Death In Venice Analysis

Exoticism, The Gamelan, and Sexuality Western music has drawn on many musical styles. Exoticism is one of the styles that was popular in the late nineteenth century. Exoticism, according to much literature, is deliberated as a form of representation that predicts people, cultural practices and places as foreign from a composer’s perspective or intended audience. Ralph Locke, in “Musical Exoticism: Images and Reflections,” defines exoticism as “a process of evoking a place, people, or social milieu” that differs from the home country” (Locke 47). Exoticism contains the use of non-Western elements in Western music. There are two sides of spectrums that music containing exoticism can fall on, pure exoticism and transcultural compositing. Music …show more content…
In Death in Venice, Britten established a relationship between homosexuality and exoticism (Taruskin 256). The issue of homosexuality as depicted in “Death in Venice” is implicitly labeled. In his early years, Britten composed music for films; this experience had shaped his style by teaching him to communicate through music, making him become a composer who used music to express allegorical pleas for tolerance and his pacifism (Burkholder, Graut, and Palisca 928). As a homosexual, Britten had intentions to use music to deliver his concern about …show more content…
Carmen is a fictional character and the heroine of Bizet’s opera, who represents a lot of labels including seductive, sex addicted and obsessed with death as well as liberal (Frisch 172). The story represents a battle of the sexes. Carmen’s music is exotic and sexy, intensifying the Gamelan themes of sexual and exotic as represented by the gypsy music. Bizet clearly used his music to label a group of people as violent. Unlike Bizet’s music which directly labels Carmen as an “other,” Britten’s music falls on the spectrum of pure exoticism through directly presenting Aschenbach as