“Beyond Description”
Chapter one places music in the context of late 19th-century Euro-American japonisme. The focus is on American perceptions of and reactions to Japanese music encountered in Japan in the second half of the 19th century. Sources include published and unpublished correspondence and diaries of Americans (from Salem sailors to scholars to Gilded Age socialites) who traveled to Japan as well as travel books, scholarly journals, newspapers, and novels set in Japan. The chapter presents the earliest songs, musicals, and plays representing Japan and Japanese music to the American public. Bostonian Japanophiles are central as are American music educators who worked in Japan. The context in which Japanese music was first heard in the U.S., particularly at World Expositions, is explored. These early and primarily negative reports indirectly reveal contemporaneous American musical values and unintentionally marked Japanese music as an ideal model for later modernist composers.