Music's relationship to the exotic has been a growing area of enquiry in recent decades, yet, as any number of sources reveal – from specialized studies to collections of essays to Grove Music Online’s ‘Exoticism’ bibliography (updated in September 2014) – the focus of most scholarship has been on music of the nineteenth century and beyond. To some degree, this is understandable: as European empires expanded to encompass much of the globe and contact with foreign cultures increased, European composers and audiences concomitantly found novelty and entertainment through musical representations, however stereotypical and inaccurate, of these cultures. Thus the sheer number of such representations – which tended, increasingly, to include stylistic markers of difference – grew substantially in the nineteenth century. Ralph P. Locke's own voluminous previous writings have focused virtually exclusively on the period after 1800, from his studies of Saint-Saëns's Samson et Dalila and Verdi's Aida to his book Musical Exoticism: Images and Reflections (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), which includes only a chapter and a half (out of eleven) on exotic works pre-dating the nineteenth century. Music and the Exotic from the Renaissance to Mozart is thus a much-needed addition to the literature. It is the first sustained study of specific works composed during the years 1500–1800, while it also highlights broader trends in composers’ approaches to the exotic and audiences’ reception of their music. These trends include an increasing preference for exotic settings and characters, often involving quite particular references to a range of foreigners, removed either geographically or chronologically; frequent allegorical treatment of characters and groups in musico-dramatic works, often for the purpose of criticizing aspects of the home culture; and, especially in the eighteenth century, a growing number of stylistic indications of otherness (6–8).

Since what might be considered ‘exotic’ – literally meaning ‘external’ or ‘from outside’ – is potentially nearly boundless, Locke defines the parameters of his study in the first part of his book (chapter 2): ‘Our primary concern is with peoples (ethnic groups, etc.) that were understood at the time as really existing in – or, like Jews or Gypsies, deriving from – some land that was both far from Here and distinctly different from Here’ (30). He specifies that ‘various categories of Others that are not associated with particular ethnic, national, or cultural traits’ – women, children, animals and imaginary creatures such as monsters and witches – are not the focus of his study, although these categories sometimes overlap with cultural otherness. In Lully's Armide, for instance, the eponymous Syrian sorceress uses her magical powers to seduce the crusader Renaud, who ultimately abandons her. (A more complete index would point readers to these same characters in Handel's Rinaldo, which is also discussed in the book.) As Locke notes, the conflict between love and duty highlighted in the opera is further complicated by the characters’ gender and religious differences, which not only influenced the opera's reception but also may be read allegorically as reflections of Louis XIV's struggles with his own religious and political demons.

Locke notes that according to received scholarly wisdom, tragédies en musique (like opere serie) ‘tend not to build crucial plot points on matters of locale and ethnicity’. None the less, he observes, these works often depend on a basic distinction between two groups who quite clearly represent ‘Us’ and ‘Them’ and therefore prompt interpretation (241–242). And, as in the case of Armide, although Their music does not sound distinct from Ours, difference none the less pervades these works and colours their reception. Music and the Exotic, which Locke frames as a chronological ‘prequel’ to his Musical Exoticism, therefore revisits at the outset (part 1, chapter 2) a paradigm he introduced and elaborated extensively in his previous book, as well as in his article ‘A Broader View of Musical Exoticism’ (The Journal of Musicology 24/4 (2007), 477–521): ‘All the Music in Full Context’. Underlying this paradigm is the question ‘Must the music in a work that evokes an exotic place or people “sound exotic” – and to whom?’ (17). In contrast to the unspoken affirmative answer implicit in much scholarship (which Locke refers to as the ‘Exotic Style Only’ paradigm), Locke's research leads him to a different conclusion: not necessarily. Because his approach may be novel to many readers, especially those unfamiliar with his earlier work, and because it is at the heart of the interpretations he offers in Music and the Exotic, I cite his explanation of it at some length:

The book's very title reflects this paradigm, as does Locke's frequent use of the phrase ‘music-assisted representation’, for the music itself is only one potential aspect of the representations he explores. Indeed, many of the repertories Locke considers challenge the application of the ‘Exotic Style Only’ paradigm on several levels beyond the frequent lack of stylistic markers of difference, either because the music has been lost (many Venetian operatic balli, as well as Iberian and Ibero-American villancicos, for example) or because the music was (partially) improvised and therefore not (fully) notated in the first place (Italian intermedi and commedia dell'arte, for instance), or because it was varied substantially from one performance to another (most of the music Locke discusses, an issue he takes up specifically in his introduction). Locke's book, along with his Musical Exoticism, thus essentially redefines the exotic in relation to music and provides a model for how scholars might interpret it.

