Matthew Head explores the cultural meanings of Mozart's Turkish music in the composer's 18th-century context, in subsequent discourses of Mozart's significance for 'Western' culture, and in today's (not entirely) post-colonial world. Unpacking the ideological content of Mozart's numerous representations of Turkey and Turkish music, Head locates the composer's exoticisms in shifting power relations between the Austrian and Ottoman Empires, and in an emerging orientalist project. At the same time, Head complicates a presentist post-colonial critique by exploring commercial stimuli to Mozart's turquerie, and by embedding the composer's orientalism in practices of self-disguise epitomised by masquerade and carnival. In this context, Mozart's Turkish music offered fleeting liberation from official and proscribed identities of the bourgeois Enlightenment.
| ISBN: | 9780947854089 |
| Publication date: | 28th November 2000 |
| Author: | Matthew William Head, Royal Musical Association |
| Publisher: | Routledge an imprint of Taylor & Francis |
| Format: | Hardback |
| Pagination: | 156 pages |
| Series: | Royal Musical Association Monographs |
| Genres: |
The arts: general topics Art music, orchestral and formal music Regional / International studies Society and culture: general Language: reference and general Language teaching and learning Literature: history and criticism |