Refreshments will be served. Admission free. Everyone welcome.
Speaker: Derek B Scott (University of Leeds)
Abstract: Is it possible to find an Eastern Occidentalism that works in a similar ideological manner, though from an inverted perspective, to Western Orientalism? I offer a brief critique of the ways in which Occidentalism has been interpreted, before selecting in support of my own arguments examples of music from countries with historical links to the Ottoman Empire, music that might be variously described as Occidentalist, auto-Orientalist, or global fusion.
Auto-Orientalism implies knowingness and occurs when the East throws back to the West a version of the image that the West has already produced of the East. I want to revisit the idea that this is politically charged (as in Homi Bhabha’s formulation of the subaltern use of hybridity) and to understand what happens when cultural stereotypes appear to be embraced without apparent subversive intent. I also want to consider how we react to the complex sampling and mixing of styles by DJs, which attracts labels such as “global fusion” or “world beat”.
Derek B Scott is Professor of Critical Musicology and Head of the School of Music at the University of Leeds. He is the author of The Singing Bourgeois: Songs of the Victorian Drawing Room and Parlour (1989, R/2001), From the Erotic to the Demonic: On Critical Musicology (2003), Sounds of the Metropolis: The 19th-Century Popular Music Revolution in London, New York, Paris, and Vienna (2008), and Musical Style and Social Meaning (2010).
His edited volumes include Music, Culture, and Society: A Reader (2000), and The Ashgate Research Companion to Popular Musicology (2009)