Orientalism generally refers to the middle eastern, asian and northern african societies and in commonly used as a term of patronisation towards Mid Eastern culture within academic writings.
in it’s relation to music, it is often referred to within more exotic styles of music, for this element I really want to use composition to bring out elements of ambience and use textures to emphasise these said exotic elements within the soundscape.
Edward Said wrote a book on Orientalism, entitled ‘Orientalism’ which is a book in which Said has challenged the concept of Orientalism, or the difference between the East and the West. The study of Orientalism comes from colonials of the European nation moving to the lesser developed countries of the East, they found their culture very exotic and therefore began the study of Orientalism, or the study of people from an exotic civilisation.
So I need to focus on this key term ‘Exotic’ and how I’m going to best translate that through composure, which leads me onto my next key topics of study. The approaches of Formalism and Naturalism.
Two approaches that I will be focusing on throughout this soundscape are the Naturalist and Formalist approaches to soundscaping.
The Naturalist approach is more composure based with the use of authentic instrumentation and literal sounds, such as a string ensemble, a vocal choir. An easy way of remembering it is to think of it of a natural source of sound, un-edited and un-tampered with.
The Formalist approach as you can probably gather is the complete opposite side of the spectrum, where sounds are constructed, adapted and well formulated.
No soundscape can be either purely naturalist or formalist, it rests on a percentage of either side, some being more Naturalist, whist others being more formalist. I plan to balance my soundscape somewhere in the middle as I find both elements to play key roles within the sonic environment. Using formalist techniques to build tension at atmosphere’s, such techniques as using tonal dissonance’s to create a so called imbalance causing the listener to feel uneasy as such. But using naturalist forms to really bring out the vibrant heritage of the middle eastern’s exotic culture, and generally set the scene for my soundscape!
From the work I have listened to already such as Cristianna’s abstract works, she takes a very strong formalist approach when it comes to sound in her work. It’s all generated and manipulated to resemble the on-screen footage. Whilst looking back at Daniel Kordiks work, I would say it’s verging on the very Naturalist point of view, where everything is recorded in one medium and it’s all the one natural sound recorded on location, and it’s only editorial process is the use of effects to transition the pieces together. So these two pieces of work gives me a very wide perspective of what the different approaches are, and how I can define my own work through this.