorist Philip Ewell’s argument of “White

Racial Frame” in music theory triggered American music societies and institutions to call out systemic racism in the pedagogies and curriculums of music education.11 Indeed, it

9 Joey S. Kim, “Orientalism in the Age of COVID-19,” Los Angeles Review of Books, March 24, 2020, https://lareviewofbooks.org/short-takes/orientalism-age-covid-19/.

10 Ibrahim Al Marashi, “Orientalism and the Geopolitics of the Coronavirus Break,” TRT World, February 14, 2020, https://www.trtworld.com/opinion/orientalism-and-the-geopolitics-of-the-coronavirus-outbreak- 33791.

11 Philip Ewell criticized the dominant Schenkerian theory in American music theory scholarship in his plenary address “Music Theory’s White Racial Frame” at the annual meeting of the Society of Music Theory (SMT) in 2019. His presentation was responded by fifteen Schenkerian theorists—all white— through the Journal of Schenkerian Studies volume 12, which has aroused a lot of controversy. Ewell’s argument can be found in Philip A. Ewell, “Music Theory and the White Racial Frame,” Music Theory Online 26, no. 2 (2020), https://mtosmt.org/issues/mto.20.26.2/mto.20.26.2.ewell.php.

is the time to reexamine Orientalism discourses to determine whether they have helped eradicate the geographical and racial differences or rather magnified them.

Scope and Methodology

My research interest began with Russian composer Igor Stravinsky’s puzzling statement of a concept of “two-dimensional music” that he mentioned in 1959 when he recalled composing his earlier song cycle Three Japanese Lyrics (1912-13). Stravinsky was trying to situate himself in Parisian musical circles and found the Japan craze among French intellectuals. When he encountered Japanese paintings and the Russian translation of Japanese poetry, he got a two-dimensional impression and applied it in composing the songs set to three Japanese poems. Stravinsky’s implement of two dimensionality in music is not noticeable in the listening experience of either the French or Russian versions of the songs. The analysis of the songs, however, reveals two- dimensional characteristics reflected in his pitch-class choices, which helps us to reassess Stravinsky’s new experiment at the critical moment of his compositional career. I assert that Stravinsky tried to handle a cultural and geopolitical crisis in Paris by adopting what Parisians were enthusiastic about—Japonisme—which consequently brought an innovation to his compositional process. By paying attention to Stravinsky’s transitional time from Russia to France, my study fills the gap between so-called

Russian and Neo-Classic periods in Stravinsky scholarship.

My research focuses on the three composers, Igor Stravinsky (1882-1971),

Maurice Ravel (1875-1937), and Maurice Delage (1879-1961), who adopted the aspects of Asian culture to reassess compositional means in early twentieth-century

Paris. Due to the Paris Expositions in 1889 and 1900, not only high-ranking officials but also middle-class French citizens were able to experience Asian music and meet real

performers from distant places. Debussy’s revolutionary musical language, emphasizing timbre and using parallel motions influenced by Indonesian gamelan ensemble, impacted his progressive followers, Debussystes, who resisted the conservative teaching in the authoritative institutions of the Paris Conservatoire and Schola

Cantorum. Non-Western cultures became a central concern in the establishment of modernism, and African and indigenous cultures near Europe were reflected as a style of primitivism, while Japanese culture was linked to the avant-garde movement.

Compared to the Eastern stereotypes in nineteenth-century opera theaters based on imagination, the inflow of Japanese cultural materials in early twentieth-century West resulted in new compositional methods and aesthetics in non-theatrical genres.

Japanese art played a pivotal role at the moment of crisis in the formalism of

French art. Since art critic Philippe Burty coined the term ‘Japonisme’ in 1872 to

“designate a new field of study—artistic, historic, and ethnographic” in the journal La

Renaissance littéraire et artistique, the concept Japonisme was dissociated from the vernacular Japonaiserie—connoting a fad by its suffix—and connected to the development of Impressionism.12 Art historians Gabriel P. Weisberg and Yvonne M.L.

Weisberg explain, “Japonisme is more than the history of the influence of one art form upon another divorced from all other contextual issues. Japonisme must be situated within the matrix of political and, most notably, commercial history in order to comprehend it as a social phenomenon.”13 In music research, the term Japonisme has

12 Phylis Floyd, “Japonisme,” Grove Art Online, accessed October 6, 2020, https://www.oxfordartonline.com/groveart/view/10.1093/gao/9781884446054.001.0001/oao- 9781884446054-e-7000044421.

13 Gabriel P. Weisberg and Yvonne M.L. Weisberg, “Introduction,” in Japonisme: An Annotated Bibliography (New Brunswick, NJ: Jane Voorhees Zimmerli Art Museum, 1990), xi.

been vaguely applied to any musical forms with Japanese themes and sometimes confused with Orientalism.14 In his book Extreme Exoticism: Japan in the American

Musical Imagination (2019), musicologist W. Anthony Sheppard discusses musical

Japonisme as a range of perceptible representations and borrowings from Japanese culture in Euro-American music.15 This dissertation, however, takes the term ‘musical

Japonisme’ closer to the way that art historians have, and finds its manifestation not from the superficial cultural markers of Japan but from the structural characteristics of

Asian-influenced music. To examine musical structure, I select the compositions of

Stravinsky, Ravel, and Delage and analyze the harmonic syntax, rhythmic gestures, formal structures, motivic transformations, pitch organizations, the choice of the texts and the use of referential sounds. My research relying on music analysis is to avoid the structural functionalism of historiography and not to simply add to the existing knowledge constructed in Western-centered music history.

This dissertation limits its subject to a specific time—the turn of the century—to a specific place—Paris—and to specific musical works—of Stravinsky, Ravel, and

Delage. I review the secondary literature about the historical, social, and political process of adopting East Asian culture in France, Japonisme in art history and

14 Jann Pasler suggests taking French Japonisme seriously, different from the more general term Orientalism, because many French Republicans considered Japan as a civilized country and supported Japanese-themed operas in the late nineteenth century. Jann Pasler, “Political Anxieties and Musical Reception: Japonisme and the Problem of Assimilation,” in Madama Butterfly: L’orientalismo di fine secolo, l’approccio pucciniano, la ricezione, edited by Arthur Groos and Virgilio Bernardoni (Florence, IT: Leo S. Olschki, 2008), 17-53.

15 Sheppard traces American Japonisme in every musical form from the mid-nineteenth century to today and explores the extensive influence of Japanese traditional music on modernist and postmodernist American composers, who sought ultra-modern sound in the twentieth century. W. Anthony Sheppard, Extreme Exoticism: Japan in the American Musical Imagination (New York: Oxford University Press, 2019).

literature, and aesthetic changes in French modernism. Since I discuss ‘musical

Japonisme’ with pan-Asian ideas, imaginations, and representations in the West, rather than solely depending on Japanese culture, I include other ethnic groups of Asia when necessary. Despite dramatic changes in the geopolitical context in our current world, musicological scholarship still acknowledges the East-West dichotomy. As an East

Asian pursuing a doctoral degree in the US, my thinking process does not go from one side to the other but works simultaneously over the blurry boundaries of the East and the West.

Images and Receptions of East Asia in Western Music

Before the late nineteenth century, Europeans pictured East Asia mostly through interactions with China, and noble European families enjoyed Chinoiserie, referring the

Chinese-favored arts, such as furniture, pottery, lacquer ware, gardening, etc. However, because of the limited actual information about Asian culture, their view was highly prejudiced. The musical representations of East Asia were marked by the use of pentatonic scales, fanciful costumes, bells and gongs, which constructed the public image of East Asian stereotypes particularly in the nineteenth-century Orientalist operas.

The distorted image of East Asia before the twentieth century was germinated during the Enlightenment, emphasizing the reason, science, and progress of Western civilization, that consequently undervalued non-Western cultures. In the seventeenth century, missionaries, who experienced original Chinese music, brought it and its theory to Europe. When they encountered Chinese music, however, they used their own musical ideas and concepts as yardsticks to judge Chinese music. In 1615, Italian

Jesuit priest Matteo Ricci wrote:

. . . the Chinese possess no instrument of the keyboard type . . . the strings are made of twisted cotton, and they seem to be ignorant of the fact that the guts of animals can be used for this purpose. . . they know nothing of the variations and harmony . . . However, they themselves are highly flattered by their own music which to the ear of a stranger represents nothing but a discordant jangle.16

Ethnomusicologist Frederick Lau asserts that Ricci’s initial remarks had governed

Europeans’ imperialist attitude toward Chinese music until the nineteenth century.17

Enlightenment ideals justified the supremacy of the white European culture and their conquest of the people of color, who in their view lacked reason, science, and progress in the low rung of the evolutionary ladder.18 When Berlioz heard Chinese music from the

Great Exhibition in London, 1851, he belittled it as “a state of benighted barbarianism and childish ignorance” and “cacophony.”19 Some English writers in the 1880-90s explained European music as the most evolved in the development of music and subjugated the non-European music at the low stage, which reflects the leverage of

Darwin’s theory of evolution in the field of music study.20

16 Quoted from William Oliver Strunk ed., “Matteo Ricci: From Five Books on the Christian Expedition to China,” in Source Readings in Music History (New York: Norton, 1998), 505.

17 Frederick Lau, “When a Great Nation Emerges: Chinese Music in the World,” in China and the West: Music, Representation, and Reception, edited by Yang Hon-Lun and Saffle Michael (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2017), 265-82.

18 For more discussion on the constructions of racism and musical Other under Western imperialism, see Timothy Dean Taylor, “The Rise of Imperialism and New Forms of Representation,” in Beyond Exoticism: Western Music and the World (Durham: Duke University Press, 2007), 73-110.

19 Robert Orledge, “Evocations of Exoticism,” in The Cambridge Companion to Ravel, edited by Deborah Mawer (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 28.

20 English writings that valued European music as superior than the others under evolutionism are John Frederick Rowbotham, A History of Music to the Time of the Troubadours (London: Trübner, 1885–87), and Charles Hubert Hastings Parry, Evolution of the Art of Music (London: Kegan Paul, 1893). See Taylor, “The Rise of Imperialism and New Forms of Representation,” 75-78.

After Japan’s official opening to the West in 1853, the artistic attention of French intellectuals on East Asia shifted from Chinoiserie to Japonaiserie (or Japonerie) with the influx of Japanese imports. Japanese woodblock prints were easily obtainable in the curio shops of Paris, like La Jonque Chinoise (The Chinese Junk), where Parisian artists gathered and exchanged artistic inspirations.21 Accordingly, Japan became a favorite subject in music theaters, and European composers borrowed Japanese or

Chinese tunes from published scores (or merchandise) or recollected what they heard from the world’s fair in big cities.22 Camille Saint-Saëns and André Messager described a Japanese woman with a pentatonic scale in La Princesse jaune (1872) and Madame

Chrysanthème (1893) respectively, and Puccini searched for “authentic” Japanese folk melodies for the character Cio-Cio-san in his Madama Butterfly.

The dramatic representation of Japan in the successful operetta The Mikado

(1885) marked its culmination and brought later commercial works like the musical comedy The Geisha: The Story of a Tea House (1896). Based on the observation of vivid Japanese life at the Japanese Village in Knightsbridge, London (1885-87), which exhibited a hundred Japanese people, W. S. Gilbert and Arthur Sullivan produced the operetta The Mikado for the public and achieved a great success by running it 672 times at the Savoy Theatre. Although most of the Japanese officials and businessmen

21 Madame Desoye, who had lived in Japan, opened the import shop La Jonque Chinoise at rue de Rivoli in 1861 that became the main purveyor of Japanese art to Parisian artists. There were other shops selling East Asian objects, such as La Porte Chinoise and À L’Empire Chinoise at rue Vivienne, and by 1869, there were five curio shops in Paris. Ting Chang, Travel, Collecting, and Museums of Asian Art in Nineteenth-Century Paris (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2013), 121-23.

22 Western composers sometimes had confused Japanese and Chinese music. W. Anthony Sheppard’s New York Times article in 2012 revealed that Puccini borrowed Chinese tunes from a Swiss music box and used them in both Madama Butterfly and Turandot. W. Anthony Sheppard, “Music Box as Muse to Puccini’s ‘Butterfly,’” The New York Times, June 17, 2012, https://nyti.ms/2kttm8s.

residing in London resented The Mikado for ridiculing the Japanese sovereign based on imagination, Japanese journalist Fukuchi Gen’ichirō (1841-1906) reported that the operetta showed a good understanding of traditional samurai society.23 Meanwhile,

English writer G. K. Chesterton (1874-1936) assessed the operetta as “jokes against

England, or that Western civilization which an Englishman knows best in England.”24

Some scholars accredit the satire of The Mikado as the expression of the internal problems in Western society. John M. MacKenzie claims that Victorian Orientalism functioned as social criticism and was generally accepted as a mockery upon English politics and society.25 Arthur Jacobs argues that the whole piece wore a comic mask and did not present Japan. He explains that the setting, costumes, and manners in the show were formed as English as they can be, and the origins of the ridiculing names of

Asian characters, such as Ko-Ko, Yum-Yum, and Pitti-Sing, were selected from everyday language in England.26 Carolyn Williams sees Gilbert and Sullivan’s practice as an English form of self-parody that sneer at their own insularity and a cult of Japan in

England.27 Meanwhile, Josephine D. Lee criticizes these interpretations detached from

23 Toshio Yokoyama, Japan in the Victorian Mind: A Study of Stereotyped Images of a Nation 1850–80 (Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire: Macmillan, 1987), xix.

24 G. K. Chesterton, “Gilbert and Sullivan,” in The Eighteen Eighties, ed. Walter de la Mare (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1930), 152. Quoted from Josephine Lee, The Japan of Pure Invention: Gilbert and Sullivan’s “The Mikado” (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2010), 161.

25 MacKenzie, Orientalism, 194.

26 Arthur Jacobs relates the name ‘Ko-Ko’ to ‘cocoa’, ‘Pitti-sing’ to the baby talk of ‘pretty thing,’ and ‘Katisha’ to ‘atishoo.’ Arthur Jacobs, Arthur Sullivan: A Victorian Musician (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1984),

27 See Carolyn Williams, Gilbert and Sullivan: Gender, Genre, Parody (New York: Columbia University Press, 2010).

Japan and considers them as “to dispute any claims that it has any troubling racial content.”28

While most of the theater works objectified Asian women on stage, the three-act operetta Das Land des Lächelns (The Land of Smiles, 1929) by Austro-Hungarian composer Franz Lehár (1870-1945) shows a contradictory manner that set a marriage between a Western woman and an Asian man. As Cio-Cio-san in Madama Butterfly tries to assimilate into Western culture, Viennese heroine Countess Lisa in Das Land des Lächelns tries to assimilate with the culture of his husband, a Chinese prince in

Peking. In contrast to many Orientalist operas, the sense of nostalgia expressed in Das

Land is not for the Eastern exotic land but for the modern European metropolis. When

Lisa decides to go back to her home Vienna, the prince hides his sorrow behind an enigmatic Chinese smile, which is the West’s imagined Asian trait of inscrutability. In a

2017 production, director Andreas Homoki removed many Chinese settings from Das

Land des Lächelns for the performance in the Opernhaus Zürich. Homoki said, “It’s not a piece about China. . . It could be anything, could be Arab, could be Aboriginal, but it’s

China because China was fashionable at the time.”29

Early twentieth-century Europeans met East Asian people and culture directly, which dampened Orientalist attitudes and fantasies about the distant dreamworld.

Progressive composers in the cosmopolitan cities of Paris and Vienna sought modernist aesthetics, freeing themselves from conventions and seeking novelty, and pursued

28 Josephine D. Lee points out that there has been racism disguised in the modern versions of The Mikado and explains how it has fueled public protests. Lee, The Japan of Pure Invention, 161

29 Michaela Baranello, “On Franz Lehar’s Operetta “The Land of Smiles,”” VAN Magazine, July 20, 2017, https://van-us.atavist.com/limits-of-perspective.

avant-gardism to distance themselves from mass culture of the growing middle class.30

While Viennese composers became introspective and private for musical individuality against mass culture, Parisian composers incorporated non-Western materials as a means to innovate their music.31 Detached from their original context, East Asian cultural materials were utilized as abstract resources. For example, Debussy visually imitated Hokusai’s Japanese woodblock print in his score cover of the orchestral piece

La mer (1905) and used the elements of Indonesian music in “Pagodes” of Estampes

(1903). Debussy’s exotic device functioned not as a signifier but as a tool to expand his musical language. Whether he borrowed specific elements of Indonesian gamelan music or simply intensified what was already latent in his music, Debussy’s attitude toward Asian culture had influenced his successors to embrace Asian materials as a method for musical modernity.

The tendency toward Asian-inspired musical experiments in France was moving to North America in the 1930s. American avant-garde composers, such as Henry

Eichheim (1870-1942), Henry Cowell (1897-1965), Harry Partch (1901-1974), and John

Cage (1912-1992), pursued ultra-modernism by implementing East Asian philosophies.

Cowell stressed the importance and necessity of borrowing foreign materials to build a new music in his time:

It seems to me certain that future progress in creative music for composers of the Western world must inevitably go towards the

30 Raymond Williams argues that the elements of alienation formed the avant-garde repertory and brought decisive aesthetic effect to the arts at a deeper level, which gave rise to modernism. Raymond Williams, The Politics of Modernism: Against the New Conformists (New York: Verso, 1989).

31 Taylor, “The Rise of Imperialism and New Forms of Representation,” 73-110.

exploration and integration of elements drawn from more than one of the world’s cultures.32

W. Anthony Sheppard emphasizes the multifaceted nature of musical exoticism and examines specific cases rather than employing the notions of ‘appropriation or influence’ and ‘modernist or postmodernist’ in his research on the cross-cultural compositions of Eichheim and Cowell.33 Sheppard stresses the important role of

American Japonisme in influencing American experimental music, which broke the timbral, temporal, and harmonic norms of the European musical past.34

In sum, the West’s changing aesthetics owed much to the French Japonisme that helped shape the avant-garde movement in music. Historically, France and Japan have shared artistic practices and productions, and the world expositions in Paris had provided the richest moments of cultural exchange.

Japonisme in fin-de-siècle Paris

In the late nineteenth century, French Impressionists, such as Édouard Manet,

Claude Monet, and Vincent van Gogh, drew geisha, kimono, Mt. Fuji, and cherry blossoms to add exotic flavor to their paintings. Soon afterwards, they began to adopt different techniques from Japanese woodblock prints, which inaugurated Japonisme. Art historians have debated on the first artistic discovery of Japanese woodblock prints among the French artists and somewhat agreed on the myth around etcher Félix

32 Henry Cowell, “Current Chronicle,” Musical Quarterly 34 (1948): 412. Quoted from Mervyn Cooke, “The East in the West: Evocations of the Gamelan in Western Music,” in The Exotic in Western Music, edited by Jonathan Bellman (Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1998), 258. Italics mine for emphasis.

33 W. Anthony Sheppard, “Continuity in Composing the American Cross-Cultural: Eichheim, Cowell, and Japan,” Journal of the American Musicological Society 61, no. 3 (2008): 465-540.

34 Sheppard, Extreme Exoticism, 2.

Bracquemond (1833-1941) who found the prints on wrapping papers around imported ceramics in 1856.35 After the initial encounter, Bracquemond obtained Manga (漫画; meaning ‘curious or whimsical drawings’) of Japanese Edo-period artist Katsushika

Hokusai (葛飾北斎, 1760-1849) and shared it with his artist friends, triggering

Japonisme in French art circles. Instead of drawing Japanese cultural markers,

Bracquemond paid attention to drawing techniques, expressive brush strokes, abstract graphic style, decorative color, and asymmetrical composition (Figure 1-1).36 Art historian Klaus Berger regards Bracquemond’s borrowing of Japanese drawing style as

“the first visual manifestation of Japanese vision through Western eyes” and argues his sketches as “no mere reproduction but a genuine transposition into another medium.”37

35 For the debate about the first encounter of Japanese woodcuts, see of Klaus Berger, “2. Beginnings,” in Japonisme in Western Painting from Whistler to Matisse, translated by David Britt (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 10-19.

36 The image of Bracquemond’s sketch (1866) in Figure 1-1 is from Berger’s Japonisme in Western Painting, 14, and that of Hokusai Manga (1814) is from James A. Michener and Hokusai Katsushika, The Hokusai Sketch-Books: Selections from the Manga (Rutland, VT: Charles E. Tuttle Company, 1958), 58.

37 Berger, Japonisme in Western Painting, 10-19.

Figure 1-1. Bracquemond’s sketch (left) and Hokusai’s Manga (right).

Japonisme was a breakthrough not only for artists but also for literary writers in

France. In the 1920s, French writers reexamined their compositional methods, formats, and meaning of their works, and some poets translated the rudiments of Japanese haiku into French. Literary scholar Jan Hokenson focuses on the missing Japanese persons in French literatures, compared to the common figurations of foreign occidentals, such as English merchants, Spanish noblemen, and barbaric Germans.38

By pointing out various Japanese aesthetics rendered in France, Hokenson argues, “In literature, painting, or music, French japonisme is primarily about France, about problems in the French practice of occidental arts and letters, and only secondarily

38 Jan Hokenson, Japan, France, and East-West Aesthetics: French Literature, 1867-2000 (Madison: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2004), 19.

about Japan, imagined source of proposed solutions.”39 If there is no Japan-ness in the representations of Japanese culture, how should we define Japonisme? Transposing

Hokenson’s argument into music, what was the problem in French music that had to be solved by adopting Japanese materials?

When Stravinsky was settling in Paris after his successful debut with Firebird

(1910), he encountered Japanese art and literature from Maurice Delage, who used to host Stravinsky before his France residency. While internationally famed musicians had flocked to Paris and exchanged their innovative styles and ideas for several decades,

Paris has also been the place where foreigners had struggled because of the ethnocentricity in French society.40 To participate the Parisian trend Japonisme and to build a consensus with Delage, Stravinsky composed Three Japanese Lyrics (Trois poésies de la lyrique japonaise) in 1912-13, in the middle of composing his long- planned Rite of Spring (Sacre du printemps, 1911-13). The Three Japanese Lyrics was premiered alongside Maurice Ravel’s Trois poèmes de Mallarmé and Maurice Delage’s

Quatre poèmes hindous in the 1914 concert of the Société Musicale Indépendante

(SMI). Ravel and Delage were outsiders from the authoritative institutions in Paris, and their use of foreign materials was not compatible with the ideologies of the national society Société Nationale de Musique (SN).

Rather than adopting the prevalent musical markers of East Asia, which was practiced by borrowing East Asian folk tunes or using pentatonic scales, Stravinsky

39 Hokenson, Japan, France, and East-West Aesthetics, 21.

40 Mozart was frustrated in finding a permanent position in Paris; Wagner described Paris as “a pit into which the spirit of the nation has subsided.” Guy Hartopp, Paris: A Concise Musical History (Wilmington, Delaware: Vernon Press, 2017), 7.

joined in the French avant-garde experiments and devised two-dimensionality in Three

Japanese Lyric.41 It was Delage and the social group Les Apaches that motivated

Stravinsky to adopt Japanese culture.42

Les Apaches and Avant-gardism

The social group Les Apaches, named after the Native American tribes because of the perceived notion of their rebellious sprit, consisted of progressive musicians, writers, artists, and critics. They sought to revolutionize conventional norms and had a critical role in the Parisian musical scene by leading the avant-garde movement and supporting Debussy’s innovativeness.43 In the spring of 1902, young intellectuals, including Ravel, gathered after the concert of Debussy’s Pelléas et Mélisande (1898).44

When conservative critics condemned the opera for threatening French traditions, the progressive group attended every performance of Pelléas et Mélisande to assure their positive response.45 Les Apaches met on Saturday nights mostly at the apartment of

41 Pentatonic scale has been regarded as the sound of Asian culture among European composers. Jeremy Day-O’Connell sees nineteenth-century pentatonicism as a representation of 1) shifting away from common practice diatonicism and of 2) reaction against the cloying tendencies of chromaticism. Jeremy Day O’Connell, Pentatonicism from the Eighteenth Century to Debussy (Rochester, NY: University of Rochester Press, 2007).

42 Jann Pasler stresses on the role of Les Apaches and Delage in Stravinsky’s adoption of Japanese culture. Jann Pasler, “Stravinsky and the Apaches,” Musical Times 123 (1982): 403-07.

43 For the members and the detailed information about Les Apaches, see Malou Haine, “Cipa Godebski et les Apaches,” Revue belge de Musicologie / Belgisch Tijdschrift voor Muziekwetenschap 60, Actes du colloque international: Les relations musicales entre Bruxelles et la Pologne 1800-1950 (2006): 221-66.

44 Malou Haines points out that the members of Les Apaches began to meet from 1898; however, the formation of the group in earnest was in 1902-3, when the groups of composers from the Paris Conservatory and the Schola Cantorum and artists from École des Beaux-Arts and the Arts Décoratifs closely gathered. In 1904, they started to call themselves as “Les Apaches.” Haine, “Cipa Godebski et les Apaches,” 231-32.

45 While most of the audience responded with surprise and hostility for the unusual declamation and orchestration, quartal and quintal harmonies, and unresolved dissonances of Debussy’s Pelléas et Mélisande, the so-called Debussystes regarded the work as a triumph. Jann Pasler argues that the social class, political preference, musical and aesthetic taste of the audiences, critics and the readers of

painter and set-designer Paul Sordes (1877-1937) in Montmartre, where they discussed modern aesthetics, presented new creations, exchanged feedback, and collaborated with each other.

Delage, a private composition student of Ravel, was a core member of Les

Apaches, who supported the group and offered new cultural materials from Asia. In

1904, Delage rented a small pavilion in the suburb of Auteuil for Les Apaches to play music all night without disturbing neighbors and decorated the place with his Japanese art collections (Figure 1-2).46 Stravinsky described the pavilion at rue de Civry fondly, saying that it “silently contains memories of our harmonious life,” “far from the brouhaha” of the Ballets Russes, and “calm and intimate.”47 During their weekly meetings, Delage used to parody what he heard in concerts from memory on the piano.48 When he returned from India and Japan after his family business trip in 1912, the group members might have heard Delage’s piano demonstration of Japanese and

Indian music. Delage’s knowledge on Asian culture became a motivation of progressiveness to the members of Les Apaches, especially to Ravel and Stravinsky.

newspapers played important roles in the receptions of the opera. Jann Pasler, “Pelléas and Power: Forces behind the Reception of Debussy's Opera,” 19th-Century Music 10, no. 3 (1987): 243-64.

