Extreme Exoticism

Extreme Exoticism explores the role of music in shaping American perceptions of the Japanese, the influence of Japanese music on American composers, and the place of Japanese Americans in American musical life over the past 150 years.

W. Anthony Sheppard is Marylin and Arthur Levitt Professor of Music at Williams College where he teaches courses in twentieth-century music, opera, popular music, and Asian music. His first book, Revealing Masks: Exotic Influences and Ritualized Performance in Modernist Music Theater received the Kurt Weill Prize. He has served as Editor-in-Chief of the Journal of the American Musicological Society and is now Series Editor of AMS Studies in Music (Oxford University Press).

List of Illustrations
Glossary of Japanese terms
Introductions and Acknowledgments
Chapter 1: "Beyond Description:" Nineteenth-Century Americans Hearing Japan
Chapter 2: Strains of Japonisme in Tin Pan Alley, on Broadway, and in the Parlor
Chapter 3: Japonisme and the Forging of American Musical Modernism
Chapter 4: Two Paradigmatic Tales, Between Genres and Genders
Chapter 5: An Exotic Enemy: Musical Propaganda in Wartime Hollywood
Chapter 6: Singing Sayonara: Musical Representations of Japan in Postwar Hollywood
Chapter 7: Representing the Authentic from Japanese American Perspectives
Chapter 8: Beat and Square Cold War Encounters
Chapter 9: Conclusions? or, Contemporary Representations and Reception
Appendices
Notes
Bibliography
Index