Selective Interest
Narrative and cultural gaps, and butterflies from New York to Nagasaki
Earlier this year, Zachary Woolfe wrote a story for the New York Times on Orientalism and appropriation in Puccini’s Madama Butterfly and Turandot, ostensibly pegged to a new production at Opera Philadelphia of the former (an announcement that Woolfe said “seems to apologize for the production’s very existence”); one of several productions of Butterfly in recent years that had brought Asian and feminist perspectives to the stagings—or, in Woolfe’s words, “anxiously adjusted” to fit the discourse.
Woolfe was correct to point out that Puccini was hardly endorsing the imperialism of B.F. Pinkerton (who leases both a Japanese house and a Japanese wife on a generous month-to-month basis, treating both with about as much consideration as one would a toilet scrubber) as his male lead. Even still, as Woolfe also points out, “even sympathetic depictions of cultural ‘others’ can participate in stereotyping them.”
In its own way, however, Woolfe’s article further sidelined Asian voices. No mention was made of the directors for these new Butterfly productions, all of whom were of Asian heritage. In making only slight references to Turandot via the Metropolitan Opera’s overstuffed legacy production by Zeffirelli, he ignored a new production that was due to open at the Kennedy Center a month after the article ran, with a new ending by composer Christopher Tin and playwright/librettist Susan Soon He Stanton that addressed the work’s Orientalist and feminist issues head-on. (Full disclosure: I wrote the program essay for that production.) And, among the experts Woolfe cited for the piece — W. Anthony Sheppard, Joseph Kerman, Arthur Groos, and Mary Jane Phillips-Matz — all were white and only one was female. This despite prominent works like Embracing the East by Mari Yoshihara and Banishing Orientalism by Phil Chan.
Obviously, this isn’t to say that the only experts we’re allowed to consult on cultural appropriation in Madama Butterfly or Turandot are Asian (nor should every Asian singer/director/conductor/musicologist be expected to be an expert in the matter). Nor should we discount decades of scholarship offered by people who attempted to locate the interdependency between the empire and the Other as reflected in such works. But, as Edward Said wrote in his 1993 book, Culture and Imperialism: “We are at a point in our work when we can no longer ignore empires and the imperial context in our studies.” What are we meant to take away, then, from an article written more than 30 years later that argues against simplistic narratives of appropriation in Butterfly and Turandot that favors the optics of the appropriators?
Perhaps the truest statement in Woolfe’s piece was in a parenthetical where he adds that “interest in such matters is spotty: The accurate representation of Roma people is not a part of most Carmen stagings or casting decisions.” My initial response to this was to think of Susan McClary’s 1992 book on Carmen, which presents the opera as one inseparable from its Orientalist roots in the age of French empire. And yet, didn’t this prove his point? Interest is indeed spotty.
I was reminded of this article over the last week, while watching the apocalyptic carnage and destruction broadcast from Lebanon into my social feed. At the beginning of this year, I began researching a piece on the classical music scene in Beirut, with plans to travel to the city in March (on my own dime).
The idea came out of my ongoing interest in the music scenes of the Levant (I was planning this piece for the same magazine where I had covered music history’s Syrian roots in 2019), as well as how people make art amid difficult and furious times. It was also borne out of the renewed frustration I felt at the end of 2023, watching the classical music world stay silent in the face of a categorical genocide in Palestine after so many resources had been poured, just a year and a half earlier, into supporting a similar act of imperial aggression in Ukraine. The magazine I was writing for at the time had, within roughly the first month of Russia’s full-scale invasion, published no fewer than 15 articles covering the story from the perspective of music and musicians. In the weeks following October 7, I struggled to get similar consideration for both Palestinian musicians at home and abroad, as well as the broader Arab/SWANA community of musicians who were facing uncertainty about the risk of regional escalation and a renewed anti-Arab and anti-Islam sentiment in countries like the United States and Germany.