46 The photo of Delage’s pavilion in Figure 1-2 is L'atelier de Maurice Delage où se réunissaient les Apaches, ca. 1900, photograph, 11 x 15 cm, Gallica, the digital library of Bibliothèque nationale de France, http://catalogue.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/cb396248158.

47 Jann Pasler, “Stravinsky and the Apaches,” The Musical Times 123, no. 1672 (1982): 403-07. Music scholar Barbara Gordon emphasizes the importance of the meeting place that functioned as a catalyst to the development of Les Apaches. Barbara N. Gordon, “Discovering Maurice Delage,” Journal of Singing 65, no. 3 (2009): 297.

48 When Delage played some excerpts from Pelléas et Mélisande learning by ear, Ravel was impressed with his piano performance of the unpublished opera. Ravel invited Delage to study composition with him. Jann Pasler, “Delage, Maurice,” Grove Music Online, accessed October 6, 2020, https://www.oxfordmusiconline.com/grovemusic/view/10.1093/gmo/9781561592630.001.0001/omo- 9781561592630-e-0000007432.

Figure 1-2. Japanese art collection in Maurice Delage’s Pavilion.

Composers in Les Apaches put forward avant-gardism with unconventional musical languages and other conceptions of interest: Debussy’s music, folk songs, children’s music, Japanese art, symbolist poetry, impressionism, and Russian composers.49 The group of connoisseurs had a different aesthetic than merely exotic or

Oriental, and the composers could get more nuanced references that their smaller and more intimate audience could understand. By becoming a member of Les Apaches in

1910, Stravinsky built a professional network in Paris while encountering Asian cultural sources that expanded his compositional techniques. When the Société Nationale de

49 Jann Pasler, “A Sociology of the Apaches: ‘Sacred Battalion’ for Pelléas,” in Berlioz and Debussy: Sources, Contexts and Legacies, edited by Barbara L. Kelly and Kerry Murphy (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2007), 156.

Musique (SN) rejected Delage’s orchestral work Conté par la mer (1909), Les Apaches supported Ravel to organize the Société Musicale Indépendante (SMI) and confronted the SN that was propagating extreme nationalism through music. As a result, the private social group Les Apaches fostered French modernism with non-French sources.

Literature Review: Orientalism and Exoticism in Musicology

Before dissociating East Asia from Orientalism discourses, this chapter briefly reviews musicological studies on Orientalism and exoticism. While ‘orientalism’ is a geographic term, “Orientalism” (with capital ‘O’) refers to Said’s concept that reinforces the uneven East-West geopolitical power. Said’s articulation of Orientalism gave rise to derivative terms, such as Orient, Oriental, and Orientalist, which have connotated the

West’s patronizing attitudes towards non-Western cultures. In Subcultural Sounds:

Micromusics of the West (1993), ethnomusicologist Mark Slobin separates ‘Oriental’ from the ‘folk,’ the internal primitives of Europe and America, and also from the

‘primitive,’ the preliterate peoples with oral tradition.50 Slobin explains that ‘Oriental’ refers to Asian high cultures that had been accessible in the West and could be compared with similar European systems. In Grove Music Online, Ralph P. Locke declares of the term ‘orientalism’ that “the word should be used only with regard to geographical regions long regarded (by Westerners) as being located ‘in the East’.”51

The derogatory implications in the term Orientalism have pushed music scholars to establish their own discipline under the concept of ‘(musical) exoticism’ that evokes “a

50 Mark Slobin, Subcultural Sounds: Micromusics of the West (Hanover, NH: Wesleyan University Press: University Press of New England, 1993).

51 Ralph P. Locke, “Orientalism,” Grove Music Online, accessed October 6, 2020, https://www.oxfordmusiconline.com/grovemusic/view/10.1093/gmo/9781561592630.001.0001/omo- 9781561592630-e-0000040604.

place, people, or social milieu that is (or is perceived or imagined to be) profoundly different from accepted local norms in its attitudes, customs, and morals.”52 In The

Exotic in Western Music (1998), Jonathan Bellman mentions that the implication of the exotic in music is not only about distant cultures but also the idea that “they are different from us.”53 In his later article “Musical Voyages and Their Baggage: Orientalism in Music and Critical Musicology” (2011), Bellman argues that the alternative terms of

Orientalism, like ‘transcultural music,’ somewhat overlap the issues of Orientalism so still carry its baggage.54

Eighteenth-century Turkish music, imitating the sound of the Ottomans’ Janissary troops, demonstrates the early practice of musical exoticism among Western European composers on their neighboring “Other.” Matthew Head researches Mozart’s Turkish exoticism in Orientalism, Masquerade and Mozart’s Turkish Music (2000) and claims that Orientalism was used as a mask of critiquing their own cultures in Europe.55 Head argues that the idea of ‘unreason’ was fundamental to establishing “the Other” in the era of Enlightenment. With nineteenth-century colonialism, European composers targeted the Middle East as a new source for their creation, and French composer Félicien

David’s depiction of Egypt in Le désert (1844) established the musical gestures of the

52 Ralph P. Locke, “Exoticism,” Grove Music Online, accessed October 6, 2020, https://www.oxfordmusiconline.com/grovemusic/view/10.1093/gmo/9781561592630.001.0001/omo- 9781561592630-e-0000045644.

53 Jonathan Bellman, “Introduction,” in The Exotic in Western Music (Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1998), ix-viii.

54 Jonathan Bellman, “Musical Voyages and Their Baggage: Orientalism in Music and Critical Musicology,” The Musical Quarterly 94, no. 3 (2011): 417–38.

55 Matthew William Head, Orientalism, Masquerade and Mozart's Turkish Music (London: Royal Musical Association, 2000).

Middle East as an acceptable form within the Western art music format.56 His practices of melodic augmented seconds, rediscovered modes, whole-tone scale, pedal-points, chromatic harmony and bombastic chorus became the clichés of nineteenth-century musical exoticism, as shown in Bizet’s Les Pêcheurs des perles (1863) and Delibes’

Lakmé (1883). In the 1990s, Said’s Orientalism, theorized with the West’s representations of the Middle Eastern culture, became instrumental in the musicological research that criticized the colonial depictions of the East in Western music. Ralph P.

Locke unveiled the essentially binary construction of a proto-European male Self and a female Other in Saint-Saëns’s Samson et Delilah (1877) in 1991, and Susan McClary criticized female sexuality and racial Otherness of the female protagonists in Bizet’s

Carmen (1875) in 1992.57

In The Exotic in Western Music, Bellman warned against the rigorous application of postcolonial theory in the research of musical exoticism and stated, “we seek to view each variety of musical exoticism on its own terms, rather than as another in a series of oppressive colonialisms, righteously judged according to the critical sensitivities of our own time.”58 Nevertheless, more music scholars have expanded their topics to non-

Western music by applying postcolonial criticisms. In Western Music and Its Others

(2000), Georgina Born and David Hesmondhalgh aim not “to conduct an exercise in cultural relativism but to contribute to a reflexive critique of Western music and music

56 Orledge, “Evocations of Exoticism,” 27.

57 See Ralph P. Locke, "Constructing the Oriental ‘Other’: Saint-Saëns’s Samson et Dalila,” Cambridge Opera Journal 3, no. 3 (1991): 261-302, and Susan McClary, Georges Bizet: Carmen (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1992).

58 Bellman, “Introduction,” in The Exotic in Western Music, xiii.

history.”59 Based on Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak’s postcolonial discussion on heterogeneous oppressions and differences within the colonizing formations, Born and

Hesmondhalgh reveal how the West has oppressed, ravaged, scapegoated, and exoticized the Other through musical tradition.60

In “Musicology on Safari: Orientalism and the Spectre of Postcolonial Theory”

(2003), Matthew Head questions McClary’s account of Carmen and asserts, “. . . even reappropriations and re-readings of orientalist texts do not necessarily escape orientalist predispositions.”61 Head argues that positive and attractive elements in the characterization of the Other, claimed by Born and Hesmondhalgh, do not transcend orientalism but belong to it.62 Timothy Dean Taylor also criticizes Born and

Hemondhalgh for simply continuing the trend of earlier musicologists that concentrates on composers, specific pieces, and styles.63 In Beyond Exoticism: Western Music and the World (2007), Taylor tackles the ‘new musicology’ in the 1980-90s that destabilized the canon but did not change the way that music is studied. He condemns “the classical music ideology,” which has privileged ‘composers’ and ‘works,’ and demands ethnographic research that can consider broader ideological and cultural shifts.

59 Georgina Born and David Hesmondhalgh, “Introduction: On Difference, Representation, and Appropriation in Music,” in Western Music and Its Others: Difference, Representation, and Appropriation in Music (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000), 46.

60 For the details of Spivak’s postcolonial theory that Born and Hesmondhalgh applied in their musicological research, see Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, The Gayatri Spivak Reader (New York: Routledge, 1996).

61 Matthew Head, “Musicology on Safari: Orientalism and the Spectre of Postcolonial Theory,” Music Analysis 22, no. 1/2 (2003): 217.

62 Head, “Musicology on Safari,” 211-30.

63 Timothy Dean Taylor, Beyond Exoticism: Western Music and the World (Durham: Duke University Press, 2007).

While Bellman’s 1998 anthology was authored by distinguished professors from mainstream classical music, Widening the Horizon: Exoticism in Post-War Popular

Music (1999), published a year after Bellman’s book, filled in the neglected areas of popular music practices and non-Western music scenes in American musicological scholarship.64 Shūhei Hosokawa’s article “Soy Sauce Music: Haruomi Hosono and

Japanese Self-Orientalism” in the book finds non-Western exoticism and shows how orientalism was inversely adapted in Japanese culture.65 Meanwhile, the publication of

Locating East Asia in Western Art Music (2004) broadened research subjects beyond

Europe and the US.66 The essays focus on the cross-cultural exchanges between East

Asia and Europe or America in the twentieth-century postwar era when composers conceptually borrowed from the other culture. However, most of the authors, including the two editors Yayoi Uno Everett and Frederick Lau, are Asian American professors, whose perspectives could not go beyond the frame of American academia.

Consequently, their works located East Asia in Western history but could not expand its narratives to global history.

Ralph P. Locke’s comprehensive monograph, Musical Exoticism: Images and

Reflections (2009) surveys exotic portrayals in various musical genres from the high

Baroque era to the early twenty-first century through both musical and non-musical

64 Philip Hayward ed., Widening the Horizon: Exoticism in Post-War Popular Music (Sydney, NSW: J. Libbey, 1999).

65 Shūhei Hosokawa, “Soy Sauce Music: Haruomi Hosono and Japanese Self-Orientalism,” in Widening the Horizon: Exoticism in Post-War Popular Music, edited by Philip Hayward (Sydney, NSW: J. Libbey, 1999), 114-44.

66 Yayoi Uno Everett and Frederick Lau ed., Locating East Asia in Western Art Music (Middletown: Wesleyan University Press, 2004).

expressions.67 His discussion includes music without exotic stylistic markers and is not limited to negative stereotypes but presents positive aspects. He treats ‘exotic’ and

‘exoticist’ differently to remove the negative nuance of exotic and explains Carmen not as exotic, but rather as an exoticist opera, in which Bizet devised Otherness for his characters. Locke argued that the aesthetic value of many exoticist works has been underestimated due to the modernist discourse that valued originality but rejected realistic representation. Under musical exoticism, he introduces diverse historical contexts and musical practices without a single narrative or a theory. However, the agents sensing and determining the exotic in Locke’s research are upper-class

Westerners, which limits the scope of his scholarship. Locke’s contextualization of musical exoticism with non-musical aspects has influenced scholars in different fields. In

Orientalism and the Operatic World (2015), historian Nicholas Tarling discusses various types of operas with orientalisms based on librettos, production history, and critical reception. He argues that Said’s criticism on the dehumanizing view of the East is not applicable to Western opera that had focused on the individual personality of characters and performers.68

In the twenty-first century, when the mixture of ‘our’ and ‘their’ music is widely practiced, the exotic quality is getting indistinguishable in hybrid cultural products. In the article “’I Changed My Olga for the Britney’: Occidentalism, Auto-Orientalism and Global

Fusion in Music” (2015), Derek B. Scott discusses Occidentalism, auto-Orientalism, and

67 Ralph P. Locke, Musical Exoticism: Images and Reflections (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009).

68 Nicholas Tarling, Orientalism and the Operatic World (Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield, 2015).

auto-Occidentalism in the popular music research of the Balkans.69 He claims that “a radical musicology must imagine radically different forms of sociality from those that have guided it in the past if we are to shape a transcultural non-essentializing musicology that is equipped to respond to our age of transnationalism and globalization.”70 Scott explains that ‘Auto-Orientalism’ occurs when an Eastern culture reworks Western images of the East in a knowing way, and ‘Occidentalism’ is the way that Westerners represent the West.71 He argues that calling ‘Occidentalism’ as ‘auto-

Occidentalism’ raises a problem because there is not much Occidental identity created by the East for the West due to uneven distribution of political power. However, I doubt whether the lack of the East’s formation of Occidental identity is due to the uneven distribution of power or the West’s ignorance that resulted the uneven distribution of knowledge. In addition, I problematize that Scott’s conceptualization of the -isms is based on the East-West dichotomy, which should be dismissed in our age of transnationalism and globalization.

Recently, Scott applies the concept of ‘cosmopolitanism’ to musicology with a hope to solve the problems in the research of transcultural music. In the article

“Cosmopolitan Musicology” (2018), Scott claims, “if musicology engaged with cosmopolitanism rather than national narratives about music, it would solve many of my

69 Derek B. Scott, “‘I Changed My Olga for the Britney’: Occidentalism, Auto-Orientalism and Global Fusion in Music,” in Critical Music Historiography: Probing Canons, Ideologies and Institutions, edited by Vesa Kurkela and Markus Mantere (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2015), 141-58.

70 Scott, “I Changed My Olga for the Britney,” 149.

71 Scott points out that the formation of Occidentalism in the book Occidentalism: The West in the Eyes of Its Enemies (2004) attacks the West as an enemy, whereas Orientalism is not simply hatred but a mixture with fear against the Other. Ian Buruma and Avishai Margalit, Occidentalism: The West in the Eyes of Its Enemies (New York: Penguin Press, 2004).

problems—I would like to call them our problems…”72 Likewise, more musicologists began to engage with the idea of cosmopolitanism that admits interdependence between cultures and people around the globe. The Global East Asian Music Research

Study Group in the AMS adopted the idea of art historian Jonathan Hay’s ‘hidden cosmopolitanisms’ in their discussion during the annual meeting of 2019.73 The session intended to situate cross-cultural East Asian music histories within Anglophone musicology that has assumed an essentialist viewpoint on self-sufficient cultures.

Inspired by historian Sebastian Conrad’s ‘global history,’ which questions for whom global history should be written, the panels proposed to search for hidden cosmopolitanisms not to merely integrate the narratives of different ethnicities or localities but to structurally transform the history of music to a global scale.74

With the growing numbers of Asian Americans, who have created their own hybrid culture, the issues of Asian race and identity are more addressed by Asian

American scholars in the twenty-first century. In the article “The Asian American Body in

Performance” (2000), Deborah Wong finds Asian American musicians’ “performing race” that strategically and pedagogically mediated their ethnicity by moving from

Whiteness to Blackness.75 Grace Wang focuses on Asian American singer-songwriters

72 Derek B. Scott, “Cosmopolitan Musicology,” in Confronting the National in the Musical Past (Milton: Taylor & Francis Group, 2018), 17.

73 Jonathan Hay, “Foreword,” in Qing Encounters: Artistic Exchanges between China and the West, edited by Petra ten-Doesschate Chu and Ning Ding (Los Angeles: The Getty Research Institute, 2015), vii-xix. The book examines how the contact between China and Europe transformed the arts on both sides of the East and the West in the eighteenth to early nineteenth century.

74 For further details, see Sebastian Conrad, What is Global History? (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2016).

75 Deborah Wong, “The Asian American Body in Performance,” in Music and the Racial Imagination, edited by Ronald Radano and Philip V. Bohlman (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000), 57-94.

who contest the racialized US through YouTube in Soundtracks of Asian America:

Navigating Race through Musical Performance (2014).76 Radical changes in East Asian identity and its diversification under globalization call for new perspectives that should not be confined by the theories constructed within the West.

A problem comes from the assumption of ‘Western power over the non-West’ that has been intensified by postcolonial criticisms. Orientalism was theorized without investigating the relationship between East Asia and Europe. Literary scholar

Christopher Bush points out that “East Asia fits very poorly into the literary-critical categories developed by postcolonial theory, if only because East Asia was never colonized. . . One might here cite coastal ‘‘semi-colonialism’’ in China, the proximity of

French Indochina, and Japan’s own history of colonialism, to begin with the most obvious.”77 To see and understand the impact of East Asian culture in European music clearly, it is crucial to think out of the box framed in the US-centric academia. Rather than scolding Orientalist representations, music scholars should consider how to build a global music history that may require more attention to the internal issues of East Asia.

Overview of Chapters

In Chapter 2 “Ravel’s Mallarmé Songs and Imagined Asia,” I discuss how the image of Asia has benefitted Ravel in expressing his social and political intention. Ravel designed exotic musical languages throughout his life and used them in confronting the academic authorities. When French conservative composers asserted their musical

76 Grace Wang, Soundtracks of Asian America: Navigating Race through Musical Performance (Durham: Duke University Press, 2014).

77 Christopher Bush, “Modernism, Orientalism, and East Asia,” in A Handbook of Modernism Studies, edited by Jean-Michel Rabaté (Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell, 2013), 194.

superiority and advocated Frenchness, Ravel and his supporters in Les Apaches founded the Société Musicale Indépendante (SMI) and hosted non-French compositions, including Austro-German composer Arnold Schoenberg’s Pierrot lunaire.

By analyzing Ravel’s song cycle Trois poèmes de Mallarmé, this chapter demonstrates how Ravel had imagined Asia and musically created the sonic space of East Asia in his songs.

In Chapter 3, “Stravinsky’s Three Japanese Lyrics and Two-Dimensional Music,”

I analyze Stravinsky’s Japanese songs and define his concept of “two-dimensional music.” Some of the well-known features in Stravinsky’s Russian-period music comprise block and layered structures, which are similar to the many dimensions of cubist paintings. Superficially, the Three Japanese Lyrics share similarities with his earlier song cycle Two Poems of Balmont (1911), an example of cubist music. However, blocks and layers produce two-dimensionality in the background of the Three Japanese

Lyrics, which is the footprint of Japanese arts. Stravinsky’s compositional practice is analogous to the process of woodcut printing, in that a single pitch set produces various musical events in different layers.

In Chapter 4, “Delage’s Sept haï-kaïs and Haiku Music,” I provide the analyses of the seven songs in Delage’s Sept haï-kaïs (1923). Since the 1870s, the French song genre mélodie has experienced radical transformation as a result of contemporary musical trends, such as atonality, miniature movements, unconventional instrumentations, and texts from symbolist poetry. As I demonstrate, Japanese haiku provided an ideal material for French avant-garde composers. The syllabic and stepwise vocal line in Delage’s song cycle symbolizes the simplicity of haiku’s

aesthetics while the complex accompaniment shows the synthesis of Japanese and

Western musical languages. Delage’s setting of haiku was influential to later mélodies, which was inherited by the instrumental genres of modern composers, such as John

Cage and Olivier Messiaen.

Chapter 5 “Sadayakko in Western Celebrity Culture” is a case study of the

Japanese geisha Sadayakko (1871–1946), who emerged triumphant on early twentieth- century Western stages. Late nineteenth-century Western society experienced first- wave feminism, growing mass media, celebrity culture, expanding global market, and modernist art movement including Japonisme. Since celebrity culture reflects the daily life and trends of historical moments, Sadayakko’s case allows us to explore the articulation of identity, value, and social norms at the critical time of ‘East Meets West.’

Japanese performing art strongly influenced Western high culture that planted affirmative views about East Asia in modern Western society.

The concluding chapter is to add my voice in a brief conclusion. I problematize the application of Western-originated theories in Asian studies and the position of scholars who discuss Asia only with an outsider’s perspective. I suggest that US-based musicologists should adopt ethnographic methods, engage with Asian-based scholars, and consult non-English sources and references.

CHAPTER 2 RAVEL’S MALLARMÉ SONGS AND IMAGINED ASIA

Although Ravel had been fascinated with the East and had long dreamed of visiting the Far East, he also knew that a successful exotic representation does not require authenticity but only imagination.1 For Ravel, Asia was a tool to distance himself from the authoritarianism of Paris music institutions and the formalism of the French musical style that had been developed in conjunction with social and political conditions.

When right-wing nationalist Vincent d’Indy (1851-1931), the director of the Schola

Cantorum, was leading the Société Nationale de Musique (SM), Ravel founded the counter organization Société Musicale Indépendante (SMI) in 1909 as a platform for promoting free musical expression and embracing non-French music. Among the 171

SMI concerts realized between 1909 and 1935, a concert from January 14, 1914 stands out, as Ravel planned to include a performance of Schoenberg’s Pierrot lunaire (1912) to cross musical and geographical boundaries. For the concert, Ravel composed Trois poèmes de Mallarmé with the same instrumentation of Schoenberg’s Pierrot lunaire and created a communal soundscape with the other two compositions of his friends in Les

Apaches: Stravinsky’s Trois poésies de la lyrique japonaise (Three Japanese Lyrics) and Delage’s Quatre poèmes hindous. In what follows, I discuss Ravel’s strategic representation of imagined Asia by examining his Mallarmé songs. The compositional process of this song cycle demonstrates how Ravel confronted academic hegemonies and how he used exoticism to construct his own musical language in a post-Debussy musical world.

1 Robert Orledge, “Evocations of Exoticism,” in The Cambridge Companion to Ravel, edited by Deborah Mawer (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 27.

Ravel’s Musical Representations of Asia

Ravel’s dreamy and fantasy-like settings in many of his compositions stem from his lifelong interest in musical exoticism—whether their titles or programs suggest the foreign cultures or not. Descended from mixed Basque and Swiss-French heritage,

Ravel engaged other cultures, as designing nostalgic Spanish idioms in his music influenced from his mother, which culturally distanced himself from the French mainstream.2 Through the Paris Exposition in 1889, France wanted to boast their power and colonial achievement to the world and validated the hierarchies of different cultures.

After closely observing the musical performances of different cultures and interviewing the foreign performers, right-wing ethnomusicologist Julien Tiersot (1857-1936) argued that Asian music is more primitive than European music since it reflects an earlier stage in musical evolution.3 Musicologist Jann Pasler states that Tiersot’s report laid a hope that “Western listeners might be able to understand and assimilate the music of different cultures, just as France hoped to assimilate the people of its colonies.”4 Pasler argues that music was understood as a sign of race in the late nineteenth century, and Tiersot’s

Western notation shows his aim to create musical universals.5

Differing from a colonialist attitude, some progressive composers found inspiration for their compositions in the new source materials from the world fairs.

2 Manuel de Falla explained Ravel’s Spanishness as “Ravel’s was a Spain he had felt in an idealized way through his mother.” Quoted from Orledge, “Evocations of Exoticism,” 30.

3 Julien Tiersot, Musiques pittoresques: promenades musicales à l’Exposition de 1889 (Paris: Fischbacher, 1889).

4 Jann Pasler, Composing the Citizen: Music as Public Utility in Third Republic France (University of California Press, 2009), 578.

5 Jann Pasler, “Sonic Anthropology in 1900: The Challenge of Transcribing Non-Western Music and Language,” Twentieth-Century Music 11, no, 1 (2014): 7-36.

Debussy benefitted the most from the exhibitions, especially from the Indonesian gamelan ensemble in the 1889 Paris Exposition. However, he did not literally borrow its musical materials. In the case of Fantaisie (1899-90) for the piano and orchestra,

Debussy deleted the very gamelan elements from its original composition before the publication, reflecting the viewpoint French composers had about musical borrowing.6 A fourteen-year-old Ravel also heard the music of the gamelan orchestra alongside the

Russian ‘Five’ in 1889, both of which became fundamental in forming his exotic musical palette. However, he denounced the descriptive clichés in the conventional Orientalism of his contemporaries.

Ravel criticized the dense atmosphere and overloaded textures of Ernest

Fanelli’s orchestral piece Tableaux symphoniques (premiered in 1912) and the over- declamatory Wagnerian vocal writing in Camille Erlanger’s opera La sorcière (1912). On the other hand, Ravel praised Manuel de Falla’s opera La vida breve (1903), which provided not only a local color but also “a sincerity of expression and an abundance and freshness of inspiration.”7 Above all, Ravel admired Stravinsky’s Le Rossignol (1908-

1914) and complimented the beginning of its second scene as “the orchestral enchantment of this strange and powerful march whose Far-Eastern quality engenders a more profound feeling, truly, than of simple curiosity, and the uncommon charm of the mysterious timbres which depict the mechanical nightingale.”8 Then, how did Ravel

6 For the details about Debussy’s compositional and publishing processes, see Richard Mueller, “Javanese Influence on Debussy’s Fantaisie and Beyond,” 19th-Century Music 10 (1986): 157-86.

7 Orledge, “Evocations of Exoticism,” 36-39. Italics mine for emphasis.

8 Maurice Ravel, A Ravel Reader: Correspondence, Articles, Interviews, compiled and edited by Arbie Orenstein (New York: Columbia University Press, 1990), 381. Italics mine for emphasis.

create a true “Far Eastern quality” with “sincere expression” and “fresh inspiration” in his own music?

Without travelling to the Far East, Ravel built imagined Asian sounds based on the foreign sources that he accumulated in France. Influenced from Russian music and the composer Rimsky-Korsakov, Ravel designed luxuriant orchestral color and texture for depicting the exotic Middle East in Ouverture de féerie (1898), the overture of his projected opera Shéhérazade. For the Middle Eastern color, he imitated the musical languages of Borodin and Debussy and added whole-tone scales.9 Later in the song cycle Shéhérazade (1903), Ravel composed “Asie,” set to the symbolist poem of his

Apaches friend Tristan Klingsor (1874-1966), in which the augmented seconds and octatonic collections evoke exotic effects. Musicologist Derek B. Scott describes “Asie” as “a summary of turn-of-the-century musical Orientalism,” and Timothy Dean Taylor mentions that Ravel invoked “known musical codes that signify the Other.”10

Nevertheless, I hear Ravel’s special portrayal of East Asia, distinguished from the general representations of the Orient, when the vocalist sings the text about China.11

The repetition of certain harmonies, melodies and rhythms creates a musically static moment in the song, as shown in Example 2-1, in which a musical idea does not go through transformations or variations and therefore does not develop. This musical

9 Derek B. Scott assumes that Ravel’s use of whole-tone scales for exotic effect may have come from the Indonesian music he heard at the Paris World Exposition in 1889, or from Russian exoticism. Derek B. Scott, “Orientalism and Musical Style,” The Musical Quarterly 82, no. 2 (1998): 314.

