British orientalism and representations of music in the long nineteenth century ideas of music, otherness, sexuality and gender in the popular arts

Abstract

This thesis explores issues of orientalism, otherness, gender and sexuality that arise in artistic British representations of non-European musicians during the long nineteenth century; it utilises recent theories of orientalism, and the subsidiary (particularly aesthetic and literary) theories both on which these theories were based and on which they have been influential. The author uses this theoretical framework of orientalism as a form of othering to analyse primary source materials in the forms of opera libretti, popular fiction and the visual arts (alongside contextualising non-fictional materials), and ๒ conjunction with musicological, literary and art theories, and thus explores how ideas of the Other were transformed over time and between different genres and artists. Section I The Musical Stage discusses elements of libretti of this period, and the occasionally contradictory ways in which the Other was represented through text and music; it particularly explores the depiction of 'Oriental' women and ideas of sexuality. Through examination of this collection of libretti, the ways in which the writers of these texts filter and romanticise the changing intellectual ideas of this era is explored. Section II Works of Fiction is a close study of the works of H. Rider Haggard, using other examples of popular fiction by his contemporary writers as contextualising material; a primary concern of this section is to investigate how music is utilised in popular fiction to other non-Europeans and in the creation of orientalised gender constructions. Section III Visual Culture is an analysis of images of music and the 'Orient' in "high art", illustrations and photography, investigating how the musical Other was visualised. Through these analyses the author considers the means by which musical concepts were employed to create a wider Orient' on the pages, stages and walls of nineteenth-century Britain.