ABSTRACT
This chapter begins with a few quite different late twentieth-century examples of such music alluding to traditional or non-Western traditions. It compares Finnissy’s approaches, to show how they do not readily align themselves with such established models. The call for subjectivity when confronting these different non-Western and traditional sources implies that instead of stable categories of familiar versus unfamiliar elements there emerges the permanently shifting perspective of a subjective and highly personal relation to music of vastly different provenance. Kubelka’s juxtaposition heightens the perception of Western tourists assuming a position of superiority against the African natives and helps to critically examine the underlying ‘Orientalist’ tenets. However, as Ian Pace has analysed in detail in his essay on The History of Photography in Sound, Finnissy never simply uses crude juxtapositions of ‘African’ and ‘European’ models, but instead presents many different ways of transforming, and even fusing both.