10 Timothy Dean Taylor, Beyond Exoticism: Western Music and the World (Durham: Duke University Press, 2007), 93-94.

11 The texts about China in “Asie” are “… China the mandarins paunchy beneath their umbrellas, and the princesses with delicate hands, and the learned ones who argue about poetry and about beauty…” English translation is from Glenn Watkins, Soundings: Music in the Twentieth Century (New York: Schirmer, 1995), 124–25.

stagnation describes the timelessness of a distant dreamland and functions indexically to form a sound of a “Far Eastern quality.”

Example 2-1. An excerpt from Ravel’s “Asie” of Shéhérazade.

In his earlier composition, “Laideronnette: Impératrice des Pagodes,” the third movement of Ma Mère l’Oye (1910), Ravel depicted a Chinese princess by recalling the

Indonesian gamelan orchestra that he heard in 1889.12 In Examples 2-1 and 2-2, the musical representations of China in both excerpts of “Asie” and “Laideronnette” show

12 Ravel said, “I consider Javanese music the most sophisticated music of the Far East, and I frequently derive themes from it: “Laideronnette” from Ma Mère l’Oye, with the tolling of its temple bells, was derived from Java both harmonically and melodically.” Quoted from Orledge, “Evocations of Exoticism,” 29.

similar gestures: rhythmic, melodic, and harmonic ostinatos with parallel second, fourth, and fifth intervals based on pentatonic scales. The musical practices in these passages are different from the Middle Eastern sound that Ravel embodied with luxuriant orchestral color and texture, augmented seconds, and whole-tone and octatonic collections. Indeed, Ravel knew the differences between the sounds of Asia and of the

Middle East. Nevertheless, he was not able to distinguish the different ethnic cultures inside of Asia and rather created pan-Asiatic representations based on his memory of gamelan’s musical elements.

Example 2-2. An excerpt from Ravel’s “Laideronnette” of Ma Mère l’Oye.

Musicologist Robert Orledge draws a parallel between the aesthetics of Ravel’s musical exoticism about the East and his Chinese salon, decorated with meticulously

chosen fake Japanese, Siamese, and Chinese objects.13 Orledge argues that Ravel’s collection of artificial artefacts was an essential part of his creative process, and his creation of exotic music surpassed the genuine article. Apparently, East Asia was beyond Ravel’s knowledge and understanding. In the 1930s, he planned the operetta- like orchestral work Le Chapeau chinois, written by Franc-Nohain, the librettist of his earlier opera L’Heure espagnole (1907), but could not realize the project. Ravel’s imagination of Chinese sound must have been too abstract to create a whole large-size piece. Despite the lack of authentic information about Asia, Ravel created his own sonic space based on his personal experience and imagination.

When Ravel observed non-French cultures for the purpose of constructing his own musical language, East Asia was the most distant place that he could imagine about. In Ravel’s music, the Far East was designed like a timeless dreamland where harmonic and rhythmic movements stop. Based on his memory of Indonesian gamelan music that he heard in Paris, Ravel was able to create his original pan-Asiatic sound and widen the horizon of his musical languages. Although Ravel’s musical exoticism was significant in developing his own French music, it was a threat to the national organization Société Nationale de Musique (SN) that promoted pure Frenchness.

Ravel’s Conflict with Société Nationale de Musique

Despite the dominance of opera in French culture, instrumental music also began to gain favor with the growing middle-class audiences in the 1850-60s. German

13 An interviewer who visited Ravel’s carefully arranged Chinese salon in 1921 and said “His love of things Japanese corresponded to his taste for what was precious and perfect. There was even a tiny room in the house full of assorted Japanese objects; and he was delighted by his friends’ astonishment when he proudly announced: ‘All this . . . is fake!” Quoted from Orledge, “Evocations of Exoticism,” 35-36.

masterpieces of Haydn, Mozart, and Beethoven occupied the greater part of public concerts, and young French composers had relatively few opportunities to present their works. Saint-Saëns complained, “… before 1870, a French composer who had the audacity to venture into the field of instrumental music had no way of having his works performed other than to give a concert himself and to invite his friends and the critics.”14

In response to the calls for supporting young composers, many musical organizations were established, most of which were short-lived because of the financial difficulties presented by small-size halls and high ticket prices. The only thriving organization, the

Société des concerts du conservatoire (1828-1967), was limited to a few privileged musicians, attached to the Paris Conservatoire, which assisted in building a musical ivory tower rather than fostering innovation and freedom. In such a situation, the organization of the Société Nationale de Musique (SN) looked promising because it promoted young French composers in its initial steps.

The SN was founded in February 25, 1871, a month after the armistice of the

Franco-Prussian War. The post-war government was cultivating the idea of

“Frenchness” to salvage their cultural pride and recognized the important role of music in establishing French national identity and propagating the superiority of French culture. With government support, the SN advocated for musical Frenchness under the motto “ars gallica.” The SN declared:

The goal of the Society is to further the production and the popularization of all serious musical works. To encourage and to bring to light, as much as is in its power, all musical endeavors, in whatever form they may take, on condition that they reveal elevated and artistic aspirations on the part of

14 Camille Saint-Saëns, “La Société Nationale de Musique,” in Harmonie et mélodie (Paris: Calmann- Lévy, 1885), 207. Quoted from Jeffrey Cooper, The Rise of Instrumental Music and Concert Series in Paris, 1828-1871 (Ann Arbor: UMI Research Press, 1983), 4.

the author. It is in brotherhood, with absolute disregard for self-interest, with the firm intention to help one another with all their power, that the members should, each within the sphere of his action, work toward the study and performance of the works that they are called to choose and to interpret.15

By the end of the 1870s, the SN became one of the most important music organizations in Paris. The two founders, voice teacher Romain Bussine (1830-1899) at the Paris Conservatoire and his colleague Camille Saint-Saëns (1835-1921), described themselves as “two musicians strongly enamored of classical music and without the shadow of disdain for foreign schools, but French above all.”16 The SN’s active membership was open only to French composers, teachers, and musicians, whereas amateurs and foreign musicians were allowed as adjunct and honorary members respectively and needed to pay monthly for their membership. When the committee of the SN decided to accept the works of foreign composers, Bussine worried the intrusion of foreign music into Parisian musical institutions and yielded his presidency to César

Franck (1822-90) in 1886.

After Franck’s death in 1890, the SN entered a new phase under the control of president Vincent d’Indy, a fervent nationalist in a right-wing political position. The Third

Republic, which successfully rebuilt the collapsed France after the Franco-Prussian

War, was anxious about social tensions, and conservative intellectuals felt threatened by the political split after the Dreyfus Affair and were getting intolerable about increasing foreign cultures in cosmopolitan Paris.17 Even though d’Indy promoted new harmonic

15 Michael Strasser, “Ars Gallica: The Société Nationale de Musique and Its Role in French Musical Life, 1871-1891” (PhD diss., University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 1998), 586.

16 Strasser, “Ars Gallica,” 126.

17 Alfred Dreyfus (1859-1935) was a young French artillery officer of Jewish descent, alleged to have been communicating French military secrets to the German Embassy. This political scandal in 1894-1906

and aesthetic features of Richard Wagner, his conservative inclination drove the SN into dogmatic philosophies and limited programs in connection with the Schola Cantorum that he co-founded in 1896. Consequently, d’Indy’s narrow view about what he considered a proper musical style evoked hostility from the younger generation and divided the SN into the followers of d’Indy and their opponents, which motivated the establishment of a new organization, the Société Musicale Indépendante (SMI).

During the years active in the Société Nationale de Musique (SN), Ravel’s relationship with music authorities was uneasy since his exotic music did not conform with the expectations of the Schola Cantorum’s standardized musical ideals: balanced in form, absent of musical irony, no borrowing from “lower” culture, and avoidance of

“dangerous” foreign cultural influence.18 Furthermore, Ravel’s five failures in the Prix de

Rome in 1900-05, known as “Affaire Ravel,” caused then director Théodore Dubois

(1837-1924) to resign as the director of the Paris Conservatoire, which discomforted

Ravel’s position in the academic music institutions.19 When the SN rejected the three musical pieces of his students, including Delage’s orchestral work Conté par la mer

(1908) because of a note outside of horn range, Ravel left the SN and founded an independent organization, the Société Musicale Indépendante (SMI), in 1909, with the

divided France into two opposing camps. On the other side of Dreyfus supporters, there was a pro-Army, anti-Semitic, anti-Dreyfus camp, mostly Catholic.

18 Jane F. Fulcher, The Composer as Intellectual: Music and Ideology in France 1914-1940 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005), 13.

19 In 1905, it was revealed that all the finalists were the students of Charles-Ferdinand Lenepveu (1840- 1910) who was on the jury of the Prix de Rome. Lenepveu was strictly conservative and hostile to musical innovation. After Dubois’s resignation, Gabriel Fauré took over as Conservatoire director. During the affairs, the members of Les Apaches played an important role in supporting Ravel’s music and his plan of organizing a new society.

help of Les Apaches. Gabriel Fauré (1845-1924) was appointed as the first president of the new society. The SMI proclaimed:

To create a free milieu where all artistic endeavors receive a warm welcome, regardless of genre, style or school, and where all the energies of the young generation unite in a spirit of fraternity to make the best means of performance available to all, whether orchestral or chamber music. This is the goal that the Société Musicale Indépendante aims to achieve.20

The process of organizing the SMI demonstrates Ravel’s protest against the conservatism of the state-supported SN. After a successful inaugural concert in April 20,

1910 with the compositions of Fauré and Debussy, the SMI became a rising society and a rival to the SN. Through diverse concert projects, Ravel attempted to respect the individual freedom of expression, promote contemporary works and avant-garde movement, and introduce foreign compositions to the French public. As a result, the

SMI played an important role in increasing the musical vocabularies of French composers and in elevating the French public’s appreciation of non-French music and culture.

“Stupendous Project” with Pierrot lunaire

After the years of running diverse concerts through the SMI, Ravel planned “a scandalous concert” when he heard from Stravinsky about the ingenious combination of a voice, woodwinds, strings, and a keyboard in Schoenberg’s Pierrot lunaire.21 Based on Stravinsky’s positive review only, Ravel began to compose his own songs with the

20 “Echos,” Mercure de France 84/3017 (April 1, 1910), 575. Quoted from Michel Duchesneau, “Maurice Ravel et la Société Musicale Indépendante: ‘Projet mirifique de concerts scandaleux,’” Revue De Musicologie 80, no. 2 (1994): 260.

21 In 1959, Stravinsky recalled, “The instrumental substance of Pierrot lunaire impressed me immensely,” which shows Stravinsky’s keen insight and preference about the Pierrot’s instrumentation. Eric Walter White, Stravinsky: The Composer and His Works (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1979), 24.

same frame of Pierrot lunaire and simultaneously threw a “stupendous project” into a shape. In his letter to the board of the SMI in 1913, Ravel wrote:

Stupendous project for a scandalous concert. Perhaps not at the Conservatoire: the Ministers would never permit the same kind of behavior there as they do in the Chamber of Deputies. Pieces for (a) narrator; (b) and (c) voice and: piano, string quartet, 2 flutes, and 2 clarinets.

(a) Pierrot lunaire: Schoenberg (21 pieces: 40 minutes) (b) Japanese Songs: Stravinsky (4 pieces: 10 minutes) (c) 2 poems by S. Mallarmé: Maurice Ravel (about 10 minutes)

… I know (a) only through hearsay. But we must play this work for which blood is flowing in Germany and Austria.22

Robert Orledge argues that the dissonance and piano texture of Ravel’s

Mallarmé songs owed to Pierrot lunaire.23 Barbara Kelly points that the motivic practices of Stravinsky and Ravel suggest the influence of Schoenberg’s extreme motivic concentration, emphasizing the self-sufficiency of melodic ideas.24 However, I doubt

Pierrot lunaire’s influences on the musical contents of Stravinsky’s and Ravel’s compositions since Stravinsky briefly heard Pierrot lunaire during his tour with the

Ballets Russes in Berlin, and Ravel even did not experience it directly. Despite Ravel’s ambitious plan, Pierrot lunaire was not performed but replaced by Delage’s Quatre poèmes hindous (1912-13) in the 1914 concert, which should supposedly be scandalous.

22 Ravel, “Letter to Alfredo Casella (April 2, 1913),” quoted from Ravel, A Ravel Reader, 135-36.

23 Orledge, “Evocations of Exoticism,” 40.

24 Barbara Kelly sees the correlation between the endings of Ravel’s third song “Surgi de la croupe et du bond” and of Stravinsky’s second and third songs. She argues that the losing bass role of the piano at the ends of those songs softens the impact of the final chords, which leaves listeners hanging in a suspended tonality. Barbara L. Kelly, Music and Ultra-Modernism in France: A Fragile Consensus, 1913-1939 (Woodbridge, Suffolk, UK: The Boydell Press, 2013), 105-110.

The three premiered compositions in the concert, Ravel’s Trois poèmes de

Mallarmé, Stravinsky’s Three Japanese Lyrics, and Delage’s Quatre poèmes hindous, produced a united sonority for being performed by common musicians and evoking exotic impressions. In the Japanese songs, Stravinsky transformed his artistic impression from Japanese woodblock prints into compositional process under the concept of two-dimensionality (see Chapter 3). Delage depicted Indian sounds with

Western instruments, which created unconventional techniques and novel timbres (see

Chapter 4). With the symbolist poems of Mallarmé, Ravel’s colorful orchestration, practiced in his earlier song cycle Shéhérazade (1903), created an exotic mood.

Consequently, the three song cycles evoked the exotic soundscape in the concert hall.

Table 2-1. Comparison of the instrumentations Schoenberg Ravel Stravinsky Delage Pierrot Lunaire Trois poèmes de Trois poésies de la Quatre poèmes Op. 21 (1912) Mallarmé lyrique japonaise hindous (1913) (Three Japanese (Four Hindu Lyrics, 1913) Poems, 1914) Flute Flute Flute Flute Piccolo 2nd flute + piccolo 2nd flute + piccolo Piccolo X X X Oboe + cor anglaise Clarinet Clarinet Clarinet Clarinet Bass clarinet 2nd clarinet 2nd clarinet bass clarinet + bass clarinet Piano Piano Piano Harp 1st violin 1st violin 1st violin 1st violin X 2nd violin 2nd violin 2nd violin Viola Viola Viola Viola Cello Cello Cello Cello

By inviting Schoenberg’s Pierrot lunaire and adopting its instrumentation, Ravel attempted to cross national boundaries in the Parisian concert scene, which challenged the ideals of the SN and French music authority. The unified sonority by the same

instrumentation in the three exotic songs of Ravel, Stravinsky, and Delage was an expression of embracing different cultures and ideas, which shows the changing attitude of Parisian progressive intellectuals about non-French cultures.

Search for Sonority through Soloist Instrumentation

Ravel executed his concert project by applying Pierrot lunaire’s soloist instrumentation in his Mallarmé songs. Could Ravel’s adoption of Schoenberg’s instrumentation have been for economic convenience? I claim that Ravel’s action was not only to show a strong acceptance of Schoenberg’s style that defied musical

Frenchness but also to comply with a search for a new sonority, growing among

Debussy followers. After experiencing exotic sonorities from the different cultures at the

Paris Exposition, Debussy treated timbre not merely as a means but as a goal for his composition. Influenced from poet Charles Baudelaire (1821-1867), who translated the synesthetic expressions of artistic color and musical spectrum in his poetry, Debussy integrated a new way of musical thinking by appropriating Asian art and music with symbolist fascination. For his Pelléas, Debussy explained, “I try to use each timbre in its pure state. . . People have learnt to mix timbres too much.”25

In Die neue Instrumentation (1928), Austrian-British composer Egon Wellesz pointed out the paradigm shift from a vertical to horizontal way of thinking in modern compositions. He argued that the new linear style called for a clear instrumentation of each voice, to free from the chordal writing of the late-Romantic era. Wellesz labeled

25 Quoted from Robert Orledge, Debussy and the Theatre (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1982), 98.

Schoenberg’s Chamber Symphony Op. 9 for 15 solo instruments (1906) as the first significant manifestation of the practice:

The evolutionary tendency to replace the massive effect of the large orchestra with the thinner, more piercing sound of soli instrumentation, in order to make the thematic and motivic fabric more readily recognizable can be detected in the orchestration of Mahler’s songs as well as in Schoenberg’s Chamber Symphony. . . However, the true breakthrough of a distinctive chamber symphony style came only with works which had abandoned symphonic methods altogether that is in connection with a tendency that pushed toward innovation in the creation of form.26

The term ‘Solistische Instrumentation’ was first used by Schoenberg in a letter to conductor Alexander von Zemlinsky in February 20, 1918 to indicate certain passages in his early work Pelleas und Melisande (1903). Schoenberg explained some passages as “soloist instrumentation” and contrasted them with Romantic “organ-like (registration) instrumentation.”27 After Schoenberg’s Chamber Symphony Op. 9, the Second

Viennese School increasingly practiced soloist instrumentation to use color as a formative element and later to clarify musical structure. Anton Webern mentioned, “I take much pleasure in these arrangements [of soloistic instrumentation]. If you think of my most recent scores—which are essentially for chamber orchestra (nothing but solo parts)—you will understand how close this is to my heart.”28 Hanns Eisler, another student of Schoenberg, also stated, “today we like clarity, cleanness, power, and delicacy but not an overblown colouring of the sonic material. We prefer, today, a very

26 Egon Wellesz, Die neue Instrumentation, vol. 2 (Berlin, 1929), 151. Quoted from Walter Frisch, Schoenberg and His World (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1999), 147.

27 Anton Webern and Felix Meyer, “Anton Webern’s Six Pieces for Orchestra, op. 6,” The Rosaleen Moldenhauer Memorial. Music History from Primary Sources: A Guide to the Moldenhauer Archives, Library Congress, Digital Collections, accessed October 6, 2020, https://www.loc.gov/collections/moldenhauer-archives/articles-and-essays/guide-to-archives/anton- webern-six-pieces-for-orchestra/.

28 Quoted from Webern and Meyer, “Anton Webern’s Six Pieces for Orchestra, op. 6.”

soloistic orchestration whereby the instruments preserve their solo character, instead of mixing them into a mash, as was done in the previous century.”29

Emphasis on timbre was an encouraging trend not only in Western European music but also in Russian music at the turn of the century. Rimsky-Korsakov explained his Capriccio espagnol (1887) as “The change of timbres, the felicitous choice of melodic designs and figuration patterns, exactly suiting each kind of instrument . . . the rhythm of the percussion instruments, and so on, constitute here the very essence of the composition and not its garb or orchestration.”30 When Ravel heard Capriccio at the

Paris Exposition in 1889, he became an admirer of the Russian composer. Rimsky-

Korsakov’s orchestration later influenced that of Ravel’s Boléro (1928), in which different types of instruments effectively create an effect of changing timbres.

Stravinsky’s employment of various wind family instruments, such as English horn, bass clarinet, contra bassoon, and trumpets with different keys, also shows his concern on timbral effect.31 After the Three Japanese Lyrics, Stravinsky used its similar instrumentation setting for his L'Histoire du soldat (1918) and continued prohibiting the doublings of strings in Les Noces (1923).32 He warned about expanding the numbers of instrumentalists in his book Poetics of Music (1947):

When the music was not conceived for a huge mass of performers, when its composer did not want to produce massive dynamic effects, when the

29 Tobias Faßhauer, "Eisler’s Principles of Orchestration,” Eisler-Mitteilungen 62 (2016), 9–15.

30 Nikolay Rimsky-Korsakov, My Musical Life, translated by J. A. Joffe (New York: Knopf, 1923), 246.

31 Barbara L. Kelly asserts that the significance of Satie’s scoring for wind and brass instruments in En Habit de cheval (1911) prefigured the fascination of wind writing in the music of Stravinsky and Poulenc. Kelly, Music and Ultra-Modernism in France, 40.

32 Pieter C. van den Toorn and John McGinness, “Meter and Metrical Displacement in Stravinsky,” in Stravinsky and the Russian Period: Sound and Legacy of a Musical Idiom (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 77.

frame is all out of proportion to the dimensions of the work, multiplication of the number of participant performers can produce only disastrous effects.33

Although Ravel did not know Schoenberg’s Pierrot lunaire directly, he was eager to explore coloristic possibilities by working with a soloist ensemble. Ravel knew the value of the soloist instrumentation, in which the timbre of each instrument can efficiently stand out. Although Schoenberg intended to emphasize a linear motion through a soloist instrumentation in his music, the same instrumentation amplified the timbral and color contrasts of each instrument in Ravel’s Mallarmé songs, following his pursuit for debussyste style.34 Pierre Boulez commented on Ravel’s best use of the instrumentational borrowing:

I must still note that even in the use of the instrumental ensemble [of Mallarmé songs], the influence of Pierrot lunaire resides above all in the nomenclature. . . I merely consider that writing for an “orchestra of soloists” to have been the logical result of the Ravelian evolution. . . In the Mallarmé songs, one again encounters that apparatus of sound presentation, more studied than ever, which proceeds from doublings, superimpositions, sound-effects that have nothing to do with Pierrot lunaire, but result from a certain “mechanics” of orchestration—the refined outcome of classic orchestration.35

Pasler states that “Exoticism thus contributed to a cult of sonority, a kind of analogue to the symbolist cult of self, with significant implications for early

33 Igor Stravinsky, Poetics of Music (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1947), 130.

34 The term ‘debussyste’ was first used by the critic Henri Gauthier-Villars in deriding unresolved appoggiaturas in Debussy’s Pelléas in 1902, and music historian Henri Woollett defined ‘debussysme’ as “the ultra-modern school” who use chords to add color in 1924. Jane Ellen Harrison, “Fashionable Innovation: Debussysme in Early Twentieth-Century France” (PhD diss., Ohio State University, 2011), 2- 4.

35 Pierre Boulez, “Trajectories: Ravel, Stravinsky, Schoenberg,” in Notes of an Apprenticeship, texts collected and presented by Paule Thévenin, translated from the French by Herbert Weinstock (New York: A. A. Knopf, 1968), 245-46.

modernism.”36 While the soloist instrumentation of the Second Viennese School had been practiced for a clear structure that can emphasize thematic and motivic ideas in a linear motion, Ravel used it to explore sonority in connection to the exotic representations of the East, manifested in his Trois poèmes de Mallarmé.

Representations of Asia in Trois poèmes de Mallarmé

When Ravel heard Stravinsky’s translation of a medium from artistic impression to music in composing the Three Japanese Lyrics, he also considered a similar transformational process from poetry into music. To fulfil this intention, he revisited the collection of Stéphane Mallarmé (1842-1898) that he used for his earlier song “Sainte”

(1896). For the lyrics of the first song in Trois poèmes de Mallarmé, Ravel selected the poem “Soupir” (sigh) that has many vowels arousing sound effects.37

Mon âme vers ton front où rêve, ô calme soeur, Un automne jonché de taches de rousseur, Et vers le ciel errant de ton oeil angélique Monte, comme dans un jardin mélancolique, Fidèle, un blanc jet d’eau soupire vers l’Azur! Vers l’Azur attendri d’Octobre pâle et pur Qui mire aux grands bassins sa langueur infinie Et laisse, sur l’eau morte où la fauve agonie Des feuilles erre au vent et creuse un froid sillon, Se traîner le soleil jaune d’un long rayon.

My soul towards your brow where dreams, oh calm sister, An autumn scattered with russet freckles, And towards the wandering sky of your angelic eye Rises, as in a melancholic garden, Faithful, a white jet of water sighs towards the Azure! Towards the tender Azure of pale and pure October Which mirrors its infinite languor in great basins

36 Pasler, Composing the Citizen, 590.

37 Marvin Elmer Weinberger found that Mallarmé’s “Soupir” has more nasal vowels than his other poems, which make an aural effect by a softer and darker sound. Ravel had been interested in synesthesia and may have selected this poem on that purpose. Marvin Elmer Weinberger, “The Linguistic Implications in the Theory and Poetry of Stéphane Mallarmé” (PhD diss., Cornell University, 1956).

And leaves, on dead water where the tawny agony Foliage wanders in the wind and digs a cold furrow, Crawls the yellow sun in a long ray.38

“Soupir” portrays an autumnal scene with the visual descriptions of colors—bright blue, russet, white, tawny, and yellow—and the color “azure,” derived from the Persian gemstone, evokes an exotic sense. The text “azure” presents at the structural points of the poem: at the end of the first half (lines 1-5) and at the beginning of the last half (lines

6-10). The first part of the song in mm. 1-16 textually and musically provides a rising action, whereas the second part (mm. 17-36) regresses into stagnation, the two directions of which symbolize the inhalation and exhalation of the sigh in the title.39

The constant movement of the strings in a static harmony and motoric rhythm at the beginning of the song depicts the poetic space “rêve” (dream). This musical practice of repeating certain gestures, instead of developing themes and motives, recalls

Debussy’s musical language, arguably influenced by his exposure to Indonesian gamelan music.40 The unconventional timbre by the harmonics with glissando adds an unfamiliarity of the remote place, which used to be the Far East in Ravel’s imagination.

The E-minor mode in mm. 1-4 changes to E-Dorian with the C-sharp in the vocal in m.

