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Western Middle-East Music Imagery in the Face of Napoleon's Entreprise in Egypt: From Mere Eurocentric Exocitism, to very Organized Orientalistic Ears
Stefano A. E. Leoni
; Conservatorio Statale di Musica "G.Verdi", Torino and LAMuSA, Fac. Sociologia, Università degli Studi di Urbino "C.Bo", Italija
Sažetak
Musical Orientalism is just a way to see, or rather to construct, the oriental otherness (or Otherness, tout court). According with E. Said, it is the image of the "Orient" expressed as an entire system of thought and scholarship; it's the discourse on East by the West, that in its modern, global stage, began with the Napoleonic invasion of Egypt in 1798 and coincided with modern cultural French-British imperialism just at the age of Napoleonic enterprise and his regime. Napoleon carefully prepared this Campaign, managed it with diplomatic sagacity and bore his image out as un Mahomet d'occident.
La Description de l'Égypte, edited by Edme-François Jomard (1777-1862), was published in Paris, from 1809 to 1826, as the result of that Campaign; among these pages we can find some musical essays by Guillaume Andr. Villoteau, a member of the savants group led by Napoleon in Egypt on his flagship called Orient, who studied in loco the ethnomusical heritage. His report (De l'état actuel de l'art musical en Egypte, ou relation historique et descriptive des recherches et observations faites sur la musique en ce pays) had to stick the generalities for some reason; nevertheless, even only from reading his memoirs, the idéologues influence on him appears: in putting on one side preconceived theories and in referring to data acquired on the field - even though he maintains the ineluctable "orientalistic" attitude we saw underneath.
Bonaparte's landmark in preparing his Campaign were the texts by the Comte de Volney. He reproposed the set of usual stereotypes facing the Eastern music too: the dream, the "oriental" imagery of the West, made with purity, weakness, effeminacy, melancholy, sin, barbarism, ambiguousness, backwardness: the warped lens through the collective imagery of the European travelers has gone on in seeing and telling the East. However, with the Egypt Enterprise, and even before, with the French postrevolutionary repercussions, something changed, they were a crossroad that transformed this collective, unconscious acknowledgement of the East in a real meaning-producing machine, to which even Ali Bey (alias Domènec Badia i Leblich) would yield. He was a traveler under Arabic identity, freemason, adventurer, a spy serving the Spanish Government; he kept his Arabic identity even when he wrote his reports and he stated he want to compile an essay on Oriental music compared to the Western one too.
Moreover, we have interesting sources, from the Count de Volney, to Alexander Dumas Sr., from an anonymous "Officer of the British Army", to the Baron Dominique Vivant Denon, to the Private Secretary to General Bonaparte, Louis Antoine Fauvelet de Bourrienne. The 19th century opened between methodical descriptivism and ideological assumptions making the basic universalistic mind prevailing (and thwarting any attempt of objective relationship with Arab cultural otherness) and marking the discourse on oriental music by the West. A discourse today not yet completely faded, maybe.
Ključne riječi
musical orientalism; western travelers; Napoleon; Egypt Campaign; Villoteau; Ali Bey; Vivant Denon; William Doyle; Alexander Dumas Sr.; Arabic music; music imagery
Hrčak ID:
87499
URI
Datum izdavanja:
31.8.2007.
Posjeta: 1.446 *