Widening the Horizon

Description

First critical examination of exoticism in music

During the 1950s and early 1960s, the musical exotica produced by performers such as Les Baxter, Martin Denny, and Arthur Lyman enjoyed international success. Widening the Horizon is the first in-depth analysis of the music and its cultural context.

Sujets

• Musique
• Culture musicale
• Musiques du monde
• Music
• International
• Cultural Studies
• Anthropology
• Musicology
• World music
• Ethnomusicology
• Multiple signal classification
• Asian Studies

Informations

• Publié par: John Libbey Publishing
• Date de parution: 22 septembre 1999
• Nombre de lectures: 2
• EAN13: 9780861969333
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 1 Mo

Extrait

WIDENING THE HORIZON
Dedicated to Amelia, who made her own wonderfully exotic sounds while assisting me in the editing of this book .
WIDENING THE HORIZON
Exoticism in Post-War Popular Music
Edited by Philip Hayward
Cataloguing in Publication Data
Widening the horizon: exoticism in post-war popular music.
Bibliography.
Includes index.
1. Popular music - History and criticism. 2. Music - Effect of multiculturalism on. 3. Exoticism in music. I. Hayward, Philip.
781.63
ISBN: 9781 86462 047 4 (Paperback)
ISBN: 9780 86196 933 3 (Electronic edition)
Published by
John Libbey Publishing Ltd, 3 Leicester Road, New Barnet, Herts EN5 5EW, United Kingdom e-mail: [e-mail] ;
web site: www.johnlibbey.com
Distributed Worldwide by
Indiana University Press, Herman B Wells Library-350, 1320 E. 10th St., Bloomington, IN 47405, USA. www.iupress.indiana.edu
1999 Copyright John Libbey Publishing Ltd. All rights reserved.
Unauthorised duplication contravenes applicable laws.
Printed and bound in the United States of America..
Contents
Editor s Note
Introduction
The Cocktail Shift: Aligning Musical Exotica Philip Hayward
Chapter 1
Korla Pandit and Musical Indianism Tim Taylor
Chapter 2
Utopias of the Tropics - The Exotic Music of Les Baxter and Yma Sumac Rebecca Leydon
Chapter 3
Martin Denny and the Development of Musical Exotica Shuhei Hosokawa
Chapter 4
Tropical Cool: The Arthur Lyman Sound Jon Fitzgerald and Philip Hayward
Chapter 5
Soy Sauce Music: Haruomi Hosono and Japanese Self-Orientalism Shuhei Hosokawa
Chapter 6
Musical Transport: Van Dyke Parks, Americana and the applied Orientalism of Tokyo Rose Jon Fitzgerald and Philip Hayward
Chapter 7
The Yanni Phenomenon Karl Neuenfeldt
Information About the Authors
Bibliography
Index
Acknowledgements
T hanks firstly to Shuhei Hosokawa, for encouraging me to edit this anthology. Further thanks are due to Rob Bowman, Claire Butkus, Brent Clough, Jackey Coyle, Mark Evans, Jon Fitzgerald, Nicholas Kent, Tony Langford, Ralph Locke, David Mitchell, Tony Mitchell, Toru Mitsui, Stuart Rogers, Aline Scott-Maxwell, Yngar Steinholt, Amy Stillman, Will Straw, Van Dyke Parks, Karen Ward, John Whiteoak and Mark Worth for their various assistances. Bruce Johnson also contributed a valuable critique of the first version of my Introduction to the volume.
Rebecca Coyle, as ever, provided all-round help, guidance and assistance; and Rosa Coyle-Hayward kept me sane and well-cuddled.
Van Dyke Parks and Stony Browder Jr. also merit acknowledgement for widening my own musical horizons during formative teenage years.
I should also note the contribution of three cities, Honolulu, Montreal and Sydney, whose clubs, bars, universities and second-hand record shops helped me to triangulate the phenomena analysed in these pages.
Research for this book was assisted, in various ways, by the departments of Media and Communication Studies and Music Studies at Macquarie University, Sydney - for which many thanks.
Editor s Note
Bibliography - the bibliographical references for individual chapters are collated on pages 192-198.
Discography - all original recordings are referred to in the body of text of individual chapters by dates. Details of relevant CD reissues/compilations of this material are included at the end of each chapter.
Internet Sources - individual articles published on world wide web sites are included (together with their web site addresses), in the book s end bibliography; general web site references are included at the end of each chapter (where relevant).
Cover photograph: Philip Hayward.
Widening the Horizon is co-published in Sydney by John Libbey and Co and Perfect Beat Publications.
Perfect Beat Publications also publish Perfect Beat - the Pacific Journal of Contemporary Music and Popular Culture .
General information about the journal can be obtained from:
The Music Office, Division of Humanities, Macquarie University, NSW 2109, Australia http://www.ccms.mq.edu.au/pbeat [e-mail]
Introduction
THE COCKTAIL SHIFT
Aligning Musical Exotica
PHILIP HAYWARD