5, where the text first provides the specific information about the time: “automne”

(autumn). The motive of ‘A, C-sharp, and B’ (in the rectangular box in Example 2-3),

38 If not specified, the translations of the poems in this chapter are mine.

39 Robert Gronquist, “Ravel’s Trois Poèmes de Stéphane Mallarmé,” The Musical Quarterly 64, no. 4 (1978): 507-23.

40 Vladimir Jankélévitch focused on the oscillating figures and static harmonies in Debussy’s music that represented a sea wave or water fountain, and described the musical quality as “relative stability of the instable,” “immobility in perpetual movement,” and “movement for its own sake.” Vladimir Jankélévitch, Debussy et le mystère de l’instant (Paris: Plon, 1976), 78-79. Quoted from Pasler, Composing the Citizen, 534.

connecting the two lines of the poem, comes back in mm. 9-10 on “angélique” to emphasize the rising action in the first part of the song, symbolizing inhalation. Yet, the melody of “monte” (rise) ironically descends in m. 11, which confirms an unrealistic dreamy space in the poetic setting. The pentatonic pitches of D-E-G-A-B in the piano from m. 8 vertically create second and fourth intervals, which was discussed earlier in this chapter as Ravel’s musical representations of China, and the long pentatonic scale in the flute in mm. 9-11 evokes the sound of Asia in a stereotypical sense. Supported by the ascending melody in the flute, the vocal line reaches its climax at the highest note F- sharp in m. 13 and goes down “towards the Azure” in m. 15, where the heavenly

(angelic) dream is gone at the end in the first part of the song.

Example 2-3. Ravel, “Soupir,” mm. 5-6.

Example 2-4. Ravel, “Soupir,” mm. 9-10.

The musical language of the second part from m. 17 totally changes with a new idea of a chromatic descending in the strings, and the main pentatonic sonority in the first part shifts to octatonicism. Richard Taruskin focuses on the time when Ravel and

Stravinsky stayed together in 1913 at Clarens to collaborate on the revision of

Mussorgsky’s Khovanshchina, commissioned by Diaghilev. Taruskin suggests the possibility of the two composers exchanging ideas on their song projects because

“Soupir,” composed at Clarens and dedicated to Stravinsky, employs the octatonic collection that Stravinsky also used in “Mazatzumi” of the Three Japanese Lyrics.41 In mm. 18-24 of “Soupir,” non-functional harmonies in the strings make a pattern by their full or partial repetitions, which causes a harmonic stasis within the absence of tonality.

The piano in mm. 24-28 also joins the rhythmic and harmonic stagnation by the repetitions of motives, which emphasizes the timelessness of the poetic space. As a result, Ravel’s representations of the timeless and dreamlike poetic space in the song are similar to those of Asia in his earlier works, both imagined within his reverie. In m.

35, the arpeggiated string harmonics at the very beginning of the song come back and close the song in a nostalgic mood.

41 Richard Taruskin, Stravinsky and the Russian Traditions: A Biography of the Works through Mavra (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996), 826-32.

Example 2-5. Ravel, “Soupir,” mm. 21-26.

The poem of the second song “Placet futile” presents the protagonist’s futile attempt in requesting a companionship with an exotic and fictional princess on the teacup:

Princesse! à jalouser le destin d’une Hébé Qui poind sur cette tasse au baiser de vos lèvres J’use mes feux mais n’ai rang discret que d’abbé Et ne figureai même nu sur le Sèvres. Comme je ne suis pas ton bichon embarbé, Ni la pastille, ni du rouge, ni jeux mièvres Et que sur moi je sais ton regard clos tombé Blonde dont les coiffeurs divins sont des orfèvres! Nommez-nous...toi de qui tant de ris framboisés Se joignent en troupeau d’agneaux apprivoisés Chez tous broutant les voeux et bêlant aux délires, Nommez-nous...pour qu’Amour ailé d’un éventail M’y peigne flûte aux doigts endormant ce bercail, Princesse, nommez-nous berger de vos sourires.

Princess! envying the fate of a Hebe Who lights on this cup at the kiss of your lips, I use my ardor but only have a discreet rank as abbé And I won’t even appear nude on the Sévres porcelain. Since I am not your bewhiskered lapdog, Nor lozenge, nor rouge, nor delicate games, And that on me I know your enclosed look fell Blonde whose divine hairdressers are goldsmiths! Appoint me… you whose many raspberried laughs Gathered into herds of docile lambs, Where all graze wishes and bleat deliriously, Appoint me… so that Love winged with a fan May paint me flute in fingers putting this fold to sleep, Princess, appoint me shepherd of your smiles.

The absurdness in the content of the poem is conveyed by constantly changing tonal centers in music that obscure the harmonic syntax. After completing the second song, Ravel wrote to Roland-Manuel about the difficulties in translating the poem into music:

Indeed, “Placet futile” was completed, but I retouched it. I fully realize the great audacity of having attempted to interpret this sonnet in music. It was necessary that the melodic contour, the modulations, and the rhythms be

as precious, as properly contoured as the sentiment and the images of the text. In spite of that, it was necessary to maintain the elegant deportment of the poem. Above all, it was necessary to maintain the profound and exquisite tenderness which suffuses all of this. Now that it’s done, I’m a bit nervous about it.42

To “properly” convey “the sentiment and the images of the text,” Ravel created special motives that play structural roles in leading the poetic narrative. The first important motive is ‘C, C-sharp, A, D’ of the clarinet in m. 1 and m. 4, of which the fast and angular line describes the uncertainty and inability of the man in his relationship with the princess. When the man struggles, the motive is transposed and distributed into the flute and clarinet in m. 14. However, when his position is finally improved by being switched from ‘a discreet abbe’ into ‘a shepherd of the princess’s smiles’ in the text, the tension in the motive is softened by its transformation and slowing down in mm. 26-27.

Example 2-6. Motivic transformations in Ravel’s “Placet futile.”

Another important motive is an ascending minor sixth on “princesse” in the entrance of the vocal in m. 5 (Example 2-8), which recalls the vocal melody of the song

42 Quoted from Arbie Orenstein, Ravel: Man and Musician (New York: Columbia University Press, 1975), 128-29. Italics mine for emphasis.

“Asie” in Shéhérazade (Example 2-7). The melody of “Asie” consists of the chains of upward leaps, which imitates a human’s action of calling out a remote object, and a decrescendo makes a fade-out effect of the human’s voice. Since both musical representations of the imagined land ‘Asia’ and the imagined character ‘the princess on the porcelain’ resemble each other, it seems that Ravel contextualized the princess in

“Placet futile” as an Asian figure by the musical device that was constructed in his earlier song for a sound of Asia.

Compared to an ascending minor sixth in the motive “princesse,” Ravel set up the motive “nommez-nous” (appoint me) with a descending major sixth, comprising a descending perfect fifth followed by a major second. The motive “nommez-nous” begins the 9th and 14th lines of the poem (m. 19 and m. 22 in the song) and reappears after another “princesse” in m. 25 (Example 2-8). While the motive “princesse” here is transposed by a major second “up” from the original motive, the motives of “nommez- nous” in m. 22 and m. 25 are transposed by a major second “down” from the original motive of m. 19. Therefore, Ravel devised the directions of melodies meticulously by assigning an upward motion for an unrealistic character, whereas the motive for an actual man’s dialogue was set to a downward motion.

Eventually, the two motives of “princesse” and “nommez-nous” are connected by the pitch “B” in their initial notes. In the poem, “princesse” is how the man identifies the imagined woman, and “nommez-nous” is how he wants her to identify him. Therefore, when the two motives are connected in m. 25 by the common tone “B,” the princess finally appoints the man as the shepherd of her smiles in m. 26, in which the motivic transformation in music fulfils the goal of the poetic narrator.

Example 2-7. Motive of “Asie” in Shéhérazade.

Example 2-8. Motives of “Princesse” and “Nommez-nous” in “Placet futile.”

After completing the third song “Surgi de la croupe et du bond” (Rising from the

Crupper and Leap), Ravel stated, “‘Surgi de la croupe et du bond’ is the strangest, if not

the most hermetic of his [Mallarmé’s] sonnets. In this work, I used approximately the same instrumental ensemble that is found in Schoenberg’s Pierrot lunaire.”43 For the strangest poem, Ravel created a musical experiment in which the first four measures show all twelve pitches, presumably influenced from Schoenberg’s early stage of dodecaphony. About the song’s dedication to Erik Satie, Kelly acknowledges Ravel’s recognition of Satie’s experimental nature, whereas French musicologist Ornella Volta considers the dedication as “a metaphor of sterility and impotence,” which is the characteristic of Satie’s music.44 Indeed, the poem is full of void and absence represented in the poetry by an ignored neck, mouths that never drink, and absent kisses:

Surgi de la croupe et du bond D'une verrerie éphémère Sans fleurir la veillée amère Le col ignoré s'interrompt. Je crois bien que deux bouches n'ont Bu, ni son amant ni ma mère, Jamais à la même chimère, Moi, sylphe de ce froid plafond! Le pur vase d'aucun breuvage Que l'inexhaustible veuvage Agonise mais ne consent, Naïf baiser des plus funèbres! À rien expirer annonçant Une rose dans les ténèbres.

Rising from the crupper and leap Of fragile glassware Without flowering the bitter vigil The ignored neck is interrupted. I believe that two mouths have not Drank, neither her lover nor my mother, Never of the same Chimera,

43 Quoted from Orenstein, Ravel: Man and Musician, 179.

44 Kelly, Music and Ultra-Modernism in France, 42.

I, sylph of this cold ceiling! The pure vase of no drink Which the exhaustible widowhood Dies yet never consents, Naïve and most death-like kiss! Nothing to expire announcing A rose in the darkness.

To explain the esoteric poem, Literary scholar Rae Beth Gordon provides a

Gestalt image, The Impossible Kiss or the Vase (Figure 2-1), in which the curved vase functions as the outline of two persons that parallel with the mother and her lover in the poem.45 She claims that an interplay between sumptuous ornaments and nothingness in

Mallarmé’s poetic architecture fools our perspective, like the Gestalt image.

Figure 2-1. The Impossible Kiss or the Vase, sketched by Rae Beth Gordon.

45 Rae Beth Gordon, “Trompe l’Oeil in the Poems of Mallarmé,” in Ornament, Fantasy, and Desire in Nineteenth-Century French Literature (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1992), 147-75.

The beginning of the song “Surgi de la croupe et du bond” shows a pizzicato in con sordino (with a mute) and tremolos in the strings, which is an exact reproduction of the techniques in the introduction of “Asie” (compare Examples 2-9 and 2-10). Given the undeniable similarities, these analyses suggest that Ravel recalled the idea of “Asie” in order to set up the otherworldly quality of the “strangest” poem. For Ravel, the farthest place—Asia—must have been the strangest place in his awareness. In the beginning of

“Surgi de la croupe et du bond,” voice exchanges between the pitches in the tremolos create static harmonies, which makes a murky and dreamy atmosphere depicting a remote time and place. In m.1, the cello and viola present vertical chords respectively—

C7 (C-sharp, E, G, B-flat) in the cello and A add4 (A, C-sharp, D, E) in the viola—while the first and second violins focus on linear motions by descending a semitone: ‘B-flat to

A’ in the first violin and ‘E-flat to D’ in the second violon. In m. 2, they transform to ‘B-flat to E-flat’ and ‘A to D’ in the second violin, when the pitches in the first violin accord closely with the flute melody. The angular melody in the flute, centered on D and A, makes an exotic tinge with the augmented fourths and seconds in the linear motion. The flute motive in m. 2 is repeated in mm. 3-4 and transposed down by a diminished eighth in m. 5, which shifts the central pitch from A to A-sharp and the piano chord from C7 to

C-sharp 7. Consequently, we see many conventional chords and harmonies that work unconventionally in this song. Therefore, the paradoxical interplay between absence and presence in the poem is depicted by the conventional harmonies, unfunctionally progressed and suspended in music.

Example 2-9. Ravel, “Asie,” mm. 1-3.

Example 2-10. Ravel, “Surgi de la croupe et du bond,” mm. 1-5.

The ascending melody with augmented seconds in the beginning of the flute becomes longer in m. 4 and descends chromatically, which affects the gestures of the viola and clarinet and later the vocal until m. 6. After the fourth line of the poem in m. 9, the music changes to a new phase, where the strings play whole notes by the harmonics in the dynamics of pp. The hazy color of the strings contrasts the bell-like octaves in the piano, which creates timbral diversity. The harmonies of the strings are D add4 (D, F-sharp, G, A) in m. 9 and A add6 (A, C-sharp, E, F-sharp) in m. 10 that conflict with E-flat and B-flat in the piano. The clash by this semitone-distant bitonality creates an atonal sense that conveys a contradiction in the poetic narrative. An ascending fifth interval appears not only in the linear motion of the piano—E-flat to B-flat in m. 9 and B-flat to F in m. 10—but also in the chord progression of the strings between the measures—D to A. These four notes, E-flat, B-flat, A, and D, summon the pitches of the first and second violins at the beginning of the song. Consequently, the transformation of the limited materials connects different events in distant places, which macroscopically fulfills the immobility of sonority, one of the characteristics in the musical representations of the Far Eastern space in Ravel’s music.

Example 2-11. Ravel, “Surgi de la croupe et du bond,” mm. 6-10.

In mm. 19-23, the motivic idea of the flute melody in m. 6 (A-sharp, E, G, D, D- sharp, F-sharp) reappears and alternates between flute and clarinet (in the rectangular box in Example 2-12), which magnifies the effect of timbral changes. The E-centered bass in the cello and piano chromatically moves down during the last four measures, which moves the tonal center back to C, the initial chord in the cello of the song.

Nevertheless, there is no traditional cadential process, which closes the song in the mood of uncertainty.

Example 2-12. Ravel, “Surgi de la croupe et du bond,” mm. 22-24.

Although there is no direct reference to Asia in Trois poèmes de Mallarmé, Ravel borrowed musical materials from his earlier song “Asie” and imported the idea of remoteness, dreaminess, and timelessness in his own way. A timeless and nostalgic

sentiment is also expressed by static harmonies, unconventional harmonic syntax, motivic transformations, pentatonic and octatonic collections, and timbral emphasis in the three songs of Trois poèmes de Mallarmé. As a result, Ravel’s “exotic” musical language created a modernist aesthetic in its own right.

Conclusion

By tracing the compositional process and analyzing Trois poèmes de Mallarmé, this chapter reveals how Ravel imagined musical representations of Asia. His progressive disposition and uneasy relationship with the French music authorities ignited the organization of the Société Musicale Indépendante (SMI), and through the concert project in 1914, Ravel created a certain sonority with Stravinsky and Delage that crossed cultural boundaries and broadened their aesthetic scope. The soloist instrumentation, adopted from Schoenberg’s Pierrot lunaire, was effective in emphasizing different timbres and linear motions, which was a rising trend when the

Western composers encountered new music from the world fairs. With the limited references in France, Ravel created his own sound of East Asia, different from that of the Middle East.

In Mallarmé songs, Ravel reused his earlier materials in “Asie” of Shéhérazade and depicted the unrealistic poetic world by the idea of Asia. Asia was the farthest place that Ravel imagined as a timeless, dreamy and somewhat strange space. Although his imagination of Asia was not based on real Asia, his musical representations of Asia were original and coherently presented in his compositions. With the conception of Asia,

Ravel was able to move away from chauvinism and formalism of the conservative

French musical society and build his own musical language that benefitted his favorite subjects of nostalgia, fairy tales and fantasies.

CHAPTER 3 STRAVINSKY’S THREE JAPANESE LYRICS AND TWO-DIMENSIONAL MUSIC

When composing the Rite of Spring in 1912, Igor Stravinsky took a detour to write a song cycle, the Three Japanese Lyrics, set to short Japanese poems.1

Stravinsky defined the compositional inspiration of the three songs in his autobiography:

While putting the finishing touches to the orchestration of the Sacre [Le Sacre du printemps], I was busy with another composition which was very close to my heart. In the summer I had read a little anthology of Japanese Lyrics—short poems of a few lines each, selected from the old poets. The impression which they had made on me was exactly like that made by Japanese paintings and engravings. The graphic solution of problems of perspective and space shown by their art incited me to find something analogous in music.2

The impression Stravinsky got from both Japanese poems and paintings was so strong that he put his long-projected Rite of Spring aside and composed the Three Japanese

Lyrics. Since his practice was not based on Japanese music but through the transformation of mediums—from art to music—it may not suitable to interpret the musical gestures in the Japanese songs with a general methodology of Stravinsky research. In July 16, 1913, music critic Vladimir Derzhanovsky wrote to Stravinsky about his difficulty in understanding the Japanese songs: “The music of the Japanese

Lyrics is enchanting, marvelous, but what is the meaning of this constant and stubborn disharmony between musical meter and text?” Derzhanovsky wrote again on

September 24 that “I have read your explanation of the Japanese Lyrics with great

1 Stravinsky used the poems with 5-7-5-7-7 syllables, called waka (和歌; literally, ‘Japanese songs’) or tanka (短歌; literally, ‘short songs’), first appeared in Japanese literature in the eighth century. Waka predates haiku (俳句) with 5-7-5 syllables that arose in the fourteenth century and developed through the Edo period (1603-1868).

2 Igor Stravinsky, Igor Stravinsky: An Autobiography (New York: Norton, 1962), 45.

interest and can now defend your direction.”3 Although Stravinsky’s reply is missing, we can infer that Stravinsky had a systematic way of composing the songs that made

Derzhanovsky fully understand the discordance between the music and the text.

Later at a conference in Japan, 1959, Stravinsky recollected the compositional procedure of his Japanese songs and brought up a concept of two-dimensionality:

I was interested at that time in Japanese woodblock prints. What attracted me was that this was a two-dimensional art without any sense of solidity. I discovered this sense of the two-dimensional in some Russian translations of poetry, and attempted to express this sense in my music. However, the Russian critics of the time attacked me severely for creating two- dimensional music.4

Stravinsky considered the Three Japanese Lyrics important and had reminisced its compositional motivation through interviews and writings. However, music scholars have regarded the songs as Stravinsky’s temporary deviation to engage with Parisian

Japonisme because the songs apparently do not fit within Stravinsky’s “Russian period.”

Accordingly, Stravinsky’s concept of “two-dimensional music” has not received enough attention in Stravinsky scholarship. In this chapter, I reclaim the concept of “two- dimensionality” as a key to understanding Stravinsky’s compositional process and aesthetics. I analyze the piano accompaniment version of the Three Japanese Lyrics and also that of the Two Balmont Poems (1911) as a comparison. The Two Balmont

Poems, written right before the Japanese songs, was set to two short poems of Russian

Symbolist poet Konstantin Balmont (1867-1942). Since two song cycles share many

3 Quoted from Vera Stravinsky and Robert Craft, Stravinsky in Pictures and Documents (New York: Simone and Schuster, 1979), 107-08.

4 Report from a press conference, Mainichi Shimbun, in April 8, 1959. Quoted from Takashi Funayama, “Three Japanese Lyrics and Japonisme,” in Confronting Stravinsky: Man, Musician, and Modernist, ed. Jann Pasler (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986), 274. Italics mine for emphasis.

similarities in their settings and musical gestures, comparing the analyses of the songs clearly show the difference between two-dimensional music and Stravinsky’s general music of Russian period.

Compositional Process and Setting of the Songs

The Three Japanese Lyrics was composed between Stravinsky’s two major works, Petrushka (1910-11) and the Rite of Spring (1911-13), and the three songs were dedicated to his fellow composers in Les Apaches: Maurice Delage, Florent Schimitt, and Maurice Ravel. Japanese musicologist Takashi Funayama found the original sources of the Stravinsky’s selected poems and discovered that the song titles,

“Akahito,” “Mazatsumi,” and “Tsaraiuki,” were named after the poets, Yamabe no

Akahito (fl. 724–736), Minamoto no Masazumi (源当純, fl. 894-909), and Ki no

Tsurayuki (紀貫之, 872-945) respectively.5 Stravinsky’s choice of poems, however, was not from the Japanese sources but from the Russian translations in Японская лирика

(Japanese Lyrics, 1912), the collection of which Aleksandr Brandt (1855-1933) selected from the German translations in Hans Bethge’s Japanischer Fühlung (1911).6 While

Bethge wrote the spellings of poets as “Akahito,” “Masazumi,” and “Tsurayuki,” Brandt’s book shows “Акахито,” “Мазацуми,” and “Tcypайуки” that resulted in Stravinsky’s faulty

5 Takashi Funayama found the Japanese poems from the waka collection Kokka Taikan (国歌大観; Great Collection of Japanese Poetry) that was compiled by linguist Daizaburo Matsushita and first published in 1903. Funayama, “Three Japanese Lyrics and Japonisme,” 273-83.

6 There was an earlier German collection of Japanese poems, Dichtergüsse aus dem Osten: Japanische Dichtungen (1894) by Karl Florenz, who was invited to Japan for teaching German literature at Tokyo in 1888. Compared to Florenz’s translation, which was faithful to the original Japanese source, Brandt modified poems to attract more German readers with easier expression. Nils Neubert, “Max Kowalski’s Japanischer Frühling: A Song Collection from the Period of the Jewish Cultural Alliance in Nazi Germany” (DMA diss., The City University of New York, 2007).

orthography in the titles of his second and third songs as “Mazatsumi,” and “Tsaraiuki”

(Figure 3-1).7

The Three Japanese Lyrics was premiered in the “scandalous” concert held by the Société Musicale Indépendante in January 14, 1914, alongside Delage’s Four Hindu

Poems and Ravel’s Trois poèmes de Mallarmé (see Chapter 2 for the process of the concert project). Unfortunately, Stravinsky was unable to attend the premiere because of his wife’s delivery of their fourth baby in Lausanne, Switzerland. A month before the premiere, Delage wrote to Stravinsky about a difficulty in finding a Russian singer: “Do you want the three Japanese melodies sung in Russian?” And seven days before the premiere, Delage wrote again, “I spent eight days trying to find a singer, Andrieff being in St. Petersburg, Allchersky in Marseille . . . Finally it has been settled with Nikitina, who has a very high register.”8 After all, the premier was made with a French version that Delage translated the Russian texts into French. Owing to the four different language settings—Russian, French, German, and English—Stravinsky had included the Three Japanese Lyrics in many concert repertoires, and it had been his preferred piece for world tours.

7 The whole books of Hans Bethge’s Japanischer Fühlung (1911) and Aleksandr Brandt’s Японская лирика (1912) are assessable through the Internet Archive, https://archive.org/details/japanischerfrh00beth, and https://archive.org/details/japanese_lyrics.

8 The letters were written in December 19, 1913 and January 6, 1914 respectively. Quoted from Stravinsky and Craft, Stravinsky in Pictures and Documents, 108-09.

Figure 3-1. Comparison of Brandt’s Russian and Bethge’s German translations.

Stravinsky’s composition of the Three Japanese Lyrics began for a voice and piano; however, after listening to Schoenberg’s Pierrot lunaire during a Berlin tour with the Ballets Russes in 1912, the Japanese songs ended up in two versions: a voice accompanied by a piano and by a chamber orchestra.9 When Stravinsky first heard

Pierrot lunaire, he wrote to Schmitt: “I am happy that I was able to interest you in

Schoenberg and to influence you to play his prodigious Pierrot lunaire . . . Schoenberg is a remarkable artist. I feel it.”10 When returned from the tour to Clemens, Stravinsky dropped one viola and added two clarinets in the chamber version of the Three

Japanese Lyrics, which resulted in the similar instrumentation with Pierrot lunaire. In

1959, eight years after Schoenberg’s death, Stravinsky recalled Pierrot lunaire:

The instrumental substance of Pierrot lunaire impressed me immensely. And by saying ‘instrumental’ music I mean not simply the instrumentation of this music but the whole contrapuntal and polyphonic structure of this brilliant instrumental masterpiece.11

Some scholars find musical connections between the Three Japanese Lyrics and Pierrot lunaire, and Stephen Walsh argues that Stravinsky’s second song

“Mazatsumi” shows the influence of Pierrot lunaire in the part writing of clarinet and its contrapuntal interaction between the flute and other instruments.12 Although Stravinsky had showed his admiration of Pierrot lunaire, he heard it only once at the moment when composing his Japanese songs. Stravinsky borrowed the soloist instrumentation of

9 The instrumental version of the Three Japanese Lyrics is for a voice, piccolo, flute, clarinet, bass clarinet, piano and string quartet.

10 Quoted from Stravinsky and Craft, Stravinsky in Pictures and Documents, 94.

11 Quoted from Eric Walter White, Stravinsky: The Composer and His Works (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1979), 24.

12 Stephen Walsh, Stravinsky: A Creative Spring: Russia and France, 1882-1934 (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1999), 190.

Pierrot lunaire; however, the musical structure and content of his songs were generated based on a two-dimensional impression from Japanese art and poetry, which should not be overlooked when examining the Three Japanese Lyrics.

Research Review on Three Japanese Lyrics

In the 1948 essay “Trajectories: Ravel, Stravinsky, Schoenberg,” Pierre Boulez

(1925-2016) pointed out the peculiarity of the Three Japanese Lyrics and called its static linearity caused by superimposed fragments as “false counterpoint.”13 Although the Three Japanese Lyrics is a pivotal piece that was composed during Stravinsky’s geographical and aesthetic transition to Paris, the abstruseness of both the sound and the compositional method have led to a limited scholarly interest on the songs.

Funayama sheds light on the Three Japanese Lyrics by discovering its compositional years, origin of the texts, and meaning of the titles based on unrevealed Japanese sources. He provides pictorial descriptions for musical representations in the song cycle: “an image of snow gently falling during spring” for Song no. 1, “the water created by the thawing of the winter snow flowing rapidly through a valley” for Song no. 2, and

“the color of the cherry blossoms seen on a distant mountain” for Song no. 3.14 These interpretations, however, are subjective and arbitrary, which do not explain two dimensionality in the musical background of the Three Japanese Lyrics.

13 Pierre Boulez, “Trajectories: Ravel, Stravinsky, Schoenberg,” in Notes of an Apprenticeship, texts collected and presented by Paule Thévenin, translated from the French by Herbert Weinstock (New York: A. A. Knopf, 1968), 242-67.

14 Funayama, “Three Japanese Lyrics and Japonisme,” 282.

Glenn Watkins and Richard Taruskin focus on Stravinsky’s discovery of the non- accentual characteristic of the Japanese language and its application by dislocating textual and musical accents in “Akahito.” Stravinsky stated:

I let myself be guided by these ideas—chiefly the absence of accentuation in Japanese verse—as I composed my romances. But how to achieve this? The most natural course was to shift all the “long” syllables onto musical “short.” The accents thus ought to disappear of themselves, so as fully to achieve the linear perspective of Japanese declamation.15

Stravinsky’s original sketch in Figure 3-2 shows that the vocal melody begins with a pickup note.16 However, he distorted textual accents by moving the whole voice line to the right by an eighth beat in the publication as shown in Examples 3-1 and 3-2.

