ABSTRACT
In the eighteenth century, while many of the accounts continued to echo seventeenth-century polemics, some were more objective; stimulated by rationalistic thinking and their distance from memories of war, Europeans started to take an interest in the music for its unique sounds and rhythmic qualities. While still stressing the awkwardness and inferiority of Turkish music or critiquing the absence of rational justifications for its harmony, balance, form, and goal orientation, these accounts manifest a diminished sense of anxiety and fewer references to the "harshness" of the music and the "barbarity" of its people. This chapter examines how Western accounts filtered into the musical compositions of the eighteenth century. It also examines the role the alla turca played within eighteenth-century Viennese instrumental music not only as an integral part of the musical vocabularies of the time, but as a topos of opposition denoting war, aggression, and cultural barbarity.
