Dr. Sindhumathi Revuluri
Associate Professor of Music,
Harvard University
Harvard University
Location: Humanities 2441
19th-century France saw an explosion of writings about music. In addition to theoretical treatises and composer biographies, articles and books abounded about the musical practices of a variety of foreign locales. At the same time, musical exoticism in opera, ballet, instrumental and vocal music maintained an intense and steady popular profile. Following insights from Edward Said's seminal Orientalism, this paper pursues relationships in representation between scholarly knowledge of the foreign and imaginative portrayals through musical exoticism. I situate 19th-century French music and musical thought in their imperial and colonial context, and I consider three case studies in which sound, writing, and power collide.
Posts
