Extreme Exoticism

To what extent can music be employed to shape one culture's understanding of another? In the American imagination, Japan has represented the "most alien" nation for over 150 years. This perceived difference has inspired fantasies--of both desire and repulsion--through which Japanese culture has profoundly impacted the arts and industry of the U.S. While the influence of Japan on American and European painting, architecture, design, theater, and literature has been celebrated in numerous books and exhibitions, the role of music has been virtually ignored until now. W. Anthony Sheppard's Extreme Exoticism offers a detailed documentation and wide-ranging investigation of music's role 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. Presenting numerous American encounters with and representations of Japanese music and Japan, this book reveals how music functions in exotic representation across a variety of genres and media, and how Japanese music has at various times served as a sign of modernist experimentation, a sounding board for defining American music, and a tool for reshaping conceptions of race and gender. From the Tin Pan Alley songs of the Russo-Japanese war period to Weezer's Pinkerton album, music has continued to inscribe Japan as the land of extreme exoticism.

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