I would like to start at the beginning, going back to the text that made Said famous. The seminal Orientalism (1978)Footnote ⁵ taught us to think critically and carefully about representations of the Other and their embedded implications. His central premiss – that the Orient was invented by the West – has become almost commonplace today, and serves as the basis for much scholarship and popular thinking. In his unfurling of this complex, rich and multifaceted argument, he draws upon a wide range of examples, from philosophy and history to poetry and travelogues.

By now, it should be fair to assume that many of Said's arguments from Orientalism are familiar, either through his own text or through the many ways in which his ideas have been deployed in diverse fields. But the very fact that Said's name and the title of his seminal text seem so familiar, even normalized, also means that we are not as sensitive to some fundamental aspects of the argument as we could be. Put simply: we think we know what Orientalism is about, but in reality we often miss the full range of its nuanced critique. Reclaiming the potential of Said's ideas involves returning to him not as an analyst of style or a lover of Western classical music, but as a radical historian and a critic of the very academy of which he was a part. I would like here to highlight a few such nuances in order to demonstrate how the past – about which Said and many music scholars write – is not really the past. In particular, I hope to remind us of Said's important intervention about the relationship between imaginative acts of representation and institutions of knowledge and how the interaction continues to exert a powerful influence on scholarly work.

To begin with, the very title of the book and the main term of the entire text deserves reflection: ‘Orientalism’. For Said, ‘Orientalism’ was work about (in a loose sense) a relatively limited geographical area of the East (in relation to Europe) that is referred to as the Orient, standing in opposition to the Occident. But it also referred simultaneously to a field of study and a way of going about that study. In other words, Said refers to a body of literature and scholarship about the Orient, as well as the strategies of representation invoked. In using the corollary term ‘exoticism’ in music studies, we have generally agreed that the representational practices Said details can extend beyond this geographical area, but that the parallels with Said's original study are useful. The terms probably should not be interchangeable, but in common practice they generally conjure up the same basic ideas of representation, power and invention.

The other critical part of his title is the ‘-ism’, which already builds in the idea of an active practice: a making of or an attention to, not simply an objective study. (The latter might have been called ‘Orientology’ or ‘Oriental Studies’, for example.) In outlining the arenas in which he sees and traces Orientalism, Said uses active verbs: defining, making, representing, dominating, describing, discussing, teaching, restructuring, authorizing. In other words, something is happening; it is not simply there to be seen or discovered. The distinction may seem pedantic, but I believe it is at the very heart of Said's point: to call attention to the ways in which the Orient was invented in the service of Europe. If we follow this part of Said's premiss – and I would argue that we should – then use of the term ‘exoticism’ to refer to representations of the foreign in music could also describe an active practice. The term ‘exoticism’ is not new, of course, but including the active practice component may suggest a re-evaluation of its valence.

Secondly, I would like to draw attention to the comprehensive approach that characterizes the entire text. From the very first pages, Said is careful to approach Orientalism as a multi-faceted phenomenon: his field of study includes those who investigate the Orient from an academic point of view as well as the imaginative renderings of the Orient in the writings of Aeschylus and Victor Hugo. Indeed, the earliest introduction to what he means by the term begins with academic disciplines dedicated to studying the Orient and their proponents, Orientalists. He proceeds to the imaginative manifestations, and ends with a point about their interplay. Relatively late in the text, Said introduces a distinction that could serve as an additional layer: that of ‘latent’ and ‘manifest’ Orientalism.Footnote ⁶ The difference may seem to be self-evident in that one is referring to a built-in bias in seemingly objective or positivist records, the other an outright subjectivity and opinion-based assessment of the Orient. We might easily classify government documents in the latent category and Rudyard Kipling's writings in the manifest.

I call attention to the terms because it is worth a reminder that both forms exist in the field of music studies, and if we follow Said, all work about the Orient – at least from the eighteenth to the early twentieth century – falls into one of these categories. Even more, the interplay between the academic and the imaginative seems to be Said's self-declared major intervention in the text, a subtlety that is worth not just remembering but probing further.

Given these points (the active practice and the comprehensive attention to forms of discourse and representation), the chasm between Said's own analytics and how his name has been invoked in the field of historical musicology in the last three decades (since the publication of Orientalism and subsequent writings) is rather wide. Most often, Said's name opens a discussion of musical exoticism, sometimes more specifically called Orientalism, or the representation of ‘Others’ in musical works.Footnote ⁷

Musicology's inheritance from Said as a focus on musical works is not altogether surprising. After all, Said uses a good deal of evidence from fictional literature, whose corollary in music studies would seem to be musical works. In addition, he often and extensively engaged with music of the Western canon, again suggesting that his ideas in Orientalism would translate well and apply to the study of musical works.Footnote ⁸ However, the singular focus on representation in specific compositions and genres has obscured the more radical point of Said's text, at least as I read it: that the Orient is entirely invented by the West, and even more specifically by Western discourse. His evidence might include fictional literature, but it spans intellectual exercises, government documents and ostensibly positivist scholarship. In other words, the Orient is not only invented through art that claims to imagine; it is also invented in the intellectual and political writings that claim to convey objective truth.

