New Book by Eastman School Professor Explores Images of World Cultures in Western Music

As Europeans explored distant lands and settled new continents from the 1500s to around 1800, their impressions of foreign cultures were reflected in the performing arts, notably those involving music. Depictions of Middle Eastern harem women, Incan priests, fortune-telling Gypsies (Roma), and other inhabitants of exotic locales often reveal a mixture of attraction to the…