Enjoy this post by Noël Da, one of our Special Collections Freshman Fellows for the 2023-2024 academic year.
Interested in applying? Find out about the 2024-2025 program here.
Hello and welcome! My name is Noël Da, and this year I have had the pleasure of researching the Middle-East Inspired sheet music collection here at Special Collections.
From the beginning of my research, I was interested in this collection as a cultural phenomenon. Its contents, from the covers to the sheet music, advertise fantasies of distant lands and faraway worlds. This genre of exotic-related music must have been popular, having generated all 611 items in the Johns Hopkins collection, as well as countless more pieces in other collections. How could such a fantasy have taken hold of American audiences in the 1920s and 1930s? What did its content, its advertisements of exotic lands, do for the public imagination?
To respond to this question, I’d like to start by going somewhere else entirely: Australia. Though this jump may seem counterintuitive—it did to me, at first—its function is as a case study for orientalism and how one audience in particular received it.
The period between 1918 and 1928 was considered Australia’s Jazz Age, according to an article by Aline Scott-Maxwell1. At the same time that Jazz was being introduced to Australia, so was the genre of “oriental jazz.” Both were novelty noises, whose appeal came from the fact that they were odd and never heard before, so at certain points the two genres began to converge. As Scott-Maxwell writes, “The association between oriental exotica and early jazz was such that the ‘strange’, exotic, ‘noisy’ sounds of Chinese music came sometimes to be understood as ‘jazz’.” This was especially interesting to me because it provides jazz as a parallel for the type of trend that oriental and other exotic forms of music embodied. Both appealed to listeners’ curiosity, and were often performed with extravagant color and movement to emphasize their quirk and novelty.
Most of the time, performers of Chinese jazz were Chinese instrumentalists. We know this from newspaper reviews, one of which even made the mistake of confusing a Chinese jazz band with a traditional Chinese ensemble. An excerpt from the 1926 issue of Australian magazine The Canberra Times does just this, reporting:
“Mr Henry Foo’s Chinese jazz band, which has been playing at broadcasting station 2BL, Sydney, comprises six performers, who play a three-string violin, a two-string banjo, another two-string instrument, a trumpet (or something like it) a cymbal and a drum.“
From all indications, the “Chinese jazz band” referred to in this article seems to have been comprised of all the instruments in a traditional Chinese ensemble—no jazz involved—yet their unfamiliar music must have led the reporter to group them together with all the other novel sounds of the time.
Then there were the Chinese performers who took advantage of the societal fixation on their culture, constructing elaborate acts and advertising them as must-see exotica. One such performer was Sun Moon Lee, whose promotional posters always featured his name (almost certainly an alias, made up of three easy-to-remember Chinese-sounding words for maximum catchiness) in a signature “oriental” font.
There was also Long Tack Sam, who combined his musical performance with acrobatics, magic shows and dancing featuring his two daughters. While these performers were popular and, for the most part, well received by musical critics, they also self-orientalized to exploit the exotica craze, further complicating the problems of racial representation and social responsibility implicit to this collection.
Perhaps it is not that much of a surprise to find many of the same things happening in American exotica, which had been going on a while earlier across the ocean. There was the same emphasis on spectacle, the same lust for novelty. Just like Australian audiences, it seemed like Americans had no real clue as to what foreign music sounded like, happily settling for anything that sounded weird or new. For American composers and songwriters, the genre of exotic music often served as a chance to experiment with minor scales or nontraditional chords, while sticking to a conventional ragtime or classical composition. You can listen for yourself; I have attached a clip from one song in the collection, Camel Train, here.
Another similarity between American and Australian receptions of oriental and exotic jazz is a lack of clarity as to whether the cultural subject is being celebrated or mocked. To be clear, sometimes there is no question about it; the West is mocking the East. Yet other times, like in Sun Moon Lee’s frenzied advertisement or in the covers you see below, we are faced with a more difficult differentiation. Maybe the piece is meant to celebrate an “exotic land,” maybe it is mocking—most likely it is a combination of both.
