iPaper - side 15Following up on evocations of postcolonialism by both Weisethaunet and McClary, Hedda Høgåsen-Hallesby draws extensively on postcolonial theory in her paper “Who Are You, Peer? An Anniversary Postlude on Music, Text and Identity Constructions”. With Edward Said’s (1979) well-known critical category of Orientalism as a starting point, Høgåsen-Hallesby uses the metaphor of “friction” to examine the relationships between Ibsen’s text for the play and Grieg’s music for it. She specifically addresses the issue of whether Grieg’s music for the play’s fourth act can be considered Orientalist, in the sense of drawing on and supporting systems of knowledge and representation that justify the West’s perception of itself as morally superior to and culturally more advanced than those regions of the world on which it had colonial designs, and which thus legitimize the West’s political domination of them. Høgåsen-Hallesby concludes that while Grieg did draw on Orientalist musical tropes (such as pentatonicism) widely in use at the time, the articulation of this music to Ibsen’s text – which is explicitly critical of European and American imperialism – complicates the reading of Grieg’s musical representational practice. Høgåsen-Hallesby also addresses the gendering of Orientalist musical representations in her discussion of the figure of Anitra and Grieg’s music for “Anitra’s Dance” and the “Arabian Dance”. In his contribution “Do Pianists Exist to Play Piano Concertos? Grieg’s A minor Concerto as a National Canon”, pianist Øyvind Aase brings to the book the perspective of a professional performing musician. Like several other contributors to the volume, Aase questions the essentialist, reductive, or otherwise simplistic equating of music and different kinds of identity, arguing that, however natural they may come to be accepted as being, such equivalencies are not essential or given, but discursively constructed in specific historical circumstances. The discursive force of this construction becomes, for Aase, an oppressive force, acting to limit the artistic (and career) choices available to the performer. Aase quotes from Grieg himself, who maintained on the one hand, that being Norwegian is no guarantee that one would automatically understand his music, and, on the other hand, that nonNorwegians (such as the Australian Percy Grainger) may come to musically understand Grieg’s works in such a profound way that they can become the foremost interpreters of it. Using Grieg’s A minor concerto as an example, Aase thus presents a critical perspective on how national musical canons can constrain the artistic work of performing artists, effectively working to Introduction 17 |