Other Cultural Perspectives in this Era:
9 : 10
: 11 : 12
: 13
The Paris Exhibition of 1889: A Cultural Awakening
Cultural Perspective 13
Introduction : Overview : Issues : Projects : Links
How and when did people from distant regions of the world interact before the era of jet travel and electronic communications? One kind of event that has long brought people from various cultures together is a world exposition.
In 1889, France hosted an exposition marking the centenary of the French Revolution. The Eiffel Tower was the French showcase for this world's fair. Musicians from around the world performed for a receptive European public. One of the most popular of the exhibits, from the Indonesian island of Java, featured dancers and gamelan. (You will remember that a gamelan is an ensemble of mainly percussion instruments—including gongs, chimes, and drums, among others.) Many classical composers, including Claude Debussy and Maurice Ravel, heard this gamelan for the first time. Debussy wrote of its unique sound to a friend: "Do you not remember the Javanese music able to express every nuance of meaning, even unmentionable shades, and which makes our tonic and dominant seem like empty phantoms for the use of unwise infants?" He attempted to capture something of this sound—its pentatonic scale, unusual timbre, and texture—in a number of his compositions, including the famous symphonic poem La mer (The Sea, 1905), the piano work Pagodas (from Estampes, 1903), and several piano preludes.
Other events sparked the imagination of visitors to the Paris Exhibition. Evening festivities included a parade of musicians representing the African nations of Algeria, Senegal, and the Congo, as well as Java, Anam (now Vietnam), and New Caledonia (a Pacific island off the Australian coast). Performances included belly dancers and whirling dervishes from the Middle East (see p. 292); African-American cakewalk dancers from the southern United States (a cakewalk was a nineteenth-century dance that featured rhythmic strutting and prancing arm in arm in a parody of white plantation owners' behavior); and dancing women from Cambodia.
Folk and popular music traversed cultural boundaries at the Paris Exhibition. It was there that Debussy was introduced to traditional Russian songs in settings by Rimsky-Korsakov as well as the music of Hungarian and Spanish Gypsies. Like Bizet, Debussy attempted to capture the rhythms of the habanera and the strumming style of flamenco guitars in several of his piano works (The Interrupted Serenade and Evening in Granada).
The French composer Maurice Ravel (whom we will meet in the next chapter) was
even more profoundly influenced by this new world of music. Born in the Basque
region of France (where the Pyrénées separate France from Spain),
Ravel imbued his Spanish Rhapsody (an orchestral suite we will study)
with rich Iberian color, his violin work Tzigane (Gypsy, 1924)
with showy, exotic effects, and his song cycle
Don Quixote to Dulcinea
(1933, based on the writings of Miguel de Cervantes) with authentic Spanish
dance rhythms. Likewise, his most famous work, the hypnotic Boléro for
orchestra, is accompanied by the insistent rhythm of a popular Spanish dance
form. Nor did the mysteries of Asia escape Ravel: his orchestral song cycle
Sheherazade (1903) was inspired by the Arabian folktales of The Thousand
and One Nights (sometimes called Arabian Nights and the source for the stories
of Aladdin and Ali Baba) and includes what he believed was a Persian melody.
A movement from the charming Mother Goose Suite (originally for piano),
called Laideronette, Empress of the Pagodas, is based on a fairy tale
about an empress who is serenaded during her bath by whimsical creatures playing
fantastic instruments.
Ravel's broad ranging interests drew him to folk songs from around the world (he arranged Greek, Hebrew, Italian, and French tunes, among others), to the newly popular African-American styles of ragtime, blues, and jazz (the second movement of his Violin Sonata is entitled Blues), and to the music of Madagascar (an African island and the subject of his intense song cycle Songs of Madagascar, 1925–26).
Today, we do not have to wait for a world exposition to experience music from around the world. We have only to tune in a PBS (Public Broadcasting System) special on Mexican mariachi bands, rent a library video of Japanese Noh drama, or locate a cultural web site on Irish step dancing to stimulate our eyes, ears, and imagination.
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Overview:
This cultural perspective explores the influences that the music of other
cultures had on Western musicians who heard them at the Paris World Exhibition
in 1889, focusing primarily on the two leading French composers of the day,
Claude Debussy and Maurice Ravel. Your author notes that the music heard by
these composers represented a wide geographic and cultural range, from the art
music of Russian composer Nicolai Rimsky-Korsakov to folk music of Hungarian
Gypsies and African-American "cakewalk" dancers, to the music of the
Indonesian gamelan.
Issues:
In earlier cultural perspectives, you have read about how Western music was
enriched by contact with other cultures. Often this contact grew out of conflict
and conquest. The Paris Exhibition created a different dynamic. Here the various
cultures were being spotlighted and even celebrated. This, along with the continuing
Western fascination with the "exotic," helped to fuel a rich appropriation
that has continued to the present day. And as you will see, the influence has
gone in both directions as Western music (especially popular music) has influenced
non-Western cultures.
Projects:
You can't go back to the 1889 exhibit (although you can still see the symbol
of that event, the Eiffel Tower). However, the Internet allows you to create
your own World Exhibition. Visit some of the sites listed below to learn more
about the music that Debussy and Ravel encountered over one hundred years ago.
Then listen to some of the pieces and see if you can detect the musical influences.
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