Culminating in rich portrayals of Scheherazade by Rimsky-Korsakov and Ravel, the \u2018exotic\u2019 Orient inspired countless composers, says Stephen Johnson <\/p>
I once introduced a series of concerts in Leighton House, home of the Victorian artist Frederic Leighton, set in a secluded part of Kensington.<\/span><\/strong><\/p>\n In effect it\u2019s a grand artist\u2019s studio, replete with the kind of images and artefacts to set a creative mind working. At its heart is the stunning Arab Hall, filled with textiles, pottery and images Leighton collected during his trips to Turkey, Syria, Egypt and Damascus in the 1860s and \u201970s, and furnished with exquisite tiles, mosaics and marbles mostly made in London but closely modelled on the kind of things Leighton had seen during his Middle-Eastern travel.<\/span><\/p>\n There\u2019s a contemporary school of thought that says that Western Europeans like me should feel uncomfortable about all this. And I do \u2013 a little. Since the publication of Edward Said\u2019s provocative book Orientalism<\/i> in 1978 there\u2019s been a lot of discussion \u2013 some of it pretty rancorous \u2013 about how objects like Leighton House allegedly reflect a patronising attitude to the East on the part of greedy, power-intoxicated Western colonial minds. <\/span><\/p>\n It doesn\u2019t matter whether Leighton took these objects from the Middle East or had them made: this is what would now be called \u2018cultural appropriation\u2019, part of a mindset that could once countenance the actual appropriation of real people. \u00a0<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n But sitting in Leighton\u2019s beautiful, strangely peaceful house, that hardly seemed to explain all of it. Has the idea that imitation can be the sincerest form of flattery been entirely superseded? Inevitably thoughts led on to music: to the wealth (that really is the word) of remarkable European art music which, in different ways, has also looked to the East for inspiration and, often, creative liberation.\u00a0<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n It\u2019s a story that changes over the years. The first stirrings of musical interest in the non-Christian East can be heard in the now faintly risible use of \u2018Turkish\u2019 instruments \u2013 bass-drum, triangle and cymbals \u2013 in works by late-18th- and early-19th-century Viennese composers: in Mozart<\/a><\/strong>\u2019s putatively Turkish-set opera The Seraglio<\/i> (1782) or, more surprisingly perhaps, in the choral finale of Beethoven\u2019s Ninth Symphony<\/a><\/strong>.<\/span><\/p>\nHow the East has inspired classical music<\/h2>\n