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Javaphilia - American Love Affairs with Javanese Music and Dance (Paperback)
Loot Price: R873
Discovery Miles 8 730
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Javaphilia - American Love Affairs with Javanese Music and Dance (Paperback)
Series: Music and Performing Arts of Asia and the Pacific
Expected to ship within 12 - 17 working days
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Fragrant tropical flowers, opulent batik fabrics, magnificent
bronze gamelan orchestras, and, of course, aromatic coffee. Such
are the exotic images of Java, Indonesia's most densely populated
island, that have hovered at the periphery of North American
imaginations for generations. Through close readings of the careers
of four ""javaphiles"" -individuals who embraced Javanese
performing arts in their own quests for a sense of belonging-
Javaphilia: American Love Affairs with Javanese Music and Dance
explores a century of American representations of Javanese
performing arts by North Americans. While other Asian cultures made
direct impressions on Americans by virtue of firsthand contacts
through immigration, trade, and war, the distance between Java and
America, and the vagueness of Americans' imagery, enabled a few
disenfranchised musicians and dancers to fashion alternative
identities through bold and idiosyncratic representations of
Javanese music and dance. Javaphilia's main subjects-Canadian-born
singer Eva Gauthier (1885-1958), dancer/painter Hubert Stowitts
(1892-1953), ethnomusicologist Mantle Hood (1918-2005), and
composer Lou Harrison (1917-2003)-all felt marginalized by the
mainstream of Western society: Gauthier by her lukewarm reception
as an operatic mezzo-soprano in Europe, Stowitts by his
homosexuality, Hood by conflicting interests in spirituality and
scientific method, and Harrison by his predilection for prettiness
in a musical milieu that valued more anxious expressions. All four
parlayed their own direct experiences of Java into a defining
essence for their own characters. By identifying aspects of
Javanese music and dance that were compatible with their own
tendencies, these individuals could literally perform
unconventional-yet coherent-identities based in Javanese music and
dance. Although they purported to represent Java to their fellow
North Americans, they were in fact simply representing themselves.
In addition to probing the fascinating details of these javaphiles'
lives, Javaphilia presents a novel analysis of North America's
first significant encounters with Javanese performing arts at the
1893 World's Columbian Exposition in Chicago. An account of the
First International Gamelan Festival, in Vancouver, BC (at Expo
86), almost a century later, bookends the epoch that is the focus
of Javaphilia and sets the stage for a meditation on North
Americans' ongoing relationships with the music and dance of Java.
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