Cultural negotiations: Eastern music in Early Modern travel writing Claire Bardelmann (Université de Lorraine, Metz, France.)
THIS PAPER AIMS at assessing the cultural issues raised by English responses to the musical exchanges in the late 16th century and the first half of the 17th century with the Ottoman Empire, the East Indies and China. The East encompassed nearly all of Asia in the early modern cartography and geographical imagination (Hadfield 2004, 1-21). As compared to travellers’s accounts of music in the Far North or the West Indies, Eastern music is the most abundantly documented in early modern travel writing,1 especially after 1600, when the East India Company was formed (musical exchanges mainly took place for trading or diplomatic purposes). This is illustrated by the list of early modern travel books which show an effort towards the documentation and analysis of Eastern music: William Biddulph, The travels of certaines Englishmen into Africa, Asia […] and to sundry other places (London, 1608);
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As a consequence of the preoccupation of Early Modern England with the East. As Fernand Braudel remarks, England turned resolutely toward the East as a result of its relation to the larger world in which it was positioned: ‘The old firm of the Mediterranean gained once more from the terrible battles of the Atlantic. Between 1583 and 1591 it was no coincidence that English agents should have made their way along the roads through Syria to the Indian Ocean, Persia, the Indies, and Sumatra. In Egypt… the English were out-manoeuvred by skillful and persistent competition from the French. The English therefore turned their attention to Syria and the roads through it’. Braudel, 1976, 627; Archer 2001, 1-22.
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