Book - Beyond Exoticism

I saw an announcement for this book - thought it might be of interest to some of us here. I might purchase this, simply to learn more about the world of unknown avant-garde classical composers (i.e. Henry Cowell) whose work may have laid the groundwork for Denny, Baxter, Lyman, and others.

Vern

Beyond Exoticism: Western Music and the World (Refiguring American Music), written by Timothy Taylor.

(from amazon.com)
In Beyond Exoticism, Timothy D. Taylor considers how western cultures’ understandings of racial, ethnic, and cultural differences have been incorporated into music from early operas to contemporary television advertisements, arguing that the commonly used term “exoticism” glosses over such differences in many studies of western music. Beyond Exoticism encompasses a range of musical genres and musicians, including Mozart, Beethoven, Jean-Philippe Rameau, Maurice Ravel, Charles Ives, Henry Cowell, Bally Sagoo, and Bill Laswell as well as opera, symphony, country music, and “world music.” Yet, more than anything else, it is an argument for expanding the purview of musicology to take into account not only composers’ lives and the formal properties of the music they produce but also the larger historical and cultural forces shaping both music and our understanding of it.

"A bold and wide-ranging study, from a musical angle, of the West and the rest.' Timothy D. Taylor mingles insights from musicology, cultural and social history, and cultural theory to demonstrate the changing ways in which various streams of musical life, in Europe and America, have responded to the wider world. Rameau, Mozart, Ives, and Ravel here stand cheek by jowl with Bill Laswell, bhangra, Hawaiian cowboy music, and TV ads, challenging--and reinvigorating--such easy labels as exotic' and `multicultural.'"--Ralph P. Locke, Professor of Musicology, Eastman School of Music, University of Rochester

http://www.amazon.com/Beyond-Exoticism-Western-Refiguring-American/dp/0822339684/ref=pd_bbs_1/102-4028990-9156112?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1175572562&sr=8-1

sounds interesting. Thanks for the link Vern.