{"id":1198,"date":"2015-04-20T23:02:41","date_gmt":"2015-04-21T04:02:41","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/pages.stolaf.edu\/americanmusic\/?p=1198"},"modified":"2015-04-28T16:18:08","modified_gmt":"2015-04-28T21:18:08","slug":"the-music-of-salome-western-fabric-eastern-accents","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/pages.stolaf.edu\/americanmusic\/2015\/04\/20\/the-music-of-salome-western-fabric-eastern-accents\/","title":{"rendered":"The Music of Salome: Western Fabric, Eastern Accents"},"content":{"rendered":"

As evidenced by the artwork on the album cover and liner notes of this\u00a01961 LP recording of Richard Strauss’s\u00a0Salome<\/em>,1<\/sup><\/a> the artists involved in making this recording aimed to create an atmosphere of exoticness, the East, and “Otherness.” On the cover, Birgit Nillson, who plays Salome, bears her teeth and pointed, red nails in a vicious, animalistic stance, and on the liner notes, the illustration focuses around the\u00a0exotic peacock motif. \"Screen\"Screen<\/a><\/p>\n

The opera aims to portray “Otherness” in more ways than just the visual. In terms of the libretto, as the liner notes state, “Its exotic language caresses an exposed nerve in the type of elegant audience for which it was written.” As for the music, the notes read, “Strauss enclosed Wilde\u2019s drama in music that is . . . extraordinarily concise yet lavish in detail. Mood is everything: from the first clarinet notes one is plunged into the Byzantine night and the tension is never relaxed.” With\u00a0Salome<\/em>, Strauss aimed to create a comprehensive portrait of the “East” through which to portray a story of violence and immorality.<\/p>\n

As I listened to the final scene of\u00a0Salome<\/em>\u00a0on Halvorson Music Library’s own copy of this LP, I noticed several elements of auditory “Otherness” in the music. At the beginning of the scene,\u00a0sudden crashes of\u00a0brass and percussion are reminiscent of Classical era uses of\u00a0the sublime to convey terrifying foreignness. Surprising keys and chromatic turns have a similar effect. Toward the end of the scene, Strauss conveys exoticism through the clarinet, whose chromatic motif evokes the Asian\/North African street tradition\u00a0of snake charming. As the opera ends, percussion\u00a0reverberates like a gong (there may even be a gong in the second recording below) and a blaring\u00a0trumpet enters unexpectedly to play the closing melody. I included a Youtube recording of the Vienna Philharmonic with Birgit Nillson2<\/sup><\/a> (similar to\u00a0the LP recording I listened to) as well as a Youtube recording of Nillson at the Metropolitan Opera3<\/sup><\/a> for an American comparison. I noticed that the closing trumpet in the Met version sounded even more raw, jazz-like, and surprising than its European counterpart. Perhaps this is because, for white Americans, jazz automatically signifies a racial “Other” as well as lowbrow music.<\/p>\n