Watkins comments that Stravinsky treated the voice and accompaniment independently to achieve musical linearity, analogous to a two-dimensional space in Japanese art.17

Taruskin explains that the eighth notes and constant offbeats in the songs make an uninflected and stress-less voice line that represents the musical equivalent of the

Japanese non-tonal language and also the flat surface of Japanese paintings.

Attributing Stravinsky’s musical figuration to the Japanese language, however, Taruskin also suggests that the linearity of Stravinsky’s music is not necessarily caused by

Japanese impression but a practice of cosmopolitanism of the time.18 Indeed, the

15 Quoted from Richard Taruskin, “Stravinsky’s ‘Rejoicing Discovery’ and What is Meant In Defense of His Notorious Text-Setting,” in Stravinsky Retrospectives, eds. Ethan Haimo and Paul Johnson (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1987), 170.

16 The image in Figure 3-2 is from Stravinsky and Craft, Stravinsky in Pictures and Documents, 107.

17 Glenn Watkins, Pyramids at the Louvre: Music, Culture, and Collage from Stravinsky to the Postmodernists (Cambridge: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1994), 55.

18 Richard Taruskin, Stravinsky and the Russian Traditions: A Biography of the Works through Mavra (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996), 840-41.

displacement between melody and rhythm is one of Stravinsky’s general characteristics in Russian period.19

Figure 3-2. Stravinsky’s original sketch of “Akahito.”

19 Pieter C. van den Toorn and John McGinness, “Meter and Metrical Displacement in Stravinsky,” in Stravinsky and the Russian Period: Sound and Legacy of a Musical Idiom (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 13-41.

Example 3-1. Transcription of the bracket in Figure 3-2 (accents on the lyrics are mine).

Example 3-2. Published version of “Akahito,” mm. 1-4.

Since Stravinsky was exposed mostly to Japanese visual arts, not to Japanese music or language, I argue that it is important to examine Stravinsky’s transformational process from artistic ideas into musical languages.20 Stravinsky’s compositional technique, juxtaposing disparate musical groups vertically and horizontally without a transition between them, has been often described by artistic terms, such as cutting- and-pasting montage, collage, and cubism. Russian musicologist Mikhail Druskin (1905-

1991) observed Stravinsky’s interests in contemporary paintings and pointed out that the composer used the artistic modifiers of fullness, weight and volume in explaining

20 There were few publications about Japanese music, such as Louis Benedictus’s two collections of Musiques bizarres (1889), while Japanese arts were widely distributed to the public. Also, it was common for Parisian composers to transform their impression from nonmusical sources into music. Watkins, Pyramids at the Louvre, 51-53.

sonorities.21 Druskin mentioned that Stravinsky’s compositions between 1910 and the early 1920s had often been called “cubistic”; therefore, the simultaneous combination of different layers in his music can be linked to the techniques of cubist paintings. Jann

Pasler points out that Japanese engravings juxtapose colors and planes without fading out distant objects, which gives a two-dimensional impression.22 She explains that

Stravinsky expressed this artistic idea by juxtaposing instrumental groups with distinct tone colors in the Three Japanese Lyrics.

Music theorists have observed superimposing layers and non-traditional pitch collections in Stravinsky’s music. However, the Three Japanese Lyrics has been excluded in their main concern since the song cycle does not represent Stravinsky’s general musical characteristics proven in their theories. Pieter van den Toorn explains the composer’s vertical juxtaposition of distinct materials as ‘block structure’ and the horizontal stratification of fragments as ‘layered structure.’23 Gretchen Horlacher calls

Stravinsky’s way of forming textures as ‘building blocks’ and pays attention to the composer’s mannerist musical structure, consisting of repetitive fragments over another repetitive fixed ostinato.24 Some dissertations on the Three Japanese Lyrics focus on

21 Mikhail Druskin, “Space,” in Igor Stravinsky: His Life, Works, and Views, translated by Martin Cooper (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), 122-38.

22 Jann Pasler, “Stravinsky and the Apaches,” Musical Times 123 (1982): 406-07.

23 van den Toorn and McGinness, Stravinsky and the Russian Period, 2.

24 Horlacher focuses on Stravinsky’s Russian and Neoclassic periods by the notions of block and superimposition. Gretchen Grace Horlacher, Building Blocks: Repetition and Continuity in the Music of Stravinsky (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011).

octatonic collections and main pitch-class sets.25 However, none of the analytical research provides the clear answer for Stravinsky’s way of creating two-dimensional music.

Cubist Music vs. Two-Dimensional Music

The two song cycles, the Two Balmont Poems and Three Japanese Lyrics, were composed consecutively in 1911 and 1913. There are two short songs in the Balmont

Poems, “Forget-me-nots” and “The Dove,” set to Russian symbolist poems for a vocal and piano in 1911 and later arranged for an identical instrumentation with the chamber version of the Three Japanese Lyrics in 1954. In addition to their similar settings on surface, there are common traits in the compositional techniques in terms of the limited use of musical materials, specific sonorities, and motivic and melodic structures.

The vocal melodies in the first song of each song cycle, “Akahito” and “Forget- me-nots,” have the same pitch range between B4 and G5, and their linear intervals do not exceed a perfect fifth. The vocal motive in “Akahito,” moving up by a minor third and down by a major third—marked by ‘Motive-a’ in Example 3-3—is enharmonically the same with a motive in m. 2 of “Forget-me-nots” (Example 3-4). While the ostinato of the accompaniment in “Akahito” imitates the voice line, the contents between the vocal and the piano in “Forget-me-nots” are very different. The two long-valued notes with trills in the beginning of the piano in “Forget-me-nots” (D-sharp in the right hand and G-sharp in the left hand) are a perfect fifth apart, which is a Stravinsky’s general practice that music theorist Joseph Straus demonstrates in his study in 2014 that analyzed Stravinsky’s

25 Dwight Douglas Andrews’s analysis of the Three Japanese Lyrics concentrates on Stravinsky’s pitch and rhythmic vocabularies. Dwight Douglas Andrews, “An Analytical Model of Pitch and Rhythm in the Early Music of Igor Stravinsky” (PhD diss., Yale University, 1993).

extensive pieces from Petrushka (1911) to Agon (1957).26 With the new materials in the piano of “Forget-me-nots,” semiquavers in the left hand from m. 4 and short demisemiquavers in the high range from m. 5, the texture becomes complicated with more layers. Since the use of fifth intervals and many layers are commonly observed in

Stravinsky’s Russian-period compositions, as music theorists such as Straus and van den Toorn have verified, “Forget-me-nots” fulfills the general criteria in understanding

Stravinsky’s music, whereas “Akahito” keeps a single idea throughout. If the multi-layers in “Forget-me-nots” can be compared to the many dimensions of cubist paintings, it is reasonable to connect the fewer layers in “Akahito” to the two-dimensionality of

Japanese arts.

Example 3-3. ‘Motive-a’ in “Akahito,” mm. 1-7.

26 Straus emphasizes the harmonic and melodic fifths in Stravinsky’s music and called the structure as ‘a fundamentally bi-quintal structure.’ Joseph N. Straus, “Harmony and Voice Leading in the Music of Stravinsky,” Music Theory Spectrum 36 (2014): 1-33.

Example 3-4. ‘Motive-a’ in “Forget-me-nots,” mm. 1-6.

While it is hard to define the structure of “Akahito” by a traditional musical form,

“Forget-me-nots” shows a clear A-B-A ternary form, despite the short length of the song.

The middle section in mm. 7-15 shows hopping gestures in the piano and disjunct motions in the vocal line (Example 3-5), which contrasts to the characteristics of the outer sections. Two alternating tertian harmonies in the piano, 'C major seventh chord’ and ‘F-sharp minor chord,’ recalling the Petrushka chord, create harmonic blocks, and a rhythmic limp by time gaps between the B pitches in the voice and the piano makes temporal layers.27 As a result, “Forget-me-nots” forms not only vertical and horizontal

27 The Petrushka chord is the vertical combination of C major and F-sharp minor chords—two chords a tritone apart played as a simultaneity.

layers, but also tonal and temporal musical strata, which are analogous with multi- dimensional representations in cubist paintings.

Example 3-5. “Forget-me-nots,” mm. 7-10.

In the second song “Mazatsumi” of the Three Japanese Lyrics, the vocal and the piano parts show different musical gestures, in which we might recognize more layers than the first song. However, a close examination demonstrates that the fundamental materials in the second song are still limited, and some ideas are kept from the previous song. While the vocal melody of “Mazatsumi” is independent from its accompaniment, it is rather similar to that of “Akahito” in terms of motives. After the instrumental introduction in mm. 1-16, the vocal part enters in m. 17, which reminds the vocal of the first song in m. 9, as shown in Example 3-6. The first three notes in each motive, ‘G-flat,

B-double flat, and A-double flat’ of “Mazatsumi” and ‘F-sharp, A, and G’ of “Akahito,” are enharmonically identical. Moreover, the ‘Motive-a’ from the first song appears again in mm. 23-31 of the second song as shown in Example 3-7, which results in a united

sonority between the two songs. As a result, Stravinsky set new ideas in the accompaniment of “Mazatsumi” but reused the materials of “Akahito” in the vocal line, which keeps the two songs within the same sonic impression and constitutes two- dimensionality in the song cycle.

Example 3-6. Comparison between “Akahito,” m. 9 (left) and “Mazatsumi,” m. 17 (right).

Example 3-7. ‘Motive-a’ in the vocal melody of “Mazatsumi,” mm. 23-33.

Even though the nonconventional harmonies of the accompaniment in

“Mazatsumi” look complex on surface, because of many short notes with accidentals, the harmonic structure is rather simple. The introduction of the song starts with a vertical pitch collection in m. 1 that changes to a horizontal form by unfolding and transposing in m. 2 (Example 3-8). In m. 3, the piano proceeds to E-natural minor scale in the right hand, of which the linear movement remains in the most part of the piano in

“Mazatsumi.” The opening chord in m. 1 returns at the end of the song and is repeated by moving up a minor tenth. Although dissonant harmonies and untraditional harmonic syntax complicate the surface of the music, the limited use of pitch collections is economically designed, a characteristic that fits quite neatly into the paradigm of two- dimensional music.

Example 3-8. Beginning and ending harmonies of the piano in “Mazatsumi.”

While both “Akahito” and “Mazatsumi” do not follow a conventional musical form,

“The Dove,” the second song of the Two Balmont Poems, has a ternary form like the first song “Forget-me-nots.” The ostinato pattern with D-augmented triad (D, F-sharp, and A-sharp) in the beginning of “The Dove” persists during the first section, and A-

sharp, sustained as a main pitch of the vocal melody, moves down to A-natural in m. 7 to prepare for the second section (Example 3-9). The second section from m. 8 shows two different layers that centered in A-natural and G respectively in the piano, and a new sinuous line with triplets is added in the left hand. Once again, there is a radical change between the second and third sections in mm. 14-15 (Example 3-10). The texture of the third section suddenly becomes simple by the unison of both hands with constant eighth notes. Consequently, the contrasts by the shifts in main pitches and textures between the sections make clear block structures in “The Dove” that are relevant to multi-dimensions in cubist paintings.

Example 3-9. “The Dove” of Two Balmont Poems, mm. 5-9.

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Example 3-10. “The Dove” of Two Balmont Poems, mm. 13-16.

In the third song of the Three Japanese Lyrics, “Tsaraiuki,” Stravinsky controlled blocks and layers by devising different surfaces based on a single framework. With a deeper investigation, we can find that the different musical ideas in “Tsaraiuki” are deeply interrelated each other. The beginning melody in the right hand of the piano

(marked by ‘A’ in Example 3-11) implies the following vocal melody (marked by ‘B’) by sharing structural pitches: A-sharp, C-sharp, G-sharp and D-sharp. By overlapping the last note of the phrase ‘B,’ the new idea ‘C’ begins and reuses the main pitches of ‘A’ and ‘B’ again. Consequently, all the three thematic melodies of ‘A’, ‘B’, and ‘C’ look different but are based on the same pitch-class set as shown in Example 3-12.

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Furthermore, the idea of ‘A’ is reused in mm. 8-10 and mm. 18-21, and that of ‘C’ appears in mm. 12-13 and mm. 22-24. As a result, limiting materials is practiced in the whole song of “Tsaraiuki,” in which multi-layers are only superficial events and originated from a single seed. By designing the same things as looking different,

Stravinsky devised fewer dimensions but was able to avoid monotony in the Three

Japanese Lyrics.

Example 3-11. Three motives in “Tsaraiuki,” mm. 1-8.

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Example 3-12. Structural pitches of the three motives in “Tsaraiuki.”

Surprisingly, Stravinsky’s compositional practice that produces different layers from a single pitch-class set is reminiscent of the process of woodcut printing. Indeed, the controlled blocks and layers in the background of the Three Japanese Lyrics show the footprint of two-dimensionality.

Conclusion

Stravinsky brought the concept of “two-dimensional music” up to explain his

Three Japanese Lyrics, in which he transformed his artistic impression from Japanese visual arts into the compositional process of music. By comparing the analysis of the

Three Japanese Lyrics with that of his earlier song cycle Two Balmont Poems, this chapter clarifies the concept of two-dimensional music that is pivotal in understanding

Stravinsky’s new experiment. Despite superficial similarities, the Two Balmont Poems shows more musical groups vertically and horizontally superimposed, which suggests

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the multi-dimensions of cubist paintings. In the Three Japanese Lyrics, however,

Stravinsky controlled musical materials and reused them, which consequently made fewer blocks and layers.

Stravinsky was interested in modern arts, and cubism was then fashion. In

Stravinsky’s eyes, Japanese art without perspective must have seemed non-cubism rather than a specific trend of arts, which might have led him to create a two- dimensional music. Moreover, Stravinsky’s compositional practice is analogous to the process of woodcut printing, in that a single pitch set produces various musical events in different layers. As a result, I claim Stravinsky’s Balmont Poems as ‘cubist music’ as

Stravinsky defined the Three Japanese Lyrics as ‘two-dimensional music.’

Stravinsky’s Three Japanese Lyrics allows us to re-evaluate East Asian influence on Western art music and to challenge the stereotypical representations of Eastern

“Other” under the tenets of Orientalism. In fin-de-siècle Paris, there were composers who reassessed their conventional methods and formats when encountering East Asian music and culture. Barbara Kelly points out that Stravinsky’s fascination for static sonority and suspended tonality started with the Three Japanese Lyrics and were demonstrated throughout his career.28 Indeed, Stravinsky’s Three Japanese Lyrics is a pivotal piece that shows the structural influence of Japonisme at a critical moment, just around the time of the Rite of Spring.

28 Barbara L. Kelly, “Musical Continuities,” in Music and Ultra-Modernism in France: A Fragile Consensus, 1913-1939 (Woodbridge, Suffolk, UK: The Boydell Press, 2013), 95-162.

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CHAPTER 4 DELAGE’S SEPT HAÏ-KAÏS AND HAIKU MUSIC

In the early twentieth century, French music experienced radical transformations under modernism, and the song genre mélodie became more sophisticated than its earlier form of romance, originated from the German lied.1 Avant-garde composers experimented with new musical languages in mélodie, manifested as unconventional harmonies, supple melodic lines, and atonality. The main source of their lyrics was shifting from nineteenth-century romantic poetry to twentieth-century symbolist literature that often romanticized exotic cultures. Before the world fairs in the big cities of Europe,

Asian cultures had been consolidated as generically “Eastern” and referenced in

Western art music through conventions—sinuous melodies and augmented seconds for the Middle East and pentatonic scales for the Far East.2 However, as more European composers encountered East Asian cultures, their exotic practices became diverse and individualized by moving out of the conventional stereotypes.

Following the popularity of Japonisme in art, Japanese haiku, a poetic genre with a fixed form of 5-7-5 syllables, became an appealing apparatus to Western composers.

By using haiku or applying the conceptions and aesthetics of haiku, they established both novelty and originality in their modern music. Maurice Delage, who introduced

Japonisme to Les Apaches, was one of the initial figures using haiku as a text for his mélodie. In this chapter, I explore Delage’s song cycle Sept haï-kaïs (1924) as an

1 David Tunley and Frits Noske, “Mélodie,” Grove Music Online, accessed October 6, 2020, https://www.oxfordmusiconline.com/grovemusic/view/10.1093/gmo/9781561592630.001.0001/omo- 9781561592630-e-0000042953.

2 Derek B. Scott provides a list of musical Orientalist devices. Derek B. Scott, “Orientalism and Musical Style,” The Musical Quarterly 82, no. 2 (1998): 327.

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example of ‘musical Japonisme’ in fin-de-siècle Paris to investigate the early adaptation of East Asian culture in Western art music. The close examination of his songs with

Japanese texts demonstrates how French avant-garde composers recognized different cultures—not only with music but also with visual art and literature—and utilized them within their traditional musical format.

Debussy’s Representations of Asia

Debussy’s musical representations of Asia exerted strong influence on Delage’s musical ideas.3 While the stereotypical practices of the Eastern Other had been common in the theatrical genres, Debussy and some progressive composers in Paris considered how to enhance their own music with the help of entirely new and fresh foreign materials. Musicologist Annegret Fauser claims that Debussy’s exoticism was different from that of his contemporary composers since his adaptation of non-Western culture left traces not only on the surface but also on the structural level of his music.4

Debussy’s unconventional musical practices, such as parallel chord progressions, textural variation, and irregular rhythmic flow in Fantaisie (1889-90) and in ‘‘Et la lune descend sur le temple qui fut” of Images (1907), suggest his appropriation of the elements of Indonesian gamelan music. After experiencing the Javanese gamelan ensemble at the Paris Exposition of 1889, Debussy stated that “if we listen without

European prejudice to the charm of their [Javanese gamelan’s] percussion we must

3 Jann Pasler writes, “Delage’s biggest influence was Debussy.” Jann Pasler, “Delage, Maurice,” Grove Music Online, accessed October 6, 2020, https://www.oxfordmusiconline.com/grovemusic/view/10.1093/gmo/9781561592630.001.0001/omo- 9781561592630-e-0000007432.

4 Annegret Fauser, Musical Encounters at the 1889 Paris World’s Fair (Rochester: University of Rochester Press, 2005), 205.

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confess that our percussion is like primitive noises at a country fair.”5 Jeremy Day-

O'Connell sees Debussy’s fondness of whole-tone and pentatonic scales as an influence from the equidistant intervals in the slendro tuning system of gamelan instruments.6

East Asian characters in nineteenth-century operas had been associated with oversimplified musical markers, such as pentatonic scales and ostinato patterns found in Saint-Saëns’s La Princesse jaune (1872) and Messager’s Madame Chrysanthème

(1893). When the Western public heard real Japanese music that accompanied

Japanese plays performed in Loie Fuller’s theater (Loïe Fuller Theatre) at the Paris

Exposition in 1900, however, the music did not sound simple as they have imagined.7

Ethnomusicologist Julien Tiersot transcribed the incidental music from the Exposition and wrote about Japanese music in “Ethnographie Musicale: Notes prises à l’Exposition

Universelle de 1900.” In this article, Tiersot showed the tuning system of a thirteen- string koto (in the upper score of Figure 4-1) and transcribed the scale of Sadayakko’s koto playing at the Exposition (in the lower score of Figure 4-1).8 However, today’s scholars doubt about Tiersot’s understanding of the fundamentals of Japanese music.

5 Quoted from Edward Lockspeiser, Debussy: His Life and Mind, volume 2 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1978), 115.

6 Jeremy Day O’Connell, Pentatonicism from the Eighteenth Century to Debussy (Rochester, NY: University of Rochester Press, 2007), 4.

7 An English critic commented, “No words could do justice to its horrors, besides which the efforts at cacophony of the domestic pussycat on the roof are paltry.” in “The Japs at the Coronet,” The Sketch, May 30 (1900), 241. Quoted from Shelly C. Berg, “Sada Yacco in London and Paris, 1900: Le Rêve Réalisé,” Dance Chronicle 18, no. 3 (1995): 348.

8 Julien Tiersot, “Ethnographie Musicale: Notes prises à l’Exposition Universelle de 1900,” Le ménestrel (1900): 338-40, Gallica, the digital library of Bibliothèque nationale de France, https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k5615501d.

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Robert W. Waters argues that many French scholars of the time misinterpreted

Japanese microtones as semitones, and Tiersot also failed to identify the placement of semitones in the Japanese scale.9 Glenn Watkins states that the noise surrounding the music performances in the public expositions might have precluded the audiences from getting an accurate sound of Japanese music.10

Figure 4-1. Tiersot’s “Notes Taken in the Exposition Universelle of 1900.”

9 Robert Waters, “Emulation and Influence: Japonisme and Western Music in fin de siècle Paris,” Music Review 55, no. 3 (1994): 214-26.

10 Glenn Watkins, Pyramids at the Louvre: Music, Culture, and Collage from Stravinsky to the Postmodernists (Cambridge: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1994), 51-53.

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While the gamelan influence is musically traceable in Debussy’s music, the adaptation of Japanese music is ambiguous since they were primarily based on his impression of Japanese visual arts. With a great interest in Japanese woodblock prints,

Debussy titled his piano suite as Estampes (1903) and its first piece as “Pagodes” that respectively suggest Japanese woodblock prints and an Asian landscape. He also decorated the cover of his symphonic poem La mer (1905) with Katsushika Hokusai’s

The Great Wave, a copy of which hung on his wall.11 Nevertheless, Debussy’s musical pieces do not evoke Japanese sound but suggest “the invisible sentiments of nature.”12

Instead of borrowing apocryphal Japanese tunes or using stereotypical Oriental markers, Debussy connoted Japanese art in his music.

Following Debussy’s musical Japonisme, which was imagined and translated from his artistic insight, Debussystes in Les Apaches explored transformability between the different artistic mediums. However, Delage’s position changed when he came back from a trip to India and Japan in 1912.13 His remarkable musical memory may have enabled him to revive what he heard from Japan in his song composition.14 Prior to

11 Hokusai’s “The Great Wave,” also known as “Under the Wave off Kanagawa,” is one of the series Thirty-Six Views of Mount Fuji, published around 1829-33 in the Edo period in Japan.

12 Debussy reviewed Beethoven’s Pastoral Symphony stating that “there is no attempt at direct imitation, but rather at capturing the invisible sentiments of nature.” Debussy’s programmatic music was usually not to describe something specific but to synthesize the natural world and human emotion. Simon Trezise, “The ‘Invisible Sentiments of Nature,’” in Debussy: La Mer, Cambridge Music Handbooks (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 32-44.

13 In the spring of 1912, Delage accompanied his father’s business trip to India and Japan, where he owned shoe polish factories. Pasler, “Delage, Maurice,” Grove Music Online.

14 After attending the concert of Debussy's opera Pelléas et Mélisande in 1902, Delage played the unpublished opera’s excepts by heart on the piano. Pasler, “Delage, Maurice,” Grove Music Online.

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using Japanese materials, Delage experimented with Indian sound first through his mélodies.

Figure 4-2. Cover of Debussy’s La Mer (left) and Hokusai’s The Great Wave (right).

Figure 4-3. Debussy’s studio with Hokusai's The Great Wave on the rear wall.

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Delage’s Experiments with Asian Materials

During his trip in India, Delage wrote a letter to the Société Musicale

Indépendante: “I wanted to see this country and hear it very simply to better taste all the charm. And I have just a deep impression of it, as a reward for my naive effort towards novelty.”15 India had been depicted as a place of seduction and intoxication in European literature and associated with the musical markers of fluid melisma, drone, and delicate harp and flute sound in French operas, as shown in Bizet’s Les Pêcheurs des perles

(1863), Massenet’s Le Roi de Lahore (1872-77), and Delibes’ Lakmé (1883).16 Delage, however, broke away from these conventional musical idioms by collecting authentic materials of Indian music and literature and employed them in his song cycle Quatre poèmes hindous in 1912-13. He titled the four songs “Madras,” “Lahore,” “Benares,” and

“Jeypore,” named after the cities he visited in India. The texts of the first and the last songs were selected from fifth-century Hindu poems by the Sanskrit writer Bhartṛhari.

The second song’s text is about a pine tree in the distant place, written by Heinrich

Heine (1797-1856). The third song was set to an anonymous poem about the birth of

Buddha.

In Quatre poèmes hindous, Delage reproduced the timbre of Indian sounds with

Western musical instruments, which brought originality to his songs. Delage’s treatment

15 “J'ai voulu voir ce pays et l'entendre très simplement pour en mieux goûter tout le charme. Et il m'en reste justement une impression très profonde, en récompense de mon naïf effort vers la nouveauté.” Maurice Delage, “Lettre de L’Inde,” La Revue musicale S.I.M., volume 8 (June 15, 1912): 87-89, Blue Mountain Project: Historic Avant-Garde Periodicals for Digital Research, https://bluemountain.princeton.edu/bluemtn/cgi-bin/bluemtn?a=d&d=bmtnabh19120615-01.2.11.3&e=------en-20--1--txt-IN-----.

16 Jann Pasler, “Race, Orientalism, and Distinction in the Wake of the “Yellow Peril,”” in Western Music and Its Others: Difference, Representation, and Appropriation in Music, edited by Georgina Born and David Hesmondhalgh (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000), 88.

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of woodwinds emulates the idioms of an Indian flute, often associated with a Hindu deity

Krishna. Barbara Kelly claims that Delage empowered Eastern sounds over Western ones by challenging traditional Western cello and vocal techniques in striking ways, which reversed normal power relations.17 The pizzicato glissando of cello in Example 4-

1 shows the imitation of a sitar technique found in the recordings of sitar player Imdad

Khan (1848-1920). The closed-mouth (à bouche fermée) chanting of the vocal in

Example 4-2 is similar to the singing style of the Indian singer Coimbatore Thayi (1872-

1917), whose Gramophone record in 1910 characterized a unique closed- and open- mouthed singing and microtonal ornaments.18

Example 4-1. “Lahore” of Quatre poèmes hindous, mm. 1-5.

Example 4-2. “Lahore” of Quatre poèmes hindous, mm. 43-48.

17 Barbara L. Kelly, Music and Ultra-Modernism in France: A Fragile Consensus, 1913-1939 (Woodbridge, Suffolk, UK: The Boydell Press, 2013), 123.

18 Delage was so fascinated by Thayi’s recordings that he visited her performance at Mahabalipurnam temples in India. Pasler, “Race, Orientalism, and Distinction in the Wake of the “Yellow Peril,”” 106.

