Conference Agenda

This paper argues that MC Fioti’s 2017 Brazilian funk hit “Bum Bum Tam Tam,” which samples J. S. Bach’s Partita in A minor for solo flute (BWV 1013), reconfigures Bach through eroticism and Orientalist fantasy, revealing how the Western classical canon is perceived and resignified within a contemporary Global South context. By examining both the musical adaptation of the Partita and the narrative of the music video, I demonstrate how the exoticist approach in the video reveals a distance between Brazilian funk consumers and the work of Bach, and how this process of eroticization makes Bach’s piece more accessible to this demographic.

The song’s ostinato is constructed from five measures of the Allemande, transposed and recombined into a hypnotic, trance-inducing loop. Through repetition, emphasis on minor seconds and the tritone, and the harmonic minor inflection, the sample acquires a “mysterious” quality that sets the tone of the video’s “Arabic-like” fantasy. Using the concept of Orientalism, I analyze how the music video mobilizes stereotypical tropes, such as the genie, the harem, magic lamp, and snake-charming flutes, to situate Bach within an imagined Orient associated with irrationality, sensuality, and spellcasting. The flute becomes a supernatural, seductive object; Bach’s melody becomes a mating call.

Methodologically, the paper combines musical analysis, music-video analysis, reception evidence (including YouTube commentary), and engagement with scholarship on Orientalism. I situate this case within broader processes of appropriation and resignification in Contemporary Commercial Music, where canonical works are repurposed to serve new aesthetic and social functions.

This case complicates dominant narratives of Bach reception that center Europe and North America. In a South American peripheral reality marked by class stratification and uneven access to the Western classical tradition, Bach’s music may sound as foreign as the imagined Orient itself. The “other,” in this context, is determined not only by geography but by access to the canon. “Bum Bum Tam Tam” thus exposes both the attraction and the distance between Bach and audiences less familiar with Western art music, demonstrating how canonical authority is simultaneously reinforced and transformed in global popular culture.

As Carol Oja has shown, in the wake of the First World War the relationship between American and French modernist musical movements became increasingly close. A pivotal but overlooked figure in the emergence of this transatlantic musical modernism was the French-Canadian mezzo-soprano Eva Gauthier (1885-1958). Trained as an opera singer in Paris, Gauthier relocated to New York in 1914, where she established a reputation as an interpreter of song, with a focus on works by living composers.

Much of Gauthier's repertoire was not only modernist, but specifically exploited the modernist taste for exoticism, in settings such as Stravinsky’s Trois poésies de la lyrique japonaise, Delage’s Quatre poèmes hindous, Charles Griffes’ Five Chinese and Japanese Poems, and Bainbridge Crist’s Chinese Mother Goose Rhymes. At the same time, she had lived for four years in Java and regularly included Javanese and Malay folk song on her programs, complete with traditional costume. In the first part of this paper, I argue that though Gauthier’s performances did not often truly reflect authentic cultural practices, she positioned herself as a trusted interlocutor between Western and non-Western music. As such, she should be included among the cadre of artists whom historian of Indonesian performance Matthew Isaac Cohen has described as “reject[ing] nineteenth-century modes of spectacular Orientalism in order to engage in intimate communications with their audiences about far-away cultures.”

In the second part of this paper, I draw on recital programs, press reviews, and Gauthier’s personal papers to show that Gauthier saw the appropriation of non-Western musical techniques as an integral part of the transatlantic modernist musical project. This was not unusual among her contemporaries, but Gauthier's specific contribution was to illustrate the complementarity of the two musical traditions in practice. By performing “authentic” folk song alongside newly composed repertoire, she negotiated a shift in the understanding of Eastern music from a foreign novelty to one of many possible cultural wellsprings on which modern artists might draw. Ultimately, her case emphasizes the need to analyze female performers and the genre of song as influential arbiters of transatlantic modernist musical and cultural exchange.

Given the relatively extensive research on John Cage (1912–1992) absorbing Eastern philosophy and aesthetics, this study shifts focus to examine how East Asian composers, in responding to Cage's aesthetics, reinterpret and reshape their own musical traditions. It further explores whether such reinterpretation generates cross-cultural musical expressions imbued with subjectivity. This study proposes that Cage's misreadings of Eastern culture did not merely constitute unidirectional cultural appropriation. Instead, within the East Asian context, they were transformed into an opportunity for reflecting upon indigenous traditions and reconstructing creative subjectivity, thereby propelling active cross-cultural musical practices.

This study employs a combined methodology of textual analysis and semi-structured interviews. On the one hand, by analysing the works and theoretical writings of Cage alongside East Asian composers such as Tan Dun (b. 1957) and Tōru Takemitsu (1930–1996), it examines their distinct interpretations of Orientalism and modernist aesthetics, alongside their pathways of transformation. Concurrently, interviews with composition students from multiple music academies in China and Japan gathered affective materials concerning bodily perception, sonic experience, and aesthetic judgement during listening and compositional processes. This approach supplements the practical dimensions of creative work that textual analysis alone struggles to capture.

This study finds that East Asian composers did not passively adopt Cage's aesthetic paradigm. Instead, within their dialogue with Western modernist discourse, they selectively extracted and reconfigured cultural elements. This process transformed Eastern traditions from mere cultural material into methodological resources, ultimately becoming fundamental approaches for organising sound, conceiving form, and articulating ideas. Furthermore, this process of cross-cultural interaction reveals complex power structures within the global musical context. While cultural misinterpretation and appropriation may indeed lead to distortions, they simultaneously provide crucial creative space for the generation of new artistic languages.

By combining textual analysis with interview-based research, this study demonstrates how contemporary East Asian composers engage in processes of self-reflection and re-creation under the influence of Cage's aesthetics. It offers a new perspective on the bidirectional and agentive nature of cross-cultural exchange in contemporary music, providing theoretical insights into the construction of more equitable modes of artistic dialogue between Eastern and Western traditions.