CORRECTIONS AND CLARIFICATIONS: • For those wanting examples of authentic Iranian, Turkish etc, music, you're on the right channel. That's my specialisation. Browse my channel and you'll find plenty of authentically arranged/composed music of the region, all the videos accompanied with descriptions that'll give you a good base with which to do your own searches afterwards. Check out playlists dedicated to the specific cultures. Check out my Epic