Orientalismo musical: la cuestión de género en las representaciones de lo islámico

Abstract

Musical orientalism involves the creation of Western works that seek to evoke and represent the East. Since the nineteenth century, Western, specifically European, composers have employed fixed resources to construct works with specifically Islamic themes that are loaded with meanings for the conception of the Other. This Other, moreover, includes a female-Other as an orientalist specificity applied to a gender stereotype.
This research focuses on the musical characterisation of two opposing profiles in genre, both in their scenic and textual dimension and in their purely instrumental one, based on two ways of representing the Orient: an exotic and sensual Eden or the conqueror who intends to extend his world to a territory. From this division it could be understood that the first of these representations is linked to femininity, imagining the woman on a divan with carpets, cushions and perfumes, and, in contrast, the second is reserved for the traditional idea of masculinity, as barbarism and militancy. This gender duality feeds the development of an orientalism as a paradigmatic part of the relations between East and West, with special attention to the countries of the Mediterranean, as well as their mutual perceptions of otherness.