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Extreme Exoticism explores the role of music in shaping American perceptions of the Japanese, the influence of Japanese music on American composers, and the place of Japanese Americans in American musical life over the past 150 years.
List of contents
- List of Illustrations
- Glossary of Japanese terms
- Introductions and Acknowledgments
- Chapter 1: "Beyond Description:" Nineteenth-Century Americans Hearing Japan
- Chapter 2: Strains of Japonisme in Tin Pan Alley, on Broadway, and in the Parlor
- Chapter 3: Japonisme and the Forging of American Musical Modernism
- Chapter 4: Two Paradigmatic Tales, Between Genres and Genders
- Chapter 5: An Exotic Enemy: Musical Propaganda in Wartime Hollywood
- Chapter 6: Singing Sayonara: Musical Representations of Japan in Postwar Hollywood
- Chapter 7: Representing the Authentic from Japanese American Perspectives
- Chapter 8: Beat and Square Cold War Encounters
- Chapter 9: Conclusions? or, Contemporary Representations and Reception
- Appendices
- Notes
- Bibliography
- Index
About the author
W. Anthony Sheppard is Marylin and Arthur Levitt Professor of Music at Williams College where he teaches courses in twentieth-century music, opera, popular music, and Asian music. His first book, Revealing Masks: Exotic Influences and Ritualized Performance in Modernist Music Theater received the Kurt Weill Prize. He has served as Editor-in-Chief of the Journal of the American Musicological Society and is now Series Editor of AMS Studies in Music (Oxford University Press).
Summary
To what extent can music be employed to shape one culture's understanding of another? In the American imagination, Japan has represented the "most alien" nation for over 150 years. This perceived difference has inspired fantasies--of both desire and repulsion--through which Japanese culture has profoundly impacted the arts and industry of the U.S. While the influence of Japan on American and European painting, architecture, design, theater, and literature has been celebrated in numerous books and exhibitions, the role of music has been virtually ignored until now.
W. Anthony Sheppard's Extreme Exoticism offers a detailed documentation and wide-ranging investigation of music's role in shaping American perceptions of the Japanese, the influence of Japanese music on American composers, and the place of Japanese Americans in American musical life. Presenting numerous American encounters with and representations of Japanese music and Japan, this book reveals how music functions in exotic representation across a variety of genres and media, and how Japanese music has at various times served as a sign of modernist experimentation, a sounding board for defining American music, and a tool for reshaping conceptions of race and gender. From the Tin Pan Alley songs of the Russo-Japanese war period to Weezer's Pinkerton album, music has continued to inscribe Japan as the land of extreme exoticism.
Additional text
In this insightful, wide-ranging book, W. Anthony Sheppard demonstrates in detail how music has helped shape the American image of Japan and the Japanese. Sheppard draws his examples from a wide range of genres, including musical theater, film, popular song, and experimental concert music. This masterful cultural history manages to be at once entertaining, deeply researched, and keenly relevant to life and public debates today.
