ABSTRACT
Chris Bongie has defined literary exoticism as ‘a discursive practice intent on recovering ‘elsewhere’ values ‘lost’ with the modernization of European Society’. This may be a useful way in which to begin to understand the role that exoticism played in late Victorian and Edwardian British musical culture. Exoticism was also found as a less aural presence in choice of setting or text for songs, operas, musicals and ballads that otherwise used traditional Western forms, rhythms, melodies and harmonies. The image or device of exoticism can often be perceived as scantily covering a desire for the dangerous and seductively forbidden, for poison lurking within the perfection. Of all the women composers discussed in this chapter Maude Valérie White is the one whose enthusiastic engagement with the exotic seems to resonate most strongly with choices made because of her gender. In fin-de-siecle Britain exoticism was not a part of the mainstream musical establishment although during the Edwardian period it moved into popular musical imagination.
