Music and the Exotic from the Renaissance to Mozart

Ralph P. Locke is Professor and former Chair of Musicology at the University of Rochester's Eastman School of Music. His previous books are Music, Musicians, and the Saint-Simonians (1986), Musical Exoticism: Images and Reflections (Cambridge, 2009) and the co-edited Cultivating Music in America: Women Patrons since 1860 (1997). He has published numerous articles and book chapters, and contributed to major reference works, including Grove Dictionary of Music and American National Biography. His study of conceptions of the exotic Other in Verdi's opera Aida (Cambridge Opera Journal) won the H. Colin Slim Award from the American Musicological Society.

Part I. Introduction: A Rich and Complex Heritage: 1. Images and principles; 2. Exotic in style?: paradigms and interpretations; Part II. The West and its Others: 3. The early cultural background; 4. Encounters; Part III. Songs and Dance-Types: 5. Popular songs; 6. Dances and instrumental styles from (or 'from') elsewhere; Part IV. Exotic Portrayals on Stage, in Concert, in Church: 7. Courtly ballets; 8. Distinctive developments in Venice and other Italian cities and courts; 9. Oratorio and other religious genres; 10. Early opera and partly sung stage-works; 11. French and Italian serious opera, especially Lully and Handel; 12. Eighteenth-century comic operas and short danced works; 13. Obsession with the Middle East: from the Parisian fairs to Mozart; Afterword: a helpfully troubling term.