The Musical Marco Polo. Sketches of 'Otherness' from China to the West (and backwards)

The paper aims at addressing the perception of Chinese musical aesthetics and its influence in the West and, therefore, the socio– cultural construction of what we may call “musical chineseness”, conceived as “musical otherness”, according to a wider understanding of Chinese culture as opposed to the European one (as, for instance, in the studies by François Jullien). Thanks to a series of cultural references and musical case studies (ranging from classical music to Modernist avant–garde and contemporary popular music), such notion of “otherness” is articulated into different discoursive tropes; otherness may have been portrayed as indecipherability (Giacomo Puccini’s Turandot), whimsicality (Renato Carosone’s This Chinese mushroom), extraordinariness (so–called “child music prodigies”), blurriness (shídàiqǔ or C–pop meant as fusion music), extremeness ( John Cage, John Zorn, Giacinto Scelsi, Harry Partch), but also affinity (Frank Zappa). The paper proposes to overcome both the traditional dichotomic view (according to which, in order to understand each other, China and the West can meaningfully relate only in terms of oppositions) and the consideration of West’s cultural (mis)appropriation of Chinese musical aesthetics (as epitomized by Fatima Al Qadiri’s political album Asiatisch). The idea would be to give the start to a comparative cultural semiotics based not on the differences but on the affinities; namely, on the features that the two cultural macro–contexts have in common and on the languages, the tools, the strategies they do use to connect each other (as in the case of “musical otherness” itself, employed as the koiné — common language — of the so–called alternative, experimental, or underground international artistic community, embodied by figures such as Yan Jun).