Conference Agenda

In the middle of the finale of Henriëtte Bosmans’s Piano Concertino (1928), a chromatic melody in flute and strings, spanning a tritone and marked lusingando (“alluring”), floats over a pulsing drone. The piano, percussive and quartal, fills the middle register. This evocation of the “Orient” and, as the work clarifies in other instances, specifically the Javanese gamelan – composed by a significant female composer, pianist, and critic from The Netherlands – presents a complex case of musical exoticism in the 20th century.

Bosmans’s interwar music, combining progressive international trends with a unique Dutch sensibility, was admired during her life. In her Concertino, suggestions of gamelan alongside allusions to Debussy, Stravinsky, and Milhaud undoubtedly contributed to the work’s success at the 1929 ISCM festival. Yet, after suppression by the Nazis in 1942, her music has received limited scholarly attention. Moreover, most of this scholarship connects her style to French trends, rather than placing her within more local contexts.

In this paper, I discuss intersections of the political and musical in Bosmans’s Concertino, underscoring the role Netherland-based Dutch and Indonesian intellectuals, musicians, and organizations had in shaping the musical landscape. First, after briefly introducing Bosmans and the Concertino, I contextualize the work in relation to Dutch-Indonesian “association” politics. As I argue, individuals and organizations, informed by Rabindranath Tagore’s philosophy (e.g., Noto Soeroto, Soorjo Poetro, the Indische Kunstavond, etc.), promoted an Indonesian-Dutch artistic synthesis – one that celebrated difference as much as correlation. Such a cultural politics appears even in Indonesian nationalist works, such as Soewardi Soerjaningrat’s Kinanthie Sandoong. The philosophy also inspired Dutch composers, like Bosmans, to draw out correspondences between the distinct musical traditions in their music. In fact, the unifying motives in the Concertino act not just as musical links between the work’s contrasting sections but also conceptual links between her composition professor Willem Pijper’s notion of the “germ cell” and the Javanese balungan (nuclear melody).

Second, I discuss the immediate context surrounding Bosmans’s composition. In 1928, the 25-year-anniversary celebrations of Boeatan, a gallery in The Hague that specialized in Indonesian art, led to numerous festivities and performances of Indonesian music, dance, and theatre. Columbia Records also produced recordings of the Amersterdam Indische Club kroncong ensembles in 1928. These bands, which blended jazz and popular Indonesian song, provide another point of musical association for the jazz-infused neoclassical themes in Bosmans’s Concertino.

As pogroms intensified in Central Asia (1890 ff.) and revolutionary fervor gripped Russia (1905), Armenians found themselves in a perpetual state of flight, leading many to settle in diaspora communities the world over. In Western Europe, Paris quickly established itself as the creative center of the Armenian diaspora, where writers and musicians, freed from the constraints of empire, debated the terms of Armenian national identity motivated in part by newly emergent diaspora political parties. In these years, the stakes for determining Armenian identity grew dramatically, as illustrated by the varied ways in which exiled Armenian composers represented “home” in their art music and folksong volumes, bringing forth questions regarding the efficacy of harmonization and employing pertinent themes such as exile to the newly composed repertoire. These years (the 1890s-1910s) saw Armenian musicians, in Paris as well as in Armenia, engage with authenticity discourses, exposing the two competing faces of Armenian identity: European versus Oriental, each of which held its own claims to the Armenian home. To illustrate this fraught binary, I explain how Armenian art music was constructed in the Parisian press with featured articles and score fragments (appearing in Figaro and in the monthly Société Internationale de Musique supplement among other publications). Komitas Vartabed (1869-1935), a featured author in these publications, engaged with narratives of Armenian authenticity that informed his original compositions, impacted by his fieldwork outcomes published in Paris. Lesser-known Armenian musicians educated in Paris also disseminated their musical findings in the Parisian musical press. Examining sources that have largely been excluded from Armenian Studies, this presentation shows differing versions of Armenia as represented in harmonized folksong volumes and in journal articles by both Armenian and French musicologists from the fin-de-siècle. Ultimately these musical and ethnographic sources display ambivalent and dialectical qualities reflective of fluctuations in Armenian social and cultural history during that time. I argue that these publications embody ambiguity that is not only a significant feature of Armenian musical identity but a crucial tension of Armenian cultural politics that went on to define much of the post-Genocide (1915) 20^th century.

The Orientalist craze in music, fashion, and the figurative arts has been long subject to scrutiny as a byproduct of European colonialism. While French composers were giving evocative titles to their Eastern-inspired pieces and Puccini presented rather questionable and fetishistic Asian women on the operatic stage, women’s fashion was also taking a page from the Orientalist craze. As Einav Rabinovitch-Fox has explored in her work on women’s self-fashioning in the Progressive Era, the more loose and comfortable styles associated with the Middle and Far East were staples of the New Woman’s wardrobe in the 1900s. As such, Orientalism became a means of representing Progressive ideals about women and bodily autonomy in fashion. However, this was far from the only popular display of the Other in popular culture. Popular song, as has been noted by many scholars, utilized countless racist stereotypes in attempt at maximizing commercial potential.

This paper reconsiders the Orientalist popular songs of Tin Pan Alley as not simply racist caricatures but rather tools for white women to perform alterity. The women sung about in exoticist popular songs from the Progressive era use the implied eroticism of the Oriental Other to engage in sexual transgression. Though Victorian morality waned in the first few decades of the 20^th century, such sexual exploits as those found in tunes such as “Hindu Rose” and “Cleopatricola” would still have been an affront to the propriety of the day. It is precisely because these figures have an affiliation with Otherness that their flagrant eroticism is permissible. Drawing from my analyses of the music, lyrics, and cover art, as well as select performances of early 20^th century popular song, I argue that these songs should be understood within the larger context of white women’s appropriation of Orientalism to perform Progressive ideals on women’s sexuality.