Les Chinoises

Contacts between Europe and the Far East are most famously celebrated in the travel journals of Marco Polo, a 13th-century Venetian merchant, but the initial commercial bonds have been subsequently loosened to include all manner of cultural, artistic, and philosophical exchange. Oriental objects—both actual persons and inanimate property—exerted a strong fascination on Western European minds, from the innumerable Christian converts tracked down by Jesuit missionaries to Titania’s Indian “pet” boy in Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Foreign cultures excited composers as well, but the works usually don’t offer any tangible evocation of traditional Chinese music. That is the case with Francois Couperin’s piece Les Chinoises (The Chinese) from his final collection of keyboard works. Apart from a few eccentricities in rhythm and meter, Couperin’s piece remains embedded in the French baroque soundworld of dance, ornament, and conventional tonal progressions. Clearly things from the Far East were cited for their novelty alone. It took about two centuries for European artists to develop their appreciation for Oriental art and music in its own right.

(c) Jason Stell