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Delage’s use of Indian materials introduced a new attitude to Les Apaches towards foreign music and culture, and his juxtaposition of Indian and French elements shows a new type of synthesis between Eastern and Western music. Jann Pasler argues that Albert Roussel (1869-1937), who also visited India and composed

Evocations in 1911, kept a French Orientalist perspective by dissolving Indian impression within his French music, whereas Delage acknowledged the value of Indian sources and made the most of their characteristics.19 Pasler asserts, “With its emphasis on self-criticism, sound for its own sake, and respect for tradition on their own terms, the modernist aesthetic prepared Delage to hear Indian music in its own terms.”20

Before Quatre poèmes hindous, Delage’s musical language was similar to

Debussy, Ravel, and Stravinsky; however, with the Indian songs, Delage had finally found a personal voice worthy of a career.21 When his orchestral work Conté par la mer got rejected from the Société Nationale de Musique in 1909, Delage lost his confidence as a composer and discarded many of his early compositions. Nevertheless, the success of the premiere of Quatre poèmes hindous in 1914 was evident, as the audiences demanded an encore of the second movement. Consequently, Delage composed more Indian-themed songs, such as Ragamalika (1912-14) and Trois chants de la jungle (1935), in which his innovative experiments with Indian sound challenged

19 Jann Pasler, “Reinterpreting Indian Music: Albert Roussel and Maurice Delage,” In Music-Cultures in Contact: Convergences and Collisions, edited by Margaret J. Kartomi and Stephen Blum (Basel, Switzerland: Gordon and Breach, 1994), 122-57.

20 Pasler, “Race, Orientalism and Distinction in the Wake of the “Yellow Peril,”” 107.

21 Pasler, “Reinterpreting Indian Music,” 142.

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the stereotypical representations of India in French music and secured his position as a progressive composer in Parisian society.

In contrast to Delage’s Indian-inspired compositions executed right after his

Asian trip, it took over a decade for him to experiment with Japanese materials. Delage was meticulous in selecting poems and musical languages, and it seems that he had to consider a special way of incorporating Japanese materials in his music over a longer time. His slower adoption of Japanese materials compared with Indian ones was not because he was less knowledgeable of Japanese culture. Delage knew how to read and write Japanese letters and regularly interacted with Jirohachi Satsuma (1901-1976), a Japanese man living in Paris and active in French social circles, who provided cultural information to Les Apaches. Japanese musicologist Takashi Funayama discovered

Delage’s unpublished manuscript of a short piece, composed for Satsuma (Figure 4-

4).22 The eight-measure song was set to a haiku about an old pond and its momentary change by a frog’s leap, written by well-known Japanese poet Matsuo Bashō (1644-

1694). The text displaces the two main principles of haiku: ‘permanence’ and ‘change.’23

Here is Bashō’s poem and its literal translation:

ふるいけや fu-ru-i-ke-ya (5) かわずとびこむ ka-wa-zu-to-bi-ko-mu (7) みずのおと mi-zu-no-o-to (5)

an old pond a frog jumps in the sound of the water

22 Delage’s compositional sketch in Figure 4-4 is from Funayama, “Three Japanese Lyrics and Japonisme,” 279-80.

23 Mikiso Hane, Premodern Japan: A Historical Survey (Boulder: Westview Press, 1991), 181.

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Figure 4-4. Delage’s haiku composition.

By utilizing Indian materials that he personally gathered and thus were not available to other French composers, Delage established his own innovation and individuality. After composing Sept haï-kaïs in 1923, Delage finally became more productive with Japanese materials and composed Mitsougai in 1946 and In morte di un

Samurai in 1950. While Indian sound is audible in Quatre poèmes hindous, the musical representation of Japan in Sept haï-kaïs is so subtle that a close analysis is required to discover Delage’s compositional intention and method.

Poetic Symmetry into Sept haï-kaïs

To understand how Delage achieved musical Japonisme, which is not detectable on the surface of music, I analyze the seven songs in Sept haï-kaïs in its original setting for voice and piano and focus on their structural features. Sept haï-kaïs was written for voice and piano, and later arranged for voice and instruments—flute, oboe, clarinet, piano, piano, and string quartet. Each song is less than 20 measures long; thus, the performance of the whole cycle takes only five to six minutes. The six poems are translations of Japanese poems from the seventeenth century except the third one, written by French poet George Sabiron (1882-1918). The texts contain Japanese or

Asian references stressing nature, such as nightingale, tortoise, wave, and seasonal

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changes. The seven songs were dedicated to different individuals among Delage’s acquaintances.

Table 4-1. Overview of Delage’s Sept Haï-kaïs24 Title/Content Dedication Measures Tempo Key 1 Préface du Kokinshiou Louis Laloy 16 Andantino 4 flats (Preface of the Kokinshū) “If you listen to the voice of the nightingale in the flowers or the toad in the water, you will realize that no being can live a day without singing.” 2 Les herbes de l’oubli Andrée 17 Larghetto 5 sharps (The Forgetting Grass) Vaurabourg “The forgetting-grass I wondered where their seeds came from. I know now that they are born from the compassionless heart of my lover.” 3 Le coq Jane Bathori 19 Moderato 4 sharps (The Rooster) “Puddle of water without a ripple; the rooster that drinks and his reflection are caught by its beak.” 4 La petite tortue Fernand 17 Lent 3 sharps (The Little Turtle) Dreyfus “The little tortoise creeps slowly, slowly, and it pains me without realizing that I, too, am advancing just as slowly as it is!” 5 La lune d’automne Suzanne 15 Allegro 2 sharps (The Autumn Moon) Roland- Manuel “From the white of the waves foaming on the unbridled sea, the autumn moon emerges as if from a gown.” 6 Alors (Then) Denise Jobert 14 Larghetto 5 flats “They bloom; then we gaze at them; then the flowers fade; then...” 7 L’eté (Summer) Georgette 11 Adagio 6 flats Garban “Summer in the mountain, the dawn on the cedars, one hears the bell from afar.”

The first song “Préface du Kokinshiou” was named after the Japanese anthology

Kokinshū (古今集), a collection of tenth-century wakas with 5-7-5-7-7 syllables. The preface of Kokinshū is significant as the first serious poetic criticism in the history of

24 The English translation of the texts is from Barbara N. Gordon, “Maurice Delage: A Stylistic Analysis of Selected Vocal Works” (PhD diss., New York University, 1991).

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Japanese literature; therefore, Delage’s use of the source name in the first song title verifies his good knowledge of Japanese culture. While the piano moves dynamically with frequent tremolos and grace notes, imitating a nightingale’s singing, the syllabic and stepwise vocal melody is monotonous, mostly with eighth notes and triplets

(Example 4-3). The contrast between the simple vocal line and the complex piano part is commonly found in all the seven songs of the song cycle.

Despite the four flats in the key signature, Song no.1 begins with a tonally unstable unfolding of E-flat major, C-major, and G-major chords. Soon, B-flat pitch (a dominant of E-flat tonality) is emphasized by repetition in m. 3 and m. 5 and also by an

A-diminished seventh chord (viiO7 of B-flat) at the vocal entrance. The form of the vocal part is binary, in which the two sections are divided by a relatively long rest in mm.11-

12. After the four-measure phrase cadencing on an E-flat minor triad in m. 11, the second vocal phrase starts out as tonally ambiguous in m. 12 but regains the E-flat tonality at the end.

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Example 4-3. Delage, Song no. 1 “Préface du Kokinshiou” from Sept Haï-kaïs.

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In the second section from m. 12, the conflicting pitches of ‘G-flat and G-natural’ and ‘B-flat and B-natural’ generate E-flat major, minor, and augmented triads, and a brief chromatic descending line in the piano in mm. 12-13 extends the E-flat augmented harmony. Near the end of the song, however, a G-major chord, introduced in m. 2 and m. 6, reappears and shifts the E-flat minor quality in m .15 to E-flat major in m. 16, which concludes the song in E-flat major tonality. By going back to the key of the beginning, the whole song builds a harmonic arch structure. In spite of polytonality and modal mixture, different musical layers in the song do not sound frantic but instead sound unified by being sustained within E-flat tonality. Throughout the song, musical events are present in a high pitch rage—all three staffs show a treble clef—which creates lightness in the overall sound as if a nightingale and a toad make nature acoustics in the text.

When moving to the second song “Les herbes de l’oubli” (The Forgetting Grass), a radical key change occurs from 4 flats to 5 sharps, in which the emphasis on D-sharp functions as a dominant of G-sharp minor tonality that corresponds to the key signature of the score. Like the previous song, Song no. 2 shows a comparatively simple vocal melody over an ornamental accompaniment with frequent grace notes. The unconventional secundal and quartal chords do not form a tonal center, but the similar gestures in the introduction and the postlude—blocked in rectangles in Example 4-4— suggest an arch structure like the previous song. The vocal line suggests a binary form, but its tonality and harmonies are more unconventional than Song no. 1. Yet, the beginning motives of the two phrases in mm. 3-4 and mm. 9-10 (circled in Example 4-4) present a similar melodic contour, creating unity within the whole vocal part. The two-

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against-three rhythms add ambivalence to the song, which I interpret as the representation of the double meanings of the word wasuregusa (忘れ草; forgetting- grass) in the poem. Wasuregusa is not only the name of Japanese orange lily but also refers to tobacco, which may cause people to be forgetful.

Table 4-2. Text of Song no. 2 “Les herbes de l’oubli” Japanese Poem Literal Translation 忘れ草 (Wa-su-re-gu-sa: 5) the forgetting-grass 何をか種と(Na-ni-o-ka-ta-ne-to: 7) what kind of species is 思ひしは (O-mo-hi-shi-wa: 5) in my thought つれなき人の (Tsu-re-na-ki-hi-to-no:7) an indifferent person’s 心なりけり(Ko-ko-ro-na-ri-ke-ri: 7) heart (was resulted)

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Example 4-4. Delage, Song no. 2 “Les herbes de l’oubli” from Sept Haï-kaïs.

In the third song “Le coq” (The Rooster), Delage expressed the text with meticulously refined musical gestures, as the rooster’s snatching motion was depicted by wide leaps in the piano and staccatos in the vocal. The bass line of the piano

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alternates E and B in mm. 1-10 and again at the end, projecting the dominant-tonic relationship of E major tonality. Like the previous two songs, the introductory motive in the piano reappears near the end, creating a quasi-symmetrical structure. However, the vocal melody neither has a binary form nor shows repetitive motivic gestures. Despite the lack of traditional triadic chords, some pitch sets are repeated, like the ascending motion of ‘G-sharp, A-sharp, C-sharp, D-sharp’ in m. 5, mm. 7-8 and mm. 15-16, which makes a locally coherent sonority. The first two pitches of A-sharp and D-sharp on the top line in the piano are working as structural tones that range the trajectory of each ending note in the vocal phrases: A-sharp, B, C-sharp, D, to D-sharp (marked with triangle shapes in Example 4-5). Also, the two pitches of A-sharp and D-sharp vertically appear as a dyad in mm. 13-15 (marked with hexagons in Example 4-5) that creates a bitonality with E-minor triadic chords. The prominent E-minor mode in the postlude ends up E-major mode at the end, which functions as a Picardy third.

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Example 4-5. Delage, Song no. 3 “Le coq” from Sept Haï-kaïs.

The slow tempo of the fourth song “La petite tortue” (The Little Turtle) depicts a turtle’s slow pace, and “lentement” (slowly) in the lyrics is emphasized by the repetition of the same motivic idea in the vocal in mm. 5-7. Like the previous songs, the vocal

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melody is lyrical, and the text setting is syllabic. The song begins with a chord of D, F- sharp, and G-sharp in m. 1 and ends with D, F-sharp, G-sharp, and A in m. 16, which implies D-major tonality. However, there is no implication of a tonic-dominant harmonic progression in D major anywhere in the song.

In the piano, three linear layers progress simultaneously, marked Layer 1, Layer

2, and Layer 2 in Example 4-6. While the first eight measures of Layer 1 and Layer 2 statically prolong A and D pitches respectively (see the pitch reduction at the bottom of

Example 4-6), the later measures show long ascending and descending linear motions between m. 8 and m. 15 that create an unbalanced arch form. In the text, “I,” who have been observing the turtle’s creeping, realize that “I” also have been slowly moving with the turtle. With that recognition, the descending line shifts to ascending until the end.

The chord at the switching point of the melodic direction is D-sharp dominant seventh chord in m. 11 (D-sharp, F-double sharp, A-sharp, C-sharp), which is tonally far from D major. This musical representation, as I argue, implies that “I” have been unconsciously moving far from home (D major), and when “I” was awakened, “I” went back home (to D major) at the end.

The chords in Layer 3 form a systematically organized symmetry. The outer pitch of the first chord (F-sharp) becomes the inner pitch of the second chord in m. 7, and the third and fourth chords are also formed by the same process—the outer pitches of the second and third chords become the inner pitches of the third and fourth chords.

Although Song no. 4 seems irregular and sounds abstruse on surface, an analysis of its structure allows us to find Delage’s compositional techniques that concealed structural symmetry.

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Example 4-6. Three layers in Song no. 4 “La petite tortue” from Sept Haï-kaïs.

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After a pause, which is designated to be longer than the other gaps between songs—because of a resting measure at the end of Song no. 4—the fifth song “La lune d’automne” (The Autumn Moon) starts agitatedly, making a rhythmic contrast with the previous song by a fast tempo in a triple meter. The vocal part is simply designed like the other songs, and the beginning melody of ‘B, C-sharp, B, and E’ comes back in mm.

13-14, which makes a motivic symmetry in the vocal line. The pitch range of the voice goes up in m. 11, where the subject of the text moves from sea wave to the moon (la lune), that shifts our eyes up to the sky.

The piano part depicts the turbulent waves of the sea in the text by repetitive melodic and interval patterns. In Example 4-7, Motive-A (of C-sharp, D, F-sharp, C- sharp, and B) in m. 1 imitates the upward motion of sea wave and transforms its shape throughout the song. Between the appearances of Motive-A in mm. 1-4, there is an intervening dyad of G-B, which portrays water drops splashed between the waves. In m.

6, Motive-A changes to Motive-A’ by altering one pitch—from F-sharp to G-sharp—and again to Motive-A’’ in m. 11 by transposing up a perfect fourth. Simultaneously, the dyad transforms to B-D in mm. 5-6 and m. 10, F-G in m. 9-10, and C-E in m. 11. If the transformations of Motive-A describe the variations of sea wave, those of the dyad also illustrate the changing shapes of splashes.

Song no. 5 demonstrates Delage’s skillful text painting and diverse compositional techniques. Although the song is mostly diatonic and ends on an E-minor chord, it is hard to detect a specific tonal center because of the lack of a tonic-dominant relationship. The vagueness of the tonality prepares audiences for the next song, which is tonally the most ambiguous in the song cycle.

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Example 4-7. Delage, Song no. 5 “La lune” from Sept Haï-kaïs.

The sixth song “Alors” (Then) begins with a C-sharp note in the key signatures of

5 flats, which deviates from the Western key system. Despite the confusion caused by the lack of traditional harmonies, motivic variations give unity to the song. The first two- note motive of ‘C-sharp to B’ in the piano is enharmonically repeated as ‘D-flat to C-flat’

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in m. 4 and transposed to ‘A-flat to G-flat’ in m. 5; this motivic shape also appears at the tails of the vocal phrases in m. 9 (C to B-flat) and m. 11 (F to E-flat). The beginning of the piano contains vertical secundal and quartal intervals. After the first short vocal phrase in mm. 7-8, however, some of the secundal and quartal dyads reappear in retrograde, creating a harmonic symmetry between m. 5 and m. 8. This regional symmetry in music glorifies the flower’s blooming in the poem: “Elles s’épanouissent.”

After that, the two pitches of E-flat and B-flat of the word “alors” (then) in m. 8 project the tonality of the rest of the song by becoming fundamental notes in the bass line of the piano, which gives tonality to the last half of the song.

The poem mediates the passage of time, describing the blooming and fading of flowers. The text is divided into three parts by the three appearances of “alors”: 1) They

(flowers) bloom, 2) we gaze at them, and 3) the flowers fade (see at the bottom of

Example 4-8). Therefore, a human’s observation, described by the words “we gaze at the flower,” is surrounded by flowers’ life stages in the poem, which forms a conceptual symmetry. By reversing the first two pitches of “alors” in m. 8 from ‘E-flat to B-flat’ to ‘B- flat to E-flat’ in mm. 11-12, Delage painted nature’s cycle through the mirrored pitches.25

The two notes of B-flat and E-flat are sustained to the next song without interruption, which links the text “then…” to “L’été” (summer) in the beginning of Song no. 6.

Therefore, the musical transition embodies the poetic narrative, and as a result, the pair of the last two songs indicates a seasonal change from spring to summer.

25 Barbara Gordon states that the cyclical harmony in Song no. 5 “possibly parallels the ongoing, natural cycle of life, death, and rebirth.” Gordon, “Maurice Delage,” 144.

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Example 4-8. Symmetrical structure of Song no. 6 “Alors” from Sept Haï-kaïs.

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The seventh song “L’eté” quietly begins over the B-flat in the bass, reverberating the previous song. The text of Song no. 7 portrays the placidity of a summer morning and evokes the Far Eastern atmosphere by a stereotypical subject, “la cloche d’une lieue” (the bell from afar). While Delage did not use Asian sound markers in the previous six songs, Song no. 7 shows a pentatonic scale (A-flat, B-flat, C-flat, E-flat, and

F) over the drone of B-flat and E-flat pedal points, of which musical practices are generally associated with exotic sonorities. The main scale of the song is A-flat Dorian

(A-flat, B-flat, C-flat, D-flat E-flat, F, G-flat), but the frequent appearance of G-natural suggests A-flat melodic minor scale, which forms bi-modality. Song no. 7 ends with a quartal harmony over the dyad of B-flat and E-flat, which depicts the bell sound from a far distance in the text. Consequently, the beginning and ending of the song sound similar by arousing an echo effect by long sustained sonorities.

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Example 4-9. Delage, Song no. 7 “L’eté” from Sept Haï-kaïs.

In sum, the seven songs in Delage’s Sept Haï-kaïs fall into three groups by their subjects: 1) the first two songs about Japanese culture, 2) the third and fourth songs about animals, and 3) the last three songs about seasons. Throughout the songs, syllabic and placid vocal lines contrast with active and decorative piano

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accompaniments. Dynamics are in the level of piano, and the lack of regular pulses creates a nebulous mood. Pedal points mark tonal centers, but non-functional harmonies make the tonalities vague. All the songs have vertically and horizontally conflicting pitches—e.g. G and G-flat and B and B-flat in Song no. 1—which blurs modality. Some pitch collections, motivic ideas, and poetic subjects are arranged symmetrically, which emphasizes poetic meaning or magnifies the images in the poetry.

Despite the short length of the songs and limited materials, there are multiple layers, recalling the musical languages of Debussy and Stravinsky. Recognizing Delage’s skill at text painting, which is not observable on the surface of his music, requires our close examination. In spite of unconventional experiments, Delage complies traditional harmonies and formal structures of Western tradition, such as V-I harmonic progressions, balanced phrases, and arch forms. The symmetry in the arch forms mirrors the symmetrical structure of the 5-7-5 syllables in haiku, which has been a tempting tool for many later composers in constructing a musical structure.

Haiku in Western Music

The new poetic movements in nineteenth-century France turned composers’ interests to exotic poetry. The aesthetics and fixed form of Japanese poetry were well suited to the ideals of Parnassianism, resisting Romanticism and pursuing strict formalism, and also to those of later-century Symbolism, using symbols and opposing detailed descriptions.26 Before the twentieth century, there were only two publications of

26 The name Parnassianism is derived from the journal Le Parnasse contemporain, which was named after Mount Parnassus in Greek mythology. Parnassian poets, influenced by Théophile Gautier’s doctrine of “art for art's sake,” stressed restraint, objectivity, technical perfection, and precise description as a reaction against the emotionalism and verbal imprecision of Romanticism. For the process of poetic movements of the Parnassianism, Symbolism, and haiku in the early twentieth-century Europe, see Bernard Agostini, “The Development of French Haiku in the First Half of the 20th Century: Historical

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Japanese poems in French, Leon de Rosny’s Anthologie japonaise (1871) and Judith

Gauthier’s Poèmes de la Libellule (1884). These publications were obscure, capturing the interests of specialized linguists and scholars. However, in the 1920s, more than forty French poets engaged in the mouvement haï-kaï by translating Japanese poems to French or composing haiku-style French poems, and Paul-Louis Couchoud’s collections of Au fil de l'eau (1905) and Sages et poètes d’Asie (1916) were popular as lyrics among French song composers (see Table 4-3).

Like Delage’s haiku songs, early twentieth-century mélodies set to Japanese poems are miniatures, tonally ambiguous, rhythmically and formally free, and the voice and its accompaniment are independent from each other, as shown in Example 4-10.

While a simply textured vocal line in monotonous rhythms expresses the brevity of a

Japanese poetic value, a decorative accompaniment accords with the innovative aesthetics of modern music. In any case, direct borrowing from Japanese folk tunes is not detectable in these songs. Sylvain Caron claims that the turn-of-the-century mélodie changed its initial function from the conventional representation of the Orient to an avant-garde experimentation.27 Different from operatic genres targeted to the public, mélodie was composed for elites, who were seeking modern aesthetics of “art for art’s sake.” Consequently, twentieth-century avant-garde mélodie was freed from textual or exotic references and evolved to an abstract and self-referential genre.

Perspectives,” The Haiku Foundation Digital Library, accessed October 6, 2020, https://omeka.thehaikufoundation.org/index.php/items/show/739.

27 Sylvain Caron, “Mélodie et orientalisme: de l’évocation du merveilleux aux séductions de l’avant- garde,” Revue musicale OICRM 3, no. 1 (2016): 93-114.

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Example 4-10. “Tejakakja,” mm. 1-6, from Alexandre Tansman’s 8 mélodies japonaises (1918).

Many of the haiku mélodies were arranged for both ‘voice and piano’ and ‘voice and chamber ensemble.’ Instead of using Japanese poems as texts for songs, some composers applied their poetic impression from haiku into their instrumental genres.

Jacques Pillois composed Cinq Haï-Kaï (1925) for a quintet of flute, violin, viola, cello and harp and inserted a narration of a Japanese poem at the beginning of each movement. Claude Delvincourt (1888-1954) arranged his earlier song cycle Ce monde de rosée (1925), set to 14 waka poems, into a symphonic work in 1934. Japanese critic

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Tarō Matsumoto reported in 1943 that there were about seventy musical pieces in early twentieth-century France with Japanese materials.28

Table 4-3. Japanese poetry in 1910-20s French music Year Composer Title 1912 Carol-Bérard Haï-kaï 9 mélodies with 4 interludes (for voice and piano) 1913 Igor Stravinsky Trois poésies de la 3 wakas from different sources; lyrique japonaise arranged for voice and chamber (for soprano and ensemble piano) 1917 Georges Migot 7 Petites Images Du 7 pomes from Michel Revon’s Japon: tirées du Anthologie de la littèrature cycle de Heian (IXe japonaise des origines au XXe siècle) siècle (1910); (for voice and piano) arranged for voice and orchestra 1918 Alexandre 8 mélodies Wakas from De cent poètes un Tansman japonaises poème (小倉百人一首, compiled (for voice and piano) around 1235) 1920 Jacques Au fil de l’eau, 4 Haï 4 poems from Paul-Louis Brillouin Kaï de P. L. Couchoud’s Au fil de l’eau (1905) Couchoud (for voice and piano) 1923 Maurice Delage Sept haï-kaï 7 wakas and haikus; (for voice and arranged for voice and piano in chamber ensemble) 1924 1924 Claude Ce monde de rosée 14 songs set to the wakas from Delvincourt (for voice and piano) Couchoud’s Sages et poètes d’Asie (1916); orchestrated in 1934 1925 Jacques Pillois Cinq Haï-Kaï Locating haikus between songs; (for flute, violin, extracted to Trois Haï-kaï (1927) viola, cello, and for flute and piano harp)

28 Tarō Matumoto, “Furansu no Ongakukai ni Arawareta Nihon (フランスの音楽会に現れた日本, Japan in the French Musical World),” Ongaku Kenkyu (音楽研究, Music Research) no. 2 (1943). Referenced from Funayama, “Three Japanese Lyrics and Japonisme,” 278.

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Example 4-11. John Cage's sketch, “Haiku I, For My Dear Friend, Who,” in 1950.

Western composers’ interest in Japanese poetry was not a passing fad, and later composers concentrated on the structural characteristics of haiku. In the 1950s, John

Cage composed multi-movement pieces under the title “haiku” or “haikai” by transforming the numbers of fixed syllables 5-7-5 into musical durations, tempo, or numbers of events. Cage’s strong interest in haiku was motivated by Zen Buddhist master Daisetz Teitaro Suzuki, who gave lectures at Columbia University in 1951.

Before Seven Haiku (1951-52), known as Cage’s first haiku music, there were earlier sketches in 1950. The unpublished sketch in Example 4-11 shows his attempt to apply the formulaic numbers of 5-7-5 to musical events as a structural underpinning.29 Cage kept applying the conceptions of haiku into his compositions, resulting Seven Haiku

(1952) for solo piano, Haiku (1958) for indeterminate sound sources, Haikai (1985) for zoomoozophone and flute, and Haikai (1986) for gamelan ensemble.

29 The score in Example 4-11 is John Cage, Haiku: Solo Piano, edited by Don Gillespie (New York: Henmar Press, 1951), from Editionpeters.com: http://editionpeters.com/resources/0001/stock/pdf/EP68395_Haiku_John_Cage.pdf.

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After a visit to Japan in 1962, Messiaen composed Sept haïkaï for small orchestra, the same title as Delage’s song cycle. Luigi Antonio Irlandini argues that

Messiaen’s Sept haïkaï is more connected to his personal and touristic experience than to general haiku aesthetics since the static and dense blocks and intricate texture of the composition create complexity rather than simplicity.30 However, the seven short movements are constructed in symmetry, which replicates the symmetrical structure of haiku with 5-7-5 syllables. There are two outer movements, “Introduction” and “Coda,” and the central movement is “Gagaku,” meaning Japanese court music. The second and fourth movements reflect the places that Messiaen visited in Japan, and the third and fifth movements depict the sound of Japanese birds.