Surveying the lengthy period from Greek and Roman antiquity through to the eighteenth century, part 2 of Locke's study provides an overview of the ‘historical, intellectual, religious, and philosophical trends’ (47) that underpinned the West's engagement with its others, mostly through literature and visual art as well as physical interactions. Although some of the more basic aspects of this material may already be familiar to readers, it none the less provides an important framework for the heart of the book, the studies of specific repertories in part 3 – songs, dances, courtly ballets, oratorios and various types of theatrical works involving music, notably opera – which exemplify both the rewards and challenges of applying Locke's broad paradigm.

Among Locke's most insightful chapters are those treating eighteenth-century staged works, and his focus in these chapters is well balanced between famous and much-discussed works and many that have received little attention. For example, in chapter 13, in which Locke explores the operatic ‘obsession with the Middle East’, he investigates Grétry's La Caravane du Caire and Salieri's Tarare alongside Mozart's Die Entführung aus dem Serail, Die Zauberflöte and Così fan tutte. And although Mozart's operas, notably, have already generated a voluminous secondary literature, Locke approaches them from new angles and offers fresh, thought-provoking insights into them: a re-evaluation of Osmin as an other who resists foreign domination in Die Entführung, for instance, and an interpretation of Monostatos in Die Zauberflöte within the context of his relationship to dark-skinned vice characters and devils in medieval and early modern dramas. As with his discussion of Armide, Locke highlights the ‘endotic’, or allegorically self-reflective, aspects of many of these works – for instance, Die Zauberflöte’s ambivalent stance toward the plight of Monostatos's slaves, and passages in La Caravane du Caire (first performed in 1784) that reflect contemporary questioning of the morality of slavery. Perhaps most remarkable in this respect is Tarare (premiered in 1787), whose ‘barely disguised attacks on kingship, aristocratic privilege, and the church’ waged by a cast of entirely non-European characters Locke aptly characterizes as a ‘frontal attack on Europe's customs and governing structures’ (306).

While the success and usefulness of ‘All the Music in Full Context’ as an interpretive paradigm is evident in such discussions, its application to purely instrumental repertories, such as the dances Locke surveys in chapter 6, is more challenging and ultimately less convincing, since typically the only ‘non-musical elements’ they contain are titles, and ‘evidence from beyond “the work[s themselves]”’ tends also to be scant. Although Locke reminds the reader throughout the book that a given passage's or work's reception as exotic was surely variable (see for instance pages 178, 181 and the more extended and very interesting discussion of Handel's operas’ reception by his contemporaries, 261–266), Locke notes that of the several dances he investigates, only the moresca ‘maintained a consistent, intensely theatricalized, representational aspect when performed socially (that is, not as part of a theater work)’ (117). To what extent, then, did stylized dances such as the sarabande, chaconne and polonaise, which had foreign origins but abounded in Western European music of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, continue to manifest what Locke identified in Musical Exoticism as ‘the will to represent’ or ‘the will to evoke’ (74)? That is, to what extent can these dances be construed as exotic? Indeed, in his earlier book, unlike in Music and the Exotic, Locke questioned directly how one might ‘distinguish between, on the one hand, musical works that demonstrably represent or portray the exotic, and, on the other, works (e.g., by (J. S.) Bach or, some would argue, by Steve Reich) that use foreign styles without conveying an exotic charge’ (72; original italics). The same question might have been considered in greater detail here too. Furthermore, categories investigated in Musical Exoticism such as ‘submerged exoticism’ (the absorption of originally foreign gestures into a composer's personal style, not necessarily involving representation) and ‘transcultural composing’ (a kind of musical syncretism, which again is not necessarily representational) might also have been applied to the earlier repertory discussed in this volume. This pertains especially to the works of Haydn (which receive scant mention in Music and the Exotic) and other composers who were active in multi-ethnic parts of Europe.

I raise these points less as criticisms of Locke's book than as suggestions for future research, for in a study as wide-ranging as his, it is inevitable that some topics and repertories will receive more thorough treatment than others. Locke's study is an ambitious one, yet it remains accessible to a variety of audiences, from music lovers to undergraduate and graduate students to professional musicologists and cultural historians, because it is engagingly written, free of jargon and lavishly illustrated with reproductions of many artworks that are little known and not readily available. Its exhaustive bibliography, which includes sections listing online and audiovisual resources, is indispensable to anyone interested in investigating exoticism in early music. And much research is indeed left to be done: in Locke's own concluding words (326), ‘The topic is rich and multi-sided. May it continue to be explored in a variety of ways!’.