Moreover, Said says, the interplay between the documentary and the imaginative creates a space in which Orientalism takes shape. It is here that the full scope of how the Orient was managed and produced emerges and where its power in defining European culture and identity is most magnified. What would happen if we focused on this interplay in the study of music of various historical moments?

For example, I see a rich possible parallel with the practice of musical ethnography as it was practised in nineteenth- and early twentieth-century France. Before the self-reflexive turn in anthropology, before the subsequent anthropological turn in ethnomusicology and before ethnomusicology was a discipline in its own right, there were nonetheless explorations of other places, cultures, peoples and music. Many of these investigations fall under the broad rubric of ethnography, despite not practising the very nuanced approach of today's version of that activity. (As just one example, participant observation was not a tenet of these early efforts; neither was a self-reflexive approach to what was found.) In these documentary efforts are many of the same patterns Said describes in his discussion of Orientalism: hierarchic, relational definitions, embedded biases and judgments of sophistication and civilization. For example, Julien Tiersot, a celebrated music scholar of the late nineteenth century, begins his Notes on Musical Ethnography from 1905 with this paragraph:

There is so much to be said about this passage, which almost seems to be offered as an apology for the book's contents, a consideration of the musics of foreign people and places. But I will point to only one aspect: the tone of the observations I quote above is not far removed from that of representations of many foreign cultures in music of the same period. Whether it is in Carmen, Lakmé, Madama Butterfly or any number of instrumental or chamber works, we are all too familiar with the patterns and implications of musical exoticism that couple fascination with denigration. Perhaps the commonalities in stance and the manners of representation across the genres of scholarship and composition are not so surprising. Given the colonial context in which all of these cultural products emerged, we may not be expecting much else. Certainly, they would not surprise Said. He makes plain a belief that all work was conditioned by its political time, but that even as learning and scholarship move forward, Orientalism, as a discourse, retains certain key elements.

All of this may be easy enough to accept. But I believe there is more to contend with when we think about early ethnography and its interplay with musical exoticism. The resonances across the genres of ethnography and exoticism are not simple coincidences to be written off as merely the products of colonial capitals. For Said, the resonance is the place from which Orientalism as a discourse or, as I have said, an active practice comes to be a coherent and powerful system of representation.

If we think about what this might mean for musicology, we can see both a relatively narrow lesson and a much broader one to be learnt. The narrower lesson is that exoticism did not exist in a vacuum. The musical works that traffic in it may often be treated as novelties, but the impulses behind it were entirely common and widespread. There is a danger in focusing too exclusively on ‘music’ as the repository for the kinds of ideas that Said presents in Orientalism. It is present not only on the stage but also in the academy, in the library and in the archives that many of us frequent. In other words, exoticism in music is not only in musical works but also in knowledge about music.

When we turn to records like ethnographies, transcriptions or travelogues that discuss music, it is thus critical to see them as part of a larger practice of exoticism (as a representational ideology), rather than as its parallel or its inverse. Turning to such records often inspires questions about the authenticity of musical exoticism: how similar are the sounds to those from the place imagined? While such questions are tempting, they do not deal explicitly with the issues of power that Said calls out; neither do they help us to question how power structures might shape documentary efforts.Footnote ¹⁰ Instead, the records could invite a different set of questions, not least: who has the right to imagine? Taking that question seriously suggests that these so-called objective records do not provide a corrective to imagined exoticism, but only show that the ideology of difference was so deeply embedded that it penetrated not only some of the music that was made but also how it was written about throughout the nineteenth century and beyond.

If, as Said argues at length, Europe invented the Orient, then it can also be said that the Orient helped to shape Europe. Said's arguments suggest that Europe used the Orient as its antithesis, as a ‘surrogate and even underground self’.Footnote ¹¹ Without the Orient and without Orientalism, it would seem, Europe would not be what it is. Neither would musicology be what it is without its antithesis, its surrogate and underground self. To be sure, what that antithesis is exactly is open for discussion. But I would suggest that, in the case of turn-of-the-century France, at least, one candidate is the musical practices of foreign places and peoples.

The much broader lesson, therefore, is that Orientalism may be at the very heart of how our discipline operated in its earliest stages, during the foundation of a musical academy and the codification of its basic tenets, whether those of a François-Joseph Fétis or a Guido Adler. Moreover, despite attention to historiography, methodology and expanding subject areas, the way we operate is not so different from a century ago: we still periodize historically, categorize geographically and read musical texts. Is it possible that there are traces of Orientalism, however latent, left in our work today? And if so, how might we confront this aspect of the history and present of musicology?