Extreme Exoticism

Reviews / Votes

In this hefty tome born out of twenty years of research and writing, W. Anthony Sheppard gives a complex account of American musical engagement with Japan over the last 150 years. ... While this ambitious book will serve as a valuable resource for scholars of cultural history and US-Japan relations as well as musicology, I hope that it will be widely read by musicians, producers, presenters, and arts administrators as well. * Mari Yoshihara, Music & Letters * This book is a major work of cultural history, and a welcome addition to a growing body of research on exoticism in Western music. * Edgar W. Pope, The World of Music * Extreme Exoticism is a rich, encyclopedic account of influences on American creative artists ... A reader of this provocative and lengthy essay with an interest in intercultural relations will findample rewards. ... Sheppard's control of a massive amount of research lays out for his reader a myriad of analytical projects relating to a fascinating exotic influence. * Richard E. Mueller, Journal of the American Musicological Society * The book presents as comprehensive an account of America's fascination with Japan as possible in a single tome ... This book could be a valuable starting point and useful reference tool for a new generation of scholars to work towards finding points of convergence, engagement, and connection with cultures near and far, rather than to continue highlighting the 'extreme exoticism' of others. * Mina Yang, Ethnomusicology Forum * From Commodore Perry to Katy Perry, from Tin Pan Alley to Takemitsu, this landmark study paints an immense, richly textured, and multifaceted panorama of American musical encounters with Japan. What a remarkable, fascinating, and critically important book! * Charles Hiroshi Garrett, , editor-in-chief of The Grove Dictionary of American Music, 2nd ed. * Sheppard's scholarly reach has always been unique within musicology, nor has it ever exceeded his grasp. In order to do justice to the huge topic of Japanese exoticism in American music, he had to acquire an ethnomusicologists familiarity with Japanese music and then had to learnthat is, inventways of making meaningful comparisons between appropriations and representations across the generic board, from popular music to avant-garde, and from theatrical and cinematic to instrumental genres. But that spectacular range was only the beginning. He has applied it to a set of questions that goes to the very heart of musics social and cultural effect. Behind the musical study in Extreme Exoticism lies a study of ethnic and social relations at some extremely fraught historical moments. Sheppard remains a cultural historian at heart, and addresses what is, for a musicologist, a uniquely broad readership. * Richard Taruskin, author of the Oxford History of Western Music * In this insightful, wide-ranging book, W. Anthony Sheppard demonstrates in detail how music has helped shape the American image of Japan and the Japanese. Sheppard draws his examples from a wide range of genres, including musical theater, film, popular song, and experimental concert music. This masterful cultural history manages to be at once entertaining, deeply researched, and keenly relevant to life and public debates today. * Ralph P. Locke, author of Music and the Exotic: Images and Reflections and Music and the Exotic from the Renaissance to Mozart *