
Extreme Exoticism
Japan in the American Musical Imagination
W. Anthony Sheppard(Author)
Oxford University Press Inc
Published on 1. November 2019
Book
Hardback
640 pages
978-0-19-007270-4 (ISBN)
Description
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'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.
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 *More details
Language
English
Place of publication
New York
United States
Product notice
sewn/stitched
Cloth over boards
Illustrations
100 line, 46 halftones
Dimensions
Height: 259 mm
Width: 185 mm
Thickness: 46 mm
Weight
1315 gr
ISBN-13
978-0-19-007270-4 (9780190072704)
Copyright in bibliographic data and cover images is held by Nielsen Book Services Limited or by the publishers or by their respective licensors: all rights reserved.
Schweitzer Classification
Other editions
Additional editions

E-Book
09/2019
OUP eBook
€24.49
Available for download

E-Book
09/2019
OUP eBook
€24.49
Available for download
Person
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).
Author
Marylin & Arthur Levitt Professor of MusicMarylin & Arthur Levitt Professor of Music, Williams College
Content
- 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