F or anyone interested in exploring beyond the boundaries of the contemporary popular music scene, the past is a strange and wonderful place. Much of it is also a realm of amnesia. While the histories of forms such as the blues and jazz have been studiously recovered, recorded and analysed, other styles and genres remain obscure. Taste (and its politics) are the key factors here. The histories of blues and jazz have been explored by a loose association of enthusiasts, collectors and scholars. The motivation for such initiatives has been a curiosity which derives from particular combinations of personal, class and/or cultural/sub-cultural tastes 1 . Due to its reliance on such taste agendas the archaeology of popular music - both popular and academic - has been essentially arbitrary and ad hoc . While Popular Music Studies has established itself as an academic discipline in the West over the last 10-15 years, it has not identified any methodical excavation and characterisation of its historical object of study as essential to its project. Even in its most accomplished and insightful forms, it is still largely premised on the curiosity of the individual researcher/writer and the fortuities of funding, institutional enablement etc. It has therefore allowed itself to settle within a frame inherited from (traditional forms of) Art History and Literary Studies, where the gourmet aesthetic of leading practitioners creates explicit and implicit canons 2 which act as focal points for the construction of critical and/or historical discourse.
There are two principal ways of addressing this weakness in the field. One involves the external revision of the whole project. The other, a revision and displacement of the central canon and the specific analytical models which led to its establishment. Noble as the former option is, such a meta-analytical enterprise has never been attempted, nor accomplished, by a Humanities discipline - old or New - and remains a task unlikely to be undertaken by the disparate, fragmented community of scholars who constitute the global intellectual resource of Popular Music Studies. The latter is, therefore, a more realistic option, and it is within such a revisionist project that this anthology locates itself.
Given the relatively arbitrary, taste-derived model I have characterised above, it is un-surprising that the impetus to revise and/or expand the canonical grid of Popular Music Studies (or any other cultural studies field for that matter) often derives from similar impulses. One recurrent factor is synchronicity - the simultaneous re-discovery and re-emergence of interest in particular historical phenomena in various cultural and geographical locations 3 . I write (and edit) from experience here. During the early 1990s I spent considerable time researching aspects of inter-cultural musical collaborations in the Australia/Western Pacific region since the end of World War Two. The historical trail proved rich and complex and I often veered off to follow tantalising, seductive paths into adjacent cultural and geographical areas. During this period I first became aware of the broad genre of musical exotica popularised by musicians such as Les Baxter, Martin Denny, Arthur Lyman, Korla Pandit, Yma Sumac and others 4 (to which the opening chapters of this book are addressed). If I had ever been aware of this music as a child, I had not recalled it; nor did subsequent encounters trigger any such memories. This made it all the more enticing, a shadowy history, only thinly covered by the sands of time, still retrievable.
Two particular accounts, which arose from research interviews I conducted in 1992, whetted my appetite to explore further:
It was completely wild ! Growing up in Turramurra [a northern suburb of Sydney, Australia], in the 1960s, having family dinner together, and my father would put on Arthur Lyman s Taboo - or similar records - and while you d be eating you d have these birds and rhythms and odd noises bells and whatever and you would be carrying on a regular, everyday conversation like it was all normal ! It sounds pretty odd now but it was one of those things at the time . 5
I thought it was wild, really out there , when I first heard it. It was like they [Martin Denny and Arthur Lyman] were trying all these crazy, crazy things (all at once). I don t know whether it reminded me of growing up [in Papua New Guinea], and whether that s why I liked it I don t know but you d have to say it sounded pretty weird, even for Melbourne! 6
Together with such comments, a particular silence attracted my attention - the silence which represents the academic disdain for musical exotica which prevailed from the 1950s to the near-present.
In 1994 I visited Hawai i on a brief research visit. While there, I met with several leading Hawaiian-based ethnomusicologists, all of whom extended me considerable hospitality. Late one afternoon, drinking a beer in a Waikiki hotel cocktail bar, I looked over my companion s shoulder and was immediately transfixed. A small, unassuming sign stated Tuesday Night - Arthur Lyman . I had thought that he was dead. Why else would such a stylistically remarkable, prolific and (once) so-popular musician have vanished from the critical map ? I immediately began questioning my companion about Lyman. How often and where did Lyman perform ? Where had he been, all the long years since his heyday ? Was he in good health ? etc. etc. While studiously polite, my companion was obviously both bemused by the intensity of my inquiries and far less interested in Lyman, who he appeared to perceive as an ever-present and largely unremarkable figure operating within Honolulu s hotel culture 7 . Despite this relative indifference I pursued this academic, and a more senior colleague of his, by e-mail and airm