East meets West

It would have been a cliché to say that the East and the West have enriched each other through their interaction, had it not been so very true!

Western composers , when presented with Oriental music, have incorporated and celebrated the influences for years. Starting from the Turkish themes in works by Mozart (All Turca, Die Entfuhrung aus dem Serail) and Rossini (L'italiana in Algeri), composers have gradually been exposed to the Middle and even the Far East.

In an earlier essay, I have described the often stereotypic way that Western tunes are Orientalised by the odd quivering flute/ violin, making the mundane sound sinuous and mysterious. Witness Verdi’s Aida & Othello and Rimsky-Korsakov’s Scheherazade.

Of course the Russians had an Eastern influence from very early on: half of the country is in Asia after all! It served as an integral part of their nationalist heritage, hence works like Balakirev’s Islamey suite and Borodin’s Bogatyr (2^nd) symphony.

Towards the early part of the 20^th century, Japanese and Polynesian cultures hit the West in a big way, with their distinctive prints and rhythms . The French Impressionists, in particular, Debussy and Ravel were entranced & sprayed their music with these exotic new sounds.

At the same time, Eastern culture, as a whole was starting to enter the Western consciousness: they say Beethoven and Goethe read the Vedantas; but by the 19^th century definitely, thanks to the Western Orientalist scholars like Max Muller and William Jones, Indian philosophy had reached the West. By the 20^th century, of course, began the great journeys of the great Indian thinkers to Western shores: Tagore and Vivekananda and later Gandhi.

A work that stands out in the mainly colouristic background of Eastern influences on Western music, is Alexander Zemlinsky’s Lyric Symphony, which is basically a set of 4 orchestral Lieder settings of poems from Tagore’s Gitanjali. Nothing could be farther from Tagore’s own Rabindrasangeet than this lugubrious, heavy-footed work but it has undoubted nobility of purpose.

Tagore himself, of course, spent much of his youth in England, from where the folksong influence on his music and poetry has been much documented. He was also undoubtedly influence by classical music of the West as well, his older brother Jyotirindranath after all, being something of an aficionado. His Nrityanatyas (Dance Dramas), such as Balmiki Prativa and Chandalika, could only have been written by someone deeply interested in and aware of Western opera and ballet.

By the middle of the 20^th century, the gates between Europe and Asia had fallen open, thanks to musicians like Yehudi Menuhin and George Harrison, who collaborated extensively with Ravi Shankar, the legendary sitarist: unique hybrid works such as Shankar’s and Andre Previn’s Sitar Concertos were born through this interaction.

Western classical music has continued to have a huge influence on Eastern thinkers and auteurs. Satyajit Ray was possibly the first Mahlerian in India as far back as the 1960s when Mahler was still something of an exotic composer in the West; he composed many of his own soundtracks and many of his themes carry Mahler’s influence, including the perennially popular theme tune of his detective films about Felu Da and his fantasy musicals Goopy Gyne Bagha Byne and Hirok Rajar Deshe.

In this era of World Music, it is important to understand how it came to be, about the gradual two-way organic nature of its evolution and to appreciate that it is no mere marketing gimmick but a result of the artist’s natural curiousity and openness about the world around him…