Charles Hiroshi Garrett discusses the reception and legacy of the song Chinatown, My Chinatown2, which was written in 1906 and became a nationwide hit shortly after. The song’s ambiguity comes from its apparent romanticization of Chinatown, with lyrics that seem to express a fondness and even admiration for its scenery. As Garrett argues, this is largely what allowed the song to be performed well after other, more obviously racist songs, “dropped from the repertory.” Its chorus, which was written by William Jerome, is as follows:
Chinatown, my Chinatown,
Where the lights are low,
Hearts that know no other land,
Drifting to and fro,
Dreamy, dreamy Chinatown,
Almond eyes of brown,
Hearts seem light and life seems bright
In dreamy Chinatown.
At first, these lyrics seem to be in innocent, albeit somewhat condescending, praise of Chinatown. Yet as Garrett explains, “as a closer examination of the song reveals, the dreaminess of this Chinatown springs not from romance but from opium. For, as it was initially conceived, the hearts drifting under low lights represented drugged-out nocturnal denizens of Chinatown, a district built on illusions where hearts ‘seem’ light and life ‘seems’ bright.” It seems, then, that the fantasy of exotic lands provided a response to Western curiosity about Eastern people and culture, one which—mostly through stereotyping—provided a way to be at once dismissive and appreciative, or to hide one attitude under the guise of the other.
One of the other things I wanted to explore in undertaking this collection was the cover illustrations of each piece of sheet music and the process behind them. The collection displays a vast range of cover illustrations, differing in style, color and intricacy. Still, some rules apply to almost all of the pieces. For example, they would have been commissioned by the publishers and printed using lithographs. Wanting to know more about the intricacies of the artistic process, I was able to pose some of my questions to Bill Edwards, who spends his time researching ragtime music, its cover art and history. Here is an excerpt from our conversation:
Q: What was the process of getting commissioned like, generally? Would the artists have listened to the music before designing the covers, or would they be given written descriptions as guidelines?
A: Many cover artists were commissioned on the basis of availability and reputation, as well as price point. (…) Having an artist on a retainer or nearly-exclusive contract helped to create a visual consistency for each particular publishing concern that went beyond their logo. Whether the artists listened to the music or not is likely a secondary concern. Some publishers, and even some composers, had an idea of what they wanted represented on the cover, and may have provided a simple sketch or outline. The artists, in turn, would draw up two to four examples to present, and once the final decision was made, would create the lithographic stones or offset template for that cover. (…) They rarely needed to know a title since it was immaterial to the work.
Q: I am seeing lots of drawings of exotic architecture, plants and animals. Would artists have had access to references [for these things]?
A: References were not all that hard to come by in the early 1900s, since some of them showed up on stages or films that had art directors familiar with the usual tropes found in exotic locales, and, from the 1890s forward, many magazines, newspapers and books that featured photography of those areas. Illustrated novels could also act as inspiration. (…) Also, consider that many artists would travel to foreign destinations (…) in order to expand their knowledge base, and in some cases as a form of self-education in the works from other countries. Consider the serious artists whose work from the prior centuries were represented in museums about the country, including the New York Metropolitan Art Museum and the Smithsonian Classic Art collection. Artists have been known to sit in the museums and study or copy famous works of art in order to better hone their craft. So, there were plenty of visual sources available.
Seeing the various steps of illustration, I was left with a strange impression: behind each aspect of this collection, from the lyrics to the front cover, there seemed to always be more to know, more details to unearth. Though I have spent a year with this collection, I can sense that there is much I haven’t covered, long threads of history waiting to be known.
For more of the discoveries I did make during my research, feel free to visit this video I created to summarize my findings. I had a wonderful time digging through this archive, pulling out the pieces that fascinated me and even learning a few of them on the piano. I would like to thank my mentor, Sam Bessen, for his guidance throughout this project and for answering my questions with his own extensive historical and musical knowledge—and oftentimes with more questions.
Images:
The Camel Train. published 1927. JSTOR, https://jstor.org/stable/community.32624341. Accessed 25 May 2024.
Dreamy Oriental Melody. published 1920. JSTOR, https://jstor.org/stable/community.32624365. Accessed 25 May 2024.Eastern Dreams: Oriental Song Fox-Trot. published 1927. JSTOR, https://jstor.org/stable/community.32624643. Accessed 25 May 2024.
Works cited: