Oriental Colour in Exoticist Portrayals in Art and Music at the Climax of the Long Nineteenth Century

Abstract

This article explores how the correlation of Orientalism with “colour” helped stimulate the increasing brilliance of orchestral music as the nineteenth century approached its zenith, explaining particular analogies that were drawn between fine art and music, while emphasising the importance of colour as traced in the evolution of treatises on instrumentation and orchestration and the ever– growing focus on colour in music generally (tone / tone colour / colouration / tone painting). It also draws parallels with developments in other art forms during the period – in literature, but especially in relation to those theories revolutionising fine art – aiming to illustrate that they were all driven and underpinned by similar “Eastern”–derived aesthetic philosophies, approaches and ideals – by tending to prioritise the enrichment of colour over all other constructional parameters. Even before the turn of the twentieth century, some critics feared that such unrestrained striving after colouristic effects, or “sensationalism”, was inducing every art form to turn “decadent”.