Table 4-4. Overview of Messiaen’s Sept Haïkaï Movement French Title and English Translation 1 Introduction 2 Le parc de Nara et les lanternes de pierre (Nara Park and stone lanterns) 3 Yamanaka: cadenza 4 Gagaku 5 Miyajima et le torii dans la mer (Miyajima and the Torii in the sea) 6 Les oiseaux de Karuizawa (Birds of Karuizawa) 7 Coda

Compared to the incomprehensible sound and conceptions of Japanese music, the clear structure and concise content of haiku must have been easier for Western composers to adopt as an opportunistic apparatus and transform into musical

30 Luigi Irlandini sees Messiaen’s choice of Japanese gagaku as another type of religious practice by bearing Shintoism in mind, which briefly replaced Catholicism during his avant-garde years. Luigi Antonio Irlandini. “Messiaen’s Gagaku,” Perspectives of New Music 48, no. 2 (2010): 193-207.

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expression. Through haiku, they attempted to achieve artistic authenticity in the modern musical world.

Conclusion

Early twentieth-century French composers got a chance to broaden their musical horizons when they encountered the reality of the sounds from the Paris Expositions.

Debussy found potential from Asian culture and incorporated gamelan musical elements and Japanese artistic impressions in his music. Delage was benefitted with direct experiences of Asia and created his own musical language by amalgamating Indian musical elements and Japanese poetic characteristics. As a cultural mediator, Delage introduced Japanese art and literature—and possibly music—to post-Debussy composers, especially those associated with Les Apaches. Delage invented Asian- themed mélodies that solidified his position as an avant-garde composer with originality in Parisian musical circle. In Sept haï-kaïs, the simplicity of haiku aesthetics is portrayed through syllabic and stepwise vocal lines, and his compositional skills and techniques acquired in French musical tradition were practiced in the accompaniment.

As more Japanese cultural materials flowed into the West, the application of haiku in Western music expanded from song compositions to instrumental genres. Song composers in France arranged their haiku mélodies to chamber ensemble and maximized the effect of the different instrumental timbres. Later composers wrote instrumental haiku, inspired by its poetic narratives or symmetrical structure. The musical and conceptual influences of haiku reveal the strong influence of East Asian culture in developing innovative musical languages in the West, which subsequently became a driving force to musical avant-garde. Increasing numbers of haiku in Western music proves Western composers’ changing attitude toward Asia beyond Orientalism.

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CHAPTER 5 SADAYAKKO IN WESTERN CELEBRITY CULTURE

It was not by chance that Japanese geisha Sadayakko (川上貞奴, 1871-1946; also known as Sada Yacco) emerged triumphant on early twentieth-century European and American stages, especially at the Paris Exposition in 1900. When her husband

Otojirō Kawakami (川上音二郎, 1864-1911) planned a performance tour with his troupe to the West, starting from San Francisco in May 20, 1899, he was already aware of

European tastes and circumstances from his earlier trip to Paris. The late nineteenth- century West experienced cultural and societal changes with the rise of mass media, first-wave feminism, celebrity culture, modernist art movements including Japonisme, and the expansion of global market. Since the opening of Japan to the West in 1853,

Japanese geisha culture stimulated Westerners’ curiosity. In consideration of the conditions, Kawakami and his supporters spotlighted Sadayakko’s body in their performances, and the image of Sadayakko played an important role in shaping the identity of East Asian women in the West. Musicologists have criticized the

Orientalization of East Asian female characters, best represented as submissive, childish, and suicidal Cio-Cio-san in Puccini’s Madama Butterfly (1904). This chapter, however, traces the affirmative change of East Asian woman’s images in the West by revealing Sadayakko’s influence in fin-de-siècle Western high culture. Since celebrities are integral in understanding historical moments, the case study of Sadayakko allows us to explore the articulation of identity, value, and social norms at the critical time of

‘East Meets West.’

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Sadayakko vs. Cio-Cio-san

Operatic Orientalism was common in nineteenth-century European music theaters, propagating images of the Near East to the Far East. In succeeding the precedent operas with Japanese themes, such as Saint-Saëns’s La Princesse jaune

(1872) and Messager’s Madame Chrysanthème (1893), Puccini searched for authentic

Japanese sources to set up the character Cio-Cio-san. In September 1902, he visited

Milan and met the Japanese ambassador’s wife Hisako Ōyama (1883-1916). There,

Puccini might have heard her koto playing and gained musical scores from her.

Puccini’s musical setting in Madama Butterfly, however, did not go beyond Italian idioms but only made a better Japanese ambience than his predecessors. Musicologist Arthur

Groos points out that Puccini kept Europeans’ preconception of considering Japanese culture as an exotic alien, which resulted in a clear musical distinction between

Pinkerton from the West and Cio-Cio-san from the East.1 By raising a doubt on Puccini’s use of Ōyama’s sources, Groos focuses on the time of Puccini’s trip to Milan, when the

Kawakami troupe was in the midst of their performances.2

Despite a debate on Puccini’s direct encounter with Sadayakko, scholars agree that Puccini gave reality to his imagined character Cio-Cio-san through being inspired by Sadayakko’s stage performance. Puccini’s statement suggests that he gained a critical idea to design the music of Cio-Cio-san from his Milan trip: “I didn’t interview

1 Arthur Groos has researched how Puccini manipulated Japanese culture to create the contrasting images of the Eastern Other and the Western Self. See Arthur Groos, “Return of the Native: Japan in Madama Butterfly / Madama Butterfly in Japan,” Cambridge Opera Journal 1, no. 2 (1989): 167-194, and Arthur Groos, “Madame Butterfly between East and West,” in Giacomo Puccini and His World, ed. Emanuele Senici and Arman Schwartz (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2016), 49-84.

2 Arthur Groos, “Cio-Cio-San and Sadayakko: Japanese Music-Theater in Madama Butterfly,” Monumenta Nipponica 54, no. 1 (1999): 49-51.

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Sada Yacco. But I have here a lot of material of the yellow race that will do for me… I’ve done the entrance of Butterfly and am pleased with it.”3 For the setting of Cio-Cio-san’s entrance scene in the opera, introduced by marriage broker Goro’s singing, Puccini borrowed a melody from Japanese dance music Echigo jishi (越後獅子; Le Lion D’Itigo), which was found in the transcriptions of Sadayakko’s koto playing at the Paris

Exposition in 1900. We can compare the melody in Example 5-1 with the transcriptions of Julien Tiersot and Louis Benedictus in Examples 5-2 and 5-3.4

Example 5-1. Puccini’s Borrowing of Echigo jishi in Madama Butterfly.

3 Quoted from Groos, “Cio-Cio-San and Sadayakko,” 49-51.

4 Tiersot’s transcription (Example 5-2) was included in the article Julien Tiersot, “Ethnographie Musicale: Notes prises à l’Exposition Universelle de 1900,” Le ménestrel 66, no. 43 (1900): 338-40, and Benedictus’s transcription (Example 5-3) was published in Judith Gautier, Les musiques bizarres à l’Exposition de 1900, volume 4 (Paris: Librairie Ollendorff, 1900). Both sources are available in Gallica, the digital library of Bibliothèque nationale de France: https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k5615501d/f3.item; https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k1180641m/f35.image.

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Example 5-2. Tiersot's transcription of Sadayakko’s koto playing.

Example 5-3. Benedictus’s transcription of Sadayakko’s koto playing.

While condemning Puccini’s Orientalist attitude, Groos also pays attention to the composer’s removal of the American Consulate scene from the original opera setting

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after his Milan trip. The deleted scene, depicting the humiliation of Cio-Cio-san in the

American Consulate for European residents in Nagasaki, shows her inability to assimilate into Western culture. Groos claims that this “surprising” removal relieved the

East-West opposition in the opera and shifted the main focus of the show from a general East-West conflict to a personal tragedy of a Japanese heroine.5 Whether

Puccini met Sadayakko in person or not, it should be considered that the Kawakamis’ performance offered a critical insight to Puccini and his European contemporaries as a first direct contact to Japanese theater, which helped them to transcend the limits of their imaginations about the Far East.

The Kawakamis to the West

Before becoming an internationally renowned geisha, Sadayakko was a high- class geisha in Japan, who could read, write, and compose poems. In the mid- seventeenth century, Japan licensed prostitutes in officially sanctioned brothel quarters, where female entertainers, known as geishas to foreign residents in Japan, performed music and dance. Under a new imperial regime in 1868, highly polished and well-trained geishas were cultivated as the most expensive entertainment.6 Sadayakko, who was born into the descendant of a samurai family in 1871, was sent to those geishas at age

7.7 She learnt how to perform tea ceremonies, flower arranging, singing and dancing, and at age 15 became the mistress of Prime Minister Hirobumi Itō (1841-1909), who

5 Groos, “Cio-Cio-San and Sadayakko,” 53.

6 For the history of Japanese geishas and the changes of their images in Western culture, see Yoko Kawaguchi, “Introduction,” in Butterfly's Sisters: The Geisha in Western Culture (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2010), 1-11.

7 Sadayakko’s biographical details in this dissertation are mostly based on Lesley Downer, Madame Sadayakko: The Geisha Who Bewitched the West (New York: Gotham Books, 2003).

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had studied in London in 1863-64 and was working as a Western expert for the Meiji government in the 1890s. He encouraged Sadayakko to be a “modern” geisha by being intellectual and independent. She wore the latest European fashions, enjoyed horse riding, danced in Western-style salons, swam in European swimsuits, and played cards and billiards. It was at Itō’s private party where Sadayakko met her husband Kawakami.

Otojirō Kawakami, called ‘Liberty Kid,’ was a clever, ambitious, and opportunistic entertainer but an outsider in Japanese society. Starting in his late teens, he criticized the government, joined in a populist movement, advocated democratic reformation, and made political speeches in public. He organized his own acting troupe and directed the singing and staging of their plays. One of Kawakami troupe’s songs, “Oppekepé bushi,” which survives as a sound recording today, shows Kawakami’s political orientation, sneering at the politicians and their pretensions to Western culture. The catchy chorus

“oppekepé” in the refrain of the lyrics imitates the sound of a Western bugle or trumpet:

In these days when the price of rice is rising, You completely ignore the plight of the poor, Covering your eyes with tall hats, Wearing gold rings and watches, You bow to men of influence and position And spend your money on geisha and entertainers… If you think you can get to Paradise By … using a bribe when you encounter The King of Hades in hell, you’ll never make it! Oppekepé, oppekepeppo, peppoppo.8

“Oppekepé bushi” was recorded on wax cylinders in Berlin during the Kawakami troupe’s second performance trip in 1901 and was digitalized and released on CD by

8 The translation of the Japanese lyrics is from William P. Malm, “The Modern Music of Meiji Japan,” in Tradition and Modernization in Japanese Culture, edited by Donald Shively (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1971), 283-84.

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Toshiba EMI in 1997.9 After intensive listening, J. Scott Miller concludes that Sadayakko played the koto in this recording.10

Kawakami criticized the mannerisms of Japanese traditional Kabuki theater and reformed it into a radical new genre, shinpa (or shimpa; 新派). In 1893, Kawakami visited Paris to learn Western theater and was amazed by the play La Dame aux camélias, performed by French actress Sara Bernhardt (1844-1923), of which he later translated into Japanese. In his play scripts, he used to write about contemporary events and political ideas and pursued teaching patriotism to the public.11 His modernization movement in Japanese theater with realistic content and stylization intrigued Itō, who even encouraged Kawakami to marry his favorite geisha Sadayakko.

After marriage with Sadayakko in 1894, Kawakami built a European-style theater and opened a school for young actors owing to his wife’s financial aid. Despite his fame,

Kawakami’s business was not successful, and the Kawakami couple became impoverished. In Japan, the policy that banned international travel by the public, was loosened in the 1860s, and low-class acrobats, conjurers, actors and musicians made

9 Otojirō Kawakami, J. Scott Miller, and Utaroku, Miyakoya. 甦るオッペケペー：1900 年パリ万博の川上一座 (Yomigaeru Oppekepē: 1900-nen Pari Banpaku no Kawakami Ichiza). (Japan: Toshiba-EMI, 1997).

10 J. Scott Miller, “Accidental Icon: Sadayakko among the Cylinders,” in Music Archiving in the World: Papers Presented at the Conference on the Occasion of the 100th Anniversary of the Berlin Phonogramm-Archiv, edited by Gabriele Berlin and Arthur Simon (Berlin : VWB, Verlag für Wissenschaft und Bildung, 2002), 227-30.

11 The San Francisco Examiner reported an interview with Kawakami in June 25, 1899 that he “went on the stage to teach his people patriotism, to love their country and to be royal.” Quoted from Shelly C. Berg, “Sada Yacco: The American Tour, 1899-1900,” Dance Chronicle 16, no. 2 (1993): 153.

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their way to Western lands for a fortune. Accordingly, the Kawakami planed performance tours to America and Europe to make money.

In 1899-1901, the Kawakami troupe toured big cities of the United States and

Europe with the repertoires tailored by Kawamaki to Western tastes. Sadayakko recalled that “Americans love anything showy and happy,” while “the French people are hungry for blood and tears.”12 Kawakami cut off some dialogues and traditional music and instead emphasized Sadayakko’s action and dance in new productions for Western audiences. Her performance was conveyed not by language but rather by her body movements, dramatic gestures, and facial expressions. Western critics spotlighted

Sadayakko as if she were alone on stage and complimented her magnetic stage presence, enigmatic and exotic image, and superb artistry. At the Paris Exposition,

Sadayakko’s salary was reputedly 10,000 francs a week.13 In London, the Prince of

Wales of Buckingham Palace invited the Kawakami troupe and personally gave

Kawakami a check for $2,000 (worth roughly $60,000 in modern currency).14

Image of Geisha in the West

Before the Kawakamis, the Western public had seen Japanese artists, acrobats, geishas, teahouse girls and artisans in various venues including international fairs. The advertisers of the Kawakamis emphasized that Sadayakko is not a “tea-house” geisha but a first-rank geisha, a professional singer and dancer. Kawakami wished to show the

12 Yone Noguchi, “Sada Yacco,” New York Dramatic Mirror, February 17, 1906. Quoted from Berg, “Sada Yacco: The American Tour,” 16.

13 Berg, “Sada Yacco: The American Tour,” 158. The yearly average income in France was 18,000- 20,000 francs.

14 Yoko Chiba, “Sadda Yacco and Kawakami: Performers of Japonisme,” Modern Drama 35, no. 1 (1992): 46.

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discriminating, aloof, benevolent, and expressive image of geisha to the West.15 Stanca

Scholz-Cionca, a scholar in Japanese Studies, claims that the Kawakami troupe was different from the exotic performances that the Westerners had seen in a common oriental bazaar. Scholz-Cionca emphasizes that the troupe was welcomed as the ambassador of a refined and sophisticated theater culture in the center of the Exposition with wide press coverage.16

With the great success of Pierre Loti’s autobiographical novel Madame

Chrysanthème (1887), based on his temporary marriage with Japanese geisha O-Kane- san in Nagasaki, Japanese geisha culture became popular among the Western public.

Following that, John Luther Long published the short story Madame Butterfly (1898) in the Century Magazine (New York) by writing the recollections of his sister Jennie

Correll’s mission trip to Japan, which was dramatized to David Belasco’s one-act play

Madame Butterfly: A Tragedy of Japan (1900) and also to Puccini’s opera. Both geisha characters, Chrysanthème and Butterfly, are depicted as suffering under the circumstances of colonial war, prostitution, and poverty in the similar storylines. Their personalities, however, show differences. Japanese historian Yoko Kawaguchi compares that Chrysanthème is a sallow, boring, venal, and duplicitous doll-like geisha, whereas Butterfly (Cio-Cio-san) is an exuberant, naïve, trusting, and childish human

15 Shelley C. Berg, “Sada Yacco in London and Paris, 1900: Le Rêve Réalisé,” Dance Chronicle 18, no. 3 (1995): 362.

16 Stanca Scholz-Cionca, “Japanese Shows for Western Markets: Loïe Fuller and Early Japanese Tours through Europe (1900-1908),” Journal of Global Theatre History 1 (2016): 46-61.

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being.17 Despite some signs of a good character, Butterfly could not escape the image of the unenlightened Eastern Other.

Meanwhile, British musical comedy The Geisha: The Story of A Tea House

(1896) depicted a clever, fun-loving, and happy-go-lucky geisha. William Everett claims that the notably different geisha character in this musical was caused by the First Sino-

Japanese War (1894-95) that shifted international political relations.18 While Russia,

France, and Germany forced Japan to return the Liaodong Peninsula to China, Britain was not part of this European coalition but pro-Japanese, building trade relations with

Japan. The Geisha ran for over a thousand performances in London and had an immediate success abroad. Producer George Joseph Edwardes (1855-1915), who was renowned for designing a chorus girl group in his comedies—called ‘Gaiety Girls’ named after the Gaiety Theatre in London—knew how to use a contemporary fad to his advantage and directed many musical theater productions with East Asian themes. In

The Geisha, there are two East Asian ethnicities: Japanese and Chinese. While a mercenary and foolish Chinese proprietor of a teahouse cannot interact with the other characters, a lovely and smart Japanese geisha empathizes with both the other

Japanese and European characters in the plot.

Everett argues that not only the character settings but also the musical settings by composer Sidney Jones (1861-1941) reflected a late Victorian attitude towards

Japan and China. The most famous musical number of the show, O-Mimosa-san’s “The

17 Kawaguchi, Butterfly’s Sisters, 120.

18 William A. Everett, “Imagining the Identities of East Asia in 1890s British Music Theatre: The Case of Sidney Jones’s The Geisha (1896),” in Franjo Ksaver Kuhac (1834–1911): Musical Historiography and Identity, edited by Vjera Katalinic and Stanislav Tuksar (Zagreb: Hrvatsko muzikolosko drusivo, 2013), 301-10.

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Amorous Goldfish,” demonstrates the relationship between Japan and Britain by describing a goldfish—Japan—that wants to interact with a brave officer from the ocean wave—Britain. The use of diverse qualities of chords with frequent modulations in “The

Amorous Goldfish” accords with the rich harmonic language of the Western musical tradition. Meanwhile, Chinaman Wun-Hi’s “Chin Chin Chinaman” presents narrow-range melodies over the repetitive harmonic pattern of tonic, subdominant, and dominant that reflects the image of unsophisticated and oversimplified non-Western music. O-Mimosa- san’s song particularly follows the musical style of Gilbert and Sullivan’s Savoy Opera, which was enjoyed by the British middle class. In contrast, Wun-Hi’s singing evokes the sound of a raucous music hall, largely identified with the low class. Here, Wun-Hi becomes “the Other” when O-Mimosa-san becomes “Us,” a distinction reinforced by their different musical identities.19

19 The scores in Example 5-4 are from Frances G. Spencer Collection of American Popular Sheet Music. Crouch Fine Arts Library, Baylor University. Waco, Texas. For the score of “The Amorous Goldfish,” visit the link: https://digitalcollections-baylor.quartexcollections.com/Documents/Detail/the-amorous-goldfish- song-no.-5-mimosa/26886. For the score of “Chin Chin Chinaman,” visit the link: https://digitalcollections- baylor.quartexcollections.com/Documents/Detail/chin-chin-chinaman-song-no.-24-wun-hi-and- chorus/26895.

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Example 5-4. Scores of “The Amorous Goldfish” and “Chin Chin Chinaman.”

With the opening of Japan, the Western public became more acquainted with

Japanese culture and society. Their initial image of the Japanese geisha was changing from a seventeenth-century prostitute, seen in Japanese erotic prints ‘shunga (春画),’ to an elegant, intelligent, and pleasant woman, commonly seen as one of “Us.” Direct encounters with Japanese intellectuals allowed Westerners to acknowledge Asian people as neighbors and to diminish their Orientalist attitudes. Indeed, Western society was ready to welcome Sadayakko as a celebrity.

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Marketing Ambivalent Exoticism

In Japan, Sadayakko was a highly Westernized geisha and followed the new

Western fashions introduced to Japan.20 When the Kawakami troupe arrived in the

West, however, artists, composers, and play writers focused on her “oriental” images and used Sadayakko as a model for a Far Eastern woman in their creative works.

Instead of removing the fixed images, Sadayakko rather used them strategically.

Sadayakko’s biographer Lesley Downer states, “Sadayakko was an adept at manipulating her own story. . . Sadayakko could re-create herself and project any image she liked.”21 Dance scholar Shelley C. Berg claims that Sadayakko built two identities:

‘accessible, knowable, and familiar’ and ‘remote and enigmatic.’22 Although Sadayakko was a “modern” woman in Japan, enjoying Western lifestyle, she was a submissive

Oriental woman and exotic geisha on Western stages, where the audiences neither knew her past nor understood her language.

Sadayakko’s look was considered exotic in both Japan and the West. While

Western media emphasized her East Asian look for being different from Caucasians, her appearance in Japan looked Western and therefore exotic. Downer describes the traits of Sadayakko’s face in a position of the Japanese: “[Sadayakko] had a certain foreign cast to her features. Her nose was unusually straight and long, her lips full, delicately shaped, and rather sensual. But it was her large eyes that were the most

20 Yukichi Fukuzawa (1835-1901), a leading advocate of Westernization in Japan, published a book about Western culture, The Clothing, Food, and Dwellings of the West (西洋衣食住), in 1867. In this book, he sketched uniforms, shoes, hats, and even umbrellas. The Digital Collections of Keio University Libraries provides the PDF of the book: https://iiif.lib.keio.ac.jp/FKZ/F7-A06/pdf/F7-A06.pdf.

21 Downer, Madame Sadayakko, 4.

22 Berg, “Sada Yacco in London and Paris, 1900,” 397.

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extraordinary.”23 Meanwhile, the Everybody’s Magazine published in New York, 1900 praised Sadayakko’s “perfect” Oriental beauty and described her features as:

She [Madame Yacco] is Japan’s greatest geisha, and a perfect type of Oriental beauty, showing the fine, long, oval face with prominent well- chiseled features, deep-sunken eye-sockets, oblique eyelids, elevated and arched eyebrows, high and narrow forehead, rounded nose, a bird-like mouth, pointed chin, and small hands and feet.24

Sadayakko’s “straight and long nose” in Japan changed into a “rounded nose” in the

West, where her “oblique eyelids” got more attention than her extraordinary “large eyes.” Consequently, in either culture, she was alluring by her exotic look. Downer adds comments on Sayadakko’s two eyes: “The left was flat like a Japanese eye, but the right had a crease, like a Western eye.” 25 The dual mechanism of her exotic beauty, metaphorically expressed as one Western eye and one Japanese eye, captivated both the Western and Japanese audiences. Those were the years when the West was encountering a “Japan craze,” while Japan was craving for all things from the West at the same time.

In his dissertation on Swedish opera singer Jenny Lind (1820-87), Michael

Durwin Coleman emphasizes the interplay of celebrities, the public, and the media in constructing celebrity mythos in the nineteenth century.26 As a female celebrity from a relatively peripheral nation, Jenny Lind became a symbol of her native country, known

23 Downer, Madame Sadayakko, 12. Italics mine for emphasis.

24 The Everybody’s Magazine Volumes 1-2 (New York: The Ridgeway Company, 1900), HathiTrust Digital Library, https://hdl.handle.net/2027/umn.319510009010966?urlappend=%3Bseq=717. Italics mine for emphasis.

25 Downer, Madame Sadayakko, 12.

26 Michael Durwin Coleman, “Media(ting) Jenny Lind: Representing Celebrity in Nineteenth Century Sweden” (PhD diss., University of California, Berkeley, 2005).

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as the “Swedish Nightingale” in the international arena. Coleman outlines the functional mechanism that defined her Swedishness to both Swedish and international audiences.

Likewise, Sadayakko, who came from a remote place, became a representative of

Eastern beauty and a symbol of East Asian women in the early twentieth-century West.

Figure 5-1. Sadayakko in Japanese and Western clothes.

Construction of A Celebrity Actress

Europe and North America had the first generation of celebrity actresses with the rise of public theaters in big cities, and Ellen Terry (1847-1928) from England and Sarah

Bernhardt (1844-1923) from France were the most celebrated names from a golden age for actresses in the mid-nineteenth to early-twentieth centuries. The advent of the popular press from the nineteenth century introduced everyday individuals to the masses, which established the celebrity culture. Yumito Kushibiki (1859-1924), a

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Japanese émigré, owned a teahouse in Atlantic City, where tea girls in kimono served tea and dessert. Kushibiki had ambitions to be an international impresario. He proposed a performance tour to Kawakami that began in San Francisco and ended up at his teahouse. Kushibiki was familiar with the customs of American society, where actresses were publicly worshiped like goddesses and played an important part onstage.27 He utilized the press as a marketing tool, and the San Francisco Call published an article,

“Madame Yacco, the Ellen Terry of Japan, Soon to Appear Here” in May 20, 1899, a day before the Kawakami troupe’s arrival.28 Kushibiki treated the Kawakami couple as international superstars and purposely reserved the best hotel, where many celebrities including Sarah Bernhardt were known to stay.

The special conditions of the time and place made Sadayakko an international celebrity actress of mythic proportions. The San Francisco Chronicle put her on the same level with Western celebrity actresses: “Yacco demanded and received an income which would not be despised by a modern prima donna. . . She first appeared in drama on the stage of the Kawakami Theater at Tokio.”29 In fact, Sadayakko was not an actress but merely presented at amateur plays in Japan where women were officially

27 After their performance at Chicago, Kawakami said, “. . . everyone kept calling for Sadayakko, only for Sadayakko. So while we were in that country [America], I lost my clout. But now that we are back in Japan, the land that considers man superior and woman inferior, I can walk tall again.” Quoted from Ayako Kano, Acting Like a Woman in Modern Japan: Theater, Gender, and Nationalism (New York: Palgrave, 2001), 53.

28 “Madame Yacco, the Ellen Terry of Japan, Soon to Appear Here,” The San Francisco Call, May, 20, 1899, Chronicling America: Historic American Newspapers, Lib. of Congress, https://chroniclingamerica.loc.gov/lccn/sn85066387/1899-05-20/ed-1/seq-9/.

29 “Madame Yacco, the Leading Geisha of Japan, Coming Here,” San Francisco Chronicle, May 20, 1899. Quoted from Downer, Madame Sadayakko, 95.

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prohibited from theaters between 1629 and 1891. In an interview in 1901, she recalled her unexpected debut as an actress in the West:

I was a geisha—not a teahouse geisha, but a professional singer and dancer—when I married Kawakami… I accompanied him, as did also twelve of his pupils. We sailed from Yokohama for San Francisco . . . On the very evening of the first of these representations, the pupil who took the part of the Geisha fell suddenly ill. The performance was about to be postponed, when I proposed to my husband that I should play the part of the absent actor.30

Sadayakko insisted that she had never aspired to become a professional actress. In fact, the Kawakamis knew the encouraging trend of celebrity actresses in the West and packed her kabuki costumes for their first performance tour. Without professional acting experiences, Sadayakko developed her own style of movements based on her dance skills. On Western stages, the language barrier worked positively in magnifying her body movements. Westerners focused on her exquisite gestures, a blending of

“dramatic power, symbolic import, and artful visual design.”31

Sadayakko’s fame and her exotic attraction brought her commercial success.

The perfume company Guerlain launched a product named “Yacco” in homage to her, and the boutique Au Mikado released “Kimono Sada Yacco,” shown its advertisement in

Figure 5-2.32 In A Short History of Celebrity (2010), Fred Inglis regards mid-eighteenth- century London as a starting point of the celebrity phenomenon and provides three underlying forces composing celebrity. First, the new consumerism of eighteenth-

30 Sada Yacco, “Sada Yacco,” Parisian Illustrated Review 10 (1901), 55-57.

31 Berg, “Sada Yacco: The American Tour,” 148.

32 The advertisement of “Kimono Sada Yacco” was published in the magazine Je Sais Tout: Encyclopèdie Mondiale Illustreè v. 2 (Publications Pierre Lafitte, Paris: Aug. 1906-Jan. 1907), HathiTrust Digital Library, https://hdl.handle.net/2027/nyp.33433081729570?urlappend=%3Bseq=1008.

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century London; second, the invention of the fashion industry with department stores to match mid-nineteenth-century Paris; third, the mass circulation of writing about the city life of New York and Chicago.33 Sadayakko was fortunate to meet those requirements to be a Western celebrity. First, she was exposed to the London consumers; second, the trend of Yacco fashion won popularity in Paris; third, her story hit newspaper headlines.

Figure 5-2. Advertisement of “Kimono Sada Yacco.”

33 Fred Inglis, A Short History of Celebrity (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2010), 9.

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Sadayakko’s later interviews and comments reveal more of her strong-willed character, daring to propose her performance despite the prohibition of women in public theaters in Japan. In the West, Sadayakko experienced first-wave feminism and met female activists, which motivated her to recreate an image of a strong and active woman, much like Western celebrity actresses.

Fuller’s Hybrid Production

There were female modernists in European and American art circles who directly supported Sadayakko’s career. Modern dancer Loie Fuller (1862-1928) moved from

America to Paris in 1893 and made her name with a symbolic serpentine dance, consisting of whirling textiles and lighting effects. Her unprecedented choreography, revolutionizing the conventional notions of dance and ballet, fascinated fin-de-siècle

Paris where avant-garde experiments surged in creative circles. By 1900, Fuller became a central figure in artistic movements and was able to have her own theater

“Théâtre Loïe Fuller” at the Paris Exposition in 1900. She designed the theater in the style of Art Nouveau—a reaction against the academic art by stressing on natural forms, such as the sinuous curves of flowers and women—and wished to synthesize music, dance, and décor. When Fuller saw the Kawakami troupe’s performance at Buckingham

Palace in London, she felt that the “imperial” troupe would enchant the Parisian public.

Fuller went to persuade Kawakami and was able to invite the troupe to her theater on

July 4, 1900. She promoted Sadayakko as a legitimate ambassador of Far Eastern culture and emphasized the value of the Kawakami troupe by exaggerating the expenses of their dance costumes and transportation costs.34 Fuller hosted the

34 Scholz-Cionca, “Japanese Shows for Western Markets,” 51.

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Kawakami couple in luxury hotels and organized frequent interviews, press conferences, and photograph sessions in hotel lobbies.

Figure 5-3. Loïe Fuller Theatre at the Paris Universal Exposition of 1900.

Stanca Scholz-Cionca regards Fuller as a cultural translator between the East and the West, who had an overarching vision of a theatrical style transcending East-

West polarities.35 Fuller supervised the Kawakami troupe’s performance and persuaded

Kawakami to include a ritual suicidal scene of harakiri (腹切り; literally meaning

‘abdomen cutting’) in every performance to satisfy Parisian theatergoers. A review in the

London Times recounted that Sadayakko’s gruesome act and the gory suicide scene

35 Scholz-Cionca, “Japanese Shows for Western Markets,” 46-61.

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transformed the Japanese woman’s image from a “dancing doll with the impassive face and fixed smile” into “Japanese Clytemnestra, a pallid, haggard, disheveled figure of vengeance.”36 Sadayakko’s tragic death scenes received captive attention from artistic figures such as André Gide, Auguste Rodin, and Claude Debussy. Pablo Picasso sketched Sadayakko’s performances, and symbolist poet Jean Lorrain praised that

Sadayakko’s performance was the most precious souvenir from the Exposition.37 Berg argues that for the Western artistic and literary communities, the Kawakami troupe’s performance at Fuller’s theater must have seemed the “ultimate experience of japonisme.”38

36 London Times, May 24, 1900. Quoted from Kawaguchi, Butterfly’s Sisters, 162.

37 Berg, “Sada Yacco: The American Tour,” 158.

38 Berg, “Sada Yacco in London and Paris,” 371.

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Figure 5-4. Picasso’s La Danseuse Sada Yacco (1901) and Sada Yacco (1901).

Sadayakko’s performance in Fuller’s production influenced Western female modernist dancers, such as Ruth St. Denis and Isadora Duncan, and even Ellen Terry and Sarah Bernhardt studied Sadayakko’s acting and body gestures. For the pioneering dancers who pursued new aesthetics, Sadayakko’s movements looked like a fusion of dance and drama, and her symbolic gestures of Japanese traditional theater were adopted as an avant-garde expression. After seeing Sadayakko’s performance at the

Exposition, Ruth St. Denis wrote in her autobiography that “I beheld and understood the beautiful austerities of Japanese art . . . antithesis of the flamboyant, overblown exuberance of American acrobatics.”39 Under the supervision of Fuller, Sadayakko’s

39 Ruth St. Denis, An Unfinished Life (New York and London: Harper and Brothers, 1939), 40.

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performance became the inspiration of freedom and creativity with unlimited possibilities to the Western theater.

Fuller directed a hybrid show with the Kawakamis and turned it into an accessible product to be sold in a modern global market. By hosting the Kawakami troupe, Fuller shaped European perception of Japanese theatricality during the first decades of the twentieth century. Fuller’s aesthetic vision, proposing a femme-fatale image of

Sadayakko, provided a different type of an East Asian woman to the West, which went beyond Orientalism.

Performing East Asian Culture as Feminism

Judith Gautier (1845-1911), a female activist, played an important role in disseminating the plays and music of the Kawakami troupe to the French public. Gautier had written reviews on the decorative arts exhibited in the Paris Expositions of 1867 and

1878, and in the Exposition of 1900, she wrote about Asian music and dance. Her publication Les musiques bizarres à l’Exposition de 1900, the most widely selling program booklet of the Exposition, covered Chinese, Japanese, Indochinese, Egyptian,

Javanese, and Madagascan music. In the fourth volume on Japanese music, Gautier provided French translations of the synopsis and dialogues of the Kawakami troupe’s shows with her own annotations.40

Gautier reached a high level of professional recognition among French cultural elites and was able to maintain an independent life owing to her prolific writings. Her father Théophile Gautier (1811-1872), a well-known art critic and writer, encouraged her

40 Judith Gautier, Les musiques bizarres a l’Exposition de 1900, volume 4 (Paris: Librairie Ollendorff, 1900), https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k1180641m.

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to compose salon essays from a young age. Based on her interests in escapism and

Richard Wagner’s music, she wrote articles, reviews, and exotic novels. In late nineteenth-century France, modernist artists, writers, and poets including Gautier stood against the mediocrity of bourgeois life by constructing the romantic fascination of an imaginary Orient. As a fervent proponent of East Asian culture, Gautier translated classic Chinese poetry and published the translations of Japanese poems in Poèmes de la Libellule (1884). In addition to her literary activities, she practiced East Asian culture by sculpting Buddha figures, wearing Chinese dresses or Kimonos, and setting a

Chinese living room, where she entertained her guests by tea parties with Asian desserts.

Gautier acted differently from what was expected for her gender and cultivated her own image as an outsider. She stated, “I am Chinese. I have no literary salon and I live alone. . . I have lived alone, independent, and I’m growing old independent, and I shall die independently. All my life, I shall be a sort of Far Eastern woman detached from her time and setting.”41 Art historian Véronique Chagnon-Burke points out that

Gautier’s way of life demonstrates late nineteenth-century feminism: if a woman escaped the social constraints imposed on her gender, she could participate fully in the cultural life of her day.42 Chagnon-Burke argues that Gautier’s European readers were able to project their fantasies toward a utopia through her constructed character, which was made up of diverse cultural elements. For some intellectual women engaging in the

41 Quoted from Véronique Chagnon-Burke, “Appendix 2: Judith Gautier (1845-1917), Mme Catulle Mendès, Judith Walter (peud.), F. Chaulnes (pseud.),” in Women Art Critics in Nineteenth-Century France: Vanishing Arts, edited by Wendelin Guentner (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2013), 293.

42 Véronique Chagnon-Burke, ““Tel père, telle fille”: Judith Gautier, Artist, Author, and Art Critic,” in Women Art Critics in Nineteenth-Century France: Vanishing Arts, 237-57.

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modernist movement in Euro-American art circles, Japonisme became a way of practicing nineteenth-century feminism.

Some art historians have made the connection between Japonisme and feminism. In the book The Japan Idea: Art and Life in Victorian America (1990), William

Hosley explains that one of the late nineteenth-century trends for American women was to decorate household interiors, and Japanese motifs and import objects were central to this practice.43 With the increasing availability of industrial products, Japanese objects were prized as handmade representations of artisan culture, and idealized as anti- commodities. Hosley argues that Japonisme was not only a craze for exotic objects but also a demonstration of international cultural knowledge as a means of self-definition.

He focuses on the overlapping timing of Japonisme and the women’s suffrage movement. Hosley writes:

The most visceral and distinctive art produced by Americans during the Japan craze came at the point where that craze intersected with the women’s suffrage movement. On the surface, gender politics may not appear to have played a vital role in the arts of Victorian America; but if we scratch beneath the rhetoric and look at some facts and figures, it becomes immediately apparent that the Japan craze, the push behind art education, and indeed, the entire market for art products in the Japanese taste were byproducts of the changing status of women in Victorian life.44

In the book Modern Dwellings published in 1878, Henry Hudson Holly encouraged the entry of women in public affairs: “There is, indeed, no reason why women should not become proficient, and be employed in all the industrial arts.”45

43 William Hosley, The Japan Idea: Art and Life in Victorian America (Harford, CT: Wadsworth Atheneum, 1990), 161-82.

44 Hosley, The Japan Idea, 161.

45 Henry Hudson Holly, Modern Dwellings (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1878), 216-17.

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Progressive male critics and women of a privileged class espoused opening careers in art for women, and Japonisme suggested an ideal direction for female artists. In such situations, it was not a difficult task for Sadayakko to elevate her social status and to join the ranks of the intelligent and artistic performers in Western high culture.

The Kawakamis’ Performing Art as High Culture

Drama scholar Tara Rodman focuses on modern consumers in Boston, who had a dual belief of particularity and universality when appreciating Japanese arts.46

Rodman ascribes the high value of Japanese art to the journal ‘Artistic Japan,’ published monthly from May 1888 to April 1891 in French, German, and English. The journal presented not only Japanese woodblock prints but also everyday objects of

Japan such as hair combs, swords, theater masks, and textiles, and promoted the readers’ education to evaluate Japanese arts with a critical point of view. The active education and connoisseurship of Japanese visual arts among Bostonians transferred to Japanese theater with the arrival of the Kawakami troupe.

Rodman pays attention to the role of a Japanese merchant and art dealer,

Bunkio Matsuki (1867-1940), who had encouraged Bostonians to appreciate contemporary Japanese arts as modern and therefore valuable. When the Kawakami troupe arrived, Matsuki took over their management in Boston. He sold the tickets of their shows at his art store, filled the stage with his store goods and also sold them in the theater lobby. Rodman claims that Matsuki contextualized the Kawakamis’ performance in relation to Boston’s Japonisme by encouraging elite audiences to learn

46 Tara Rodman, “A Modernist Audience: The Kawakami Troupe, Matsuki Bunkio, and Boston Japonisme,” Theatre Journal 65, no. 4 (2013): 489-505.

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about the value of Japanese arts and then apply their artistic knowledge to a live performance, which was ultimately intended to advertise his store. Consequently, the spectatorship of the performance of the Kawakami troupe became a high standard of cultural life in Boston.

Boston critics described the shows of the Kawakami troupe as modernistic and realistic and regarded their performance style as the result of serious training and artistic skills. In December 9, 1899, the Boston Post wrote:

There is much in the acting of these artists [performers in the Kawakami troupe] from Japan that it might well profit our own actors to study. They are virile, wonderfully graceful in movement, extraordinary in their naturalness yet expressiveness of gesture and attitude, as well as in their absolute freedom from anything savoring of ranting, sometimes more inelegantly known in these parts as “scene chewing.”47

Sociologist Paul DiMaggio points out that while the Boston Museum of Fine Arts and the

Boston Symphony Orchestra provided the reliable spaces of high art for visual art and music, there was no such sanctioning institution for the theater by the turn of the century.48 For Bostonians, the performers in the Kawakami troupe demonstrated the image of skilled artisans in early twentieth-century modern theater.

Conclusion

Sadayakko’s appearance in the early twentieth-century West changed the idea about the geisha from a seventeenth-century prostitute in Japanese erotic prints to an intelligent and artistic performer. Her performance strongly impacted Western performing arts and theatrical genres, and her individuality had a positive effect on the

47 “The Japanese Play,” Boston Post, December 9, 1899. Quoted from Rodman, “A Modernist Audience,” 503.

48 Paul Dimaggio, “Cultural Entrepreneurship in Nineteenth-Century Boston: The Creation of an Organizational Base for High Culture in America,” Media, Culture & Society 4, no. 1 (1982): 33–50.

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image of East Asian women in high culture and its representations in artworks. Dance scholar Shelly C. Berg states:

She [Sadayakko] became in effect, the embodiment of a constellation of contemporaneous artistic and cultural discourses; the fin-de-siècle vogue for Japonisme and art nouveau, the Symbolist fascination with the exotic and the fantastical, and the complex image of the female performer at the beginning of the twentieth century. In addition, at a time when American and trans-European feminism was in the ascendant, Yacco, both Japanese and a former geisha, was a feminist phenomenon.49

Sadayakko was a beneficiary of the artistic and cultural discourses that brought success to the Kawakamis. For Western artists and writers looking for a fresh inspiration,

Sadayakko was a new type of model: accessible but remote, familiar but enigmatic. She was a character from a different space. Through the process of Sadayakko’s rise as an international celebrity, we find the positive awareness of East Asian cultures among intellectuals in fin-de-siècle Europe and America, which consequently impacted the modernity of diverse artistic fields.

49 Berg, “Sada Yacco: The American Tour,” 149.

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CHAPTER 6 CONCLUSION: A PROPOSAL FOR ADDRESSING THE RECEPTIONS OF EAST ASIAN MUSIC AND CULTURE

In the previous chapters, I trace the affirmative receptions of East Asian art, music, and people that were performed in the early twentieth-century European musical scenes. I challenge music research with Orientalism, which only preoccupies itself with superficial musical borrowings but cannot show the structural impact of East Asian culture in Western modern music. The idea of East Asia was instrumental for

Stravinsky, Ravel, and Delage, who looked for a solution to secure their positions in the social and political upheavals of fin-de-siècle Paris. Stravinsky tried to socialize with

Parisians and accepted Japanese materials from Delage; Ravel freed himself from

French academicism by constructing an imaginary Asia, which made him pre-eminent among Debussystes; Delage proved himself as a professional composer by establishing his musical originality with Asian materials. Their attitudes toward East Asia were not

Orientalist but receptive and attentive, which benefitted their formations of avant-garde musical languages and aesthetics. If we are to understand the use of Asian materials in

Western music, we need to look for the internal evidence from those materials. The close examination of their song cycles demonstrates that the composers transformed mediums—from art to music, or from poetry to music—to supplement the shortage of authenticity in the foreign source materials that they had in Paris. However, the dominance of Orientalism discourses in music research has obscured the importance of

East Asian influence in Western music history.

The success of Said’s Orientalism (1978) has defaulted in a power struggle of the non-Western Other and led to easy conclusions about things that are, in many

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respects, a lot more complex.1 Despite W. Anthony Sheppard’s New York Times article in 2012, disclosing Puccini’s colonialist attitude toward East Asian culture and his use of

Chinese tunes for the Japanese characters in Madama Butterfly,2 many Japanese audiences still embrace the opera, and the folk song “Mo Li Hua” (茉莉花; meaning

‘Jasmine Flower’) is a national song in China by virtue of being borrowed in Puccini’s

Turandot. Considering the success of Puccini’s operas in East Asia, music scholars should monitor the changing receptions of global audiences and reconsider their approach beyond Orientalism.

While Western art music has always interacted with the music from other parts of the world, Europeans have constantly distinguished the foreign and exotic elements in their music history, which formed a lop-sided attitude between Western art music and the music of the others. The emphasis on the superiority of Western art music has infiltrated into the US-centric academia and spread to East Asia that has modeled itself on the American education system. During many years of my music education in South

Korea, I have been aware of the conflict between the organizations of ‘Western music’ and ‘national music’ that have avoided fundamental contacts with each other. South

Korean musicologist Yu-Jun Choi points out the colonial structure of the institutional separation in South Korean musicology, which reflects the dichotomy between

1 Edward Said, Orientalism (New York: Vintage Books, 1978).

2 W. Anthony Sheppard, “Music Box as Muse to Puccini’s ‘Butterfly,’” The New York Times, June 17, 2012, https://nyti.ms/2kttm8s.

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‘humanitas’ (Westerners as subjects of knowledge) and ‘anthropos’ (non-Westerners as objects of knowledge) in the construction of modern knowledge production.3

The academic field of Asian Studies, which originated from Oriental Studies with imperialist interests, had not included Asian scholars in dialogues until later in the discipline’s history. The autonomy of Asia was not recognized, and the idea of Asia has not been a self-defined concept in the academic field. Chinese literary scholar Hui

Wang points out the problems in the conception of Asia:

This idea [the accounts of Asia] is at the same time colonialist and anti- colonialist, conservative and revolutionary, nationalist and internationalist, originating in Europe and shaping Europe’s image of itself, closely related to visions of both nation-state and empire, a notion of non-European civilization, and a geographic category established through geopolitical relations.4

Regardless of colonial experiences, Western scholars used to consider Asia under a prototypical imperial duality between the East and the West. One of the examples is the notion of ‘colonial modernity’ that explains the construction of Asian modernity and its development in the 1920-30s. American sinologist John K. Fairbank (1907-1991) theorized Asia's colonialism as something benevolent to the region’s modernity, which brought criticisms in the 1990s. In Formations of Colonial Modernity in East Asia (1997),

Tani E. Barlow argues that colonial modernity has evolved in the historiography by US- based scholars.5

3 Yu-Jun Choi, “Modernity as Encounter in Postcolonial Korean Music,” Journal of Ewha Music Research Institute 21, no. 1 (2017): 187-216. For the discussion of ‘humanitas’ and ‘anthropos,’ see Naoki Sakai, “Theory and Asian Humanity: on the Question of Humanitas and Anthropos,” Postcolonial Studies 13, no. 4 (2010): 441-64.

4 Hui Wang, “The Politics of Imagining Asia: A Genealogical Analysis,” Inter‐Asia Cultural Studies 8, no. 1, translated by Matthew A. Hale (2007): 1-33.

5 For the further discussion on colonial modernity, see Hyunjung Lee and Younghan Cho, “Introduction: Colonial Modernity and Beyond in East Asian Contexts,” Cultural Studies 26, no. 5 (2012): 601-16.

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Indeed, Asian Studies has been subordinated to Western scholarship, lacking a communication with native Asian scholars. One of the problems in Western academia is that the voices of Asian scholars have been largely silenced because of difficulty of access and linguistic barriers. In the collection of essays, Asianisms: Regionalist

Interactions and Asian Integration (2016), German scholars in Asian Studies, Marc Frey and Nicola Spakowski, aim to reconstruct “regional constellations, intersections and relations in their [Asian] national, transnational and global contexts.”6 Here, my question arises: is it valid to reconstruct Asia’s regional constellations and propose diverse

Asianisms without “their” voice? Taiwanese sociologist Kuan-Hsing Chen problematizes the power of English in the Asian academic environment where many intellectuals read

English materials and only regard them as worthy of citation and engagement.7 He points out the crisis of knowledge in Asian countries that set Europe and the US as models for development, which caused the lack of scholarly research on the neighboring countries. Based on the idea of “Asia as method,” formulated by Japanese thinker Yoshimi Takeuchi (1910-77) in Tokyo, 1960, Chen has promoted inter-Asian projects initiated by publishing the journal Inter-Asia Cultural Studies since the late

1990s.8 He emphasizes the importance of dialogues and links among Asian critical circles by expanding their meeting points in Asia, not in North America or Europe.9

6 Marc Frey and Nicola Spakowski eds, Asianisms, Regionalist Interactions, and Asian Integration (Singapore: NUS Press, 2016), 1. Italics mine for emphasis.

7 Kuan-Hsing Chen, “Takeuchi Yoshimi’s 1960 ‘Asia as Method’ Lecture,” Inter-Asia Cultural Studies 13 no. 2 (2012): 317-24.

8 Yoshimi Takeuchi, “Asia as Method,” in What Is Modernity? Writings of Takeuchi Yoshimi, edited and translated by Richard F. Calichman (New York: Columbia University Press, 2005), 149–66.

9 Kuan-Hsing Chen, Asia as Method: Toward Deimperialization (Durham: Duke University Press, 2010), 212.

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Musicologists have criticized Orientalist representations that lacked a serious investigation of East Asian culture. Ironically, the same mistake has been made by many scholars, who simply applied existing theories but ignored the internal history and issues of East Asia. As the humanities and social sciences in the past twenty years have moved toward the global history and revisited the role of Asia, some music scholars are trying to get out from a Western music history that has been theorized in terms of Eurocentrism and framed within the US-centric scholarship. Since 2013, the

Balzan Musicology Project has promoted a global music history by supporting international researchers and publishing papers and books.10 In their publication Studies on a Global History of Music (2018), ethnomusicologist Martin Stokes points out the problems of post-colonial theory:

It [post-colonial theory’s contradictions] has purported to decentre the West, but insistently speaks a first-world theoretical language. It has advocated action, but has tended to confine itself to difficult writing. It has sought to give the subaltern a voice, even as it argues that the subaltern is doomed to colonial mimicry. It has claimed to speak globally, but tends to restrict itself to British and French colonial and post-colonial experience. It has demanded inquiry into the conditions of Western power and knowledge, but has placed the conditions of this inquiry itself outside of historical understanding.11

To have a comprehensive perspective, Stokes emphasizes the importance of ethnographical methodologies that offer learnable exemplars and connect historical and

10 Under the leadership of British musicologist Reinhard Strohm, the Balzan Musicology Project “Towards A Global History of Music” has been supported by the Balzan Foundation “Fund,” headquartered in Zurich. The purpose of this project is to explore a global history through “assembled case studies, parameters and terminologies that are suitable to describe a history of many different voices.” For overviews, visit the link: https://www.balzan.org/en/prizewinners/reinhard-strohm/research-project-strohm.

11 Martin Stokes, “Notes and Queries on ‘Global Music History,’” in Studies on a Global History of Music: A Balzan Musicology Project, edited by Reinhard Strohm (Milton: Taylor & Francis Group, 2018), 29.

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ethnographical traditions in music study.12 He argues that music research should be simultaneously historical and ethnographic in order to fully and accurately produce global histories of music.

Discussions on East Asia can be problematic if the researcher has not directly experienced the region. In the annual meetings of the American Musicological Society

(AMS) for the last five years, I have encountered more research on East Asian subjects every year, and in 2018, the Global East Asian Music Research Study Group was organized. The rising interest in East Asian culture owes to both the rapid growth of social networking services that open a channel to East Asian music and the increasing numbers of Asian American scholars in the US. Most of the musicological publications are written by Anglophone scholars or Asian scholars residing in the US. However, I doubt whether their perspectives represent the people who live their entire life in East

Asia. Min Kahng, a contemporary Korean-American playwriter and composer of musical theater, posted about the Orientalism debates of The Mikado (1885) in his blog: “… perhaps a Japanese person might attend a production of The Mikado and think it's silly and not that big of a deal. But that same production for many Asian Americans is loaded with a history of being pushed into an “other” by our society.”13 The different experiences and circumstances between Asian Americans and Asians decide their

12 Stokes, “Notes and Queries on ‘Global Music History,’” 24-37.

13 Min Kahng, “Orientalism & The Mikado,” Min Kahng: Playwright, Composer, Lyricist, March 29, 2016, assessed October 6, 2020, https://www.minkahng.com/blog/2016/3/29/orientalism-mikado. Kahng has received many awards in the Bay Area for his musical Four Immigrants: An American Musical Manga (2014), which was based on the documentary comic book Manga Yonin Shosei (漫画四人書生), published in San Francisco, 1931.

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values and beliefs, which results in different responses and evaluations about cultural borrowings.

Said explained Orientalism as a discursive system that allows scholars to cite each other, generate their own authority, and distribute their text.14 To avoid authoritarianism and another type of orientalism, I propose that US-based musicologists should adopt ethnographic methods, engage with Asian-based scholars, and consult non-English sources and references. By eliminating the blind spots in their research process and moving out of their comfort zone, musicologists would be finally able to write global music history.

14 Said, Orientalism, 23.

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BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH

Dong Jin Shin received her Ph.D. in historical musicology from the University of

Florida in December 2020. She received a bachelor’s degree in composition from

Yonsei University (Seoul, South Korea) and master’s degrees in music theory from both

Yonsei University and the University of North Texas. She has presented her research at conferences for musicology, ethnomusicology, music theory and Asian studies. In addition to research, she has worked as a church musician and published her compositions.

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