A Musical Shift to the East

Down the centuries many Western classical music composers took elements of Eastern traditional music to color their own, as exotica had always provided a big fascination for Western audiences, and did so at least until the present age of cheap air travel and global communications - in effect making our world a global village.  In the musical arts this meant composers could, and often did, easily add interest to pieces either through certain non-Western scales, or appropriate choices of instrumentation.  Only rarely, however, was it anything much more than the composer dipping his toes in.  Perhaps one of the earliest classical composers to truly respect Eastern musical ideas was the Frenchman Claude Debussy, whose unorthodox chords and ethereal orchestrations earned him the reputation of a musical enfant terrible.

But it was in America, further from the East than Europe, that a true understanding and wider embracement of Eastern musical ideas first began to take serious hold, and it was around the middle of the 20th century.  Several emerging composers rejected the so called Neo Classical European style, its American offshoot of "Americana" (of which perhaps the popular works of Aaron Copland are the archetypal example), and also the European import of serial or 12-tone composition.

In the 1940s some American composers looked Eastwards with great seriousness for their creative wellspring, and this was effectively the beginning of a slow, but steady surge of interest and acceptance of Eastern music into the Western classical music mainstream.  According to the literature, the principal American figures credited with this direction are Henry Cowell (the "elder statesman" of the group), Lou Harrison, John Cage and Alan Hovhaness - although there were many others of course.

These composers, amongst others, have been hugely influential in setting the scene for younger composers who embraced Eastern musical concepts from the start of their careers into their musical DNA - composers we all know of such as Philip Glass and Steve Reich.  In this blog I shall enthuse on certain works of the first generation of American composers looking Eastwards, when it was rather scorned upon by the musical establishment of our American academic institutions and concert halls.