(I hate to bring Ukraine into this, because it’s the only place I’ve been to in the last year where I haven’t felt the need to justify my existence as a Syrian-American or the right to self-determination in the Levant. Yet it seems to me that there are plenty of westerners, including those on the left, who are happy to attach narratives of civilization and culture to this situation while denying those same narratives to Palestine, Syria, and Lebanon — to say nothing of Yemen, Sudan, Haiti, the Democratic Republic of the Congo… At one point does the Other become the majority?)
Beirut provided a scene that could tell the story of a protracted crisis and how it’s felt by artists and, in turn, reflected in their art. It was not only facing attacks from Israel, but also in the grips of an economic collapse estimated by the World Bank to be among the world’s worst financial crises in nearly two centuries. The 2020 port explosion was still a fresh scar for many. And, through all of this, music continues as a matter of course, if not one of necessity. I wanted to see that process in-person, to touch it and smell it, and to share it with a wider readership as an example of the classical music scenes that exist out of the cities we consider to be the usual suspects.
I put the piece on hold at the beginning of February, following a bad case of appendicitis that required a long hospitalization and significant recovery. Getting home a month later, however, I was only more eager to move ahead with the piece and told the editor I was working with that I could plan my travel for late summer. His reaction to the piece, which began as lukewarm in January, felt significantly cooler now. “Is there actually a classical music scene there?” he asked warily. I pointed to several composers, instrumentalists, and venues I had begun to speak with, many of which formed communities analogous to New York’s New Amsterdam Records or Bang on a Can crowds.
“I think it would be more interesting to follow something like an orchestra or an opera house,” he replied. Also, did it still make sense to pursue this piece with the January 2 attack seemingly a one-off? Wasn’t everything else going on more or less business as usual in Beirut?
This hadn’t been the first time we’d had a conversation along these lines. A few years earlier, I had suggested a roundup of works by Palestinian composers.
“Are there a lot of Palestinian composers?”
“Yes.”
“…Good Palestinian composers?”
Ultimately, the Lebanon piece failed to materialize. I left the magazine in question in May (for a number of reasons) and, while I was hoping to still make a piece from Beirut happen, by June it was clear that the situation wasn’t going to improve.
Now, we are looking at the very real possibility of a full-scale regional war. Now, at least 100,000 and as many as 1 million people in Lebanon have been displaced, including thousands of Syrians who are being forced back across the border to a future less certain than what they faced as refugees. Now, photos of drivers in these mass exoduses sharing the dregs of their water with neighboring cars are going viral. Now, the Beirut Synthesizer Center and Tunefork Studios (two examples of the very real classical/new music scene in Lebanon) are mobilizing to provide essential items to displaced Lebanese. Now, even the New York Times reports that “even Beirut isn’t safe.” Now it’s unclear what of Lebanon and her culture will survive, or even what they will be tasked with surviving.
This is a small Substack and I am acutely aware of who reads this. Perhaps that’s why I’m reluctant to name the magazine in question even though it’s a pretty easy gap to fill in. I’m acutely aware of the inelegance of biting the hand that feeds, of bitter grapes, of hell hath no fury like a woman scorned, of whatever metaphor or cliche you want to apply to this situation.
I’m also acutely aware that not much will change as a result of this post. Most likely the people who need no convincing of the existence of the Other (and the Other’s culture), the ongoing ramifications of imperialism, or the skewed perspectives shaped by those in power will be the only ones to read this far. This piece may get a handful of comments and likes, and then be completely forgotten within a few weeks, by myself as much as by anyone else.
In the end, however, none of this is the point. The point is that our interest remains spotty. (Yes, all of us.) At its best, art is a means of filling in those voids and gaps. And, if we’re going to continually deny it that function, I’m not sure we deserve to have art at all.
With that function in mind, I’ll sign off with this piece by Lebanese violinist and composer Layale Chaker, set to a text by Iraqi poet Sinan Antoon: ”A Butterfly in New York.” (Recorded by Karim Sulayman and Sean Shibe for Broken Branches, an album for which I also wrote the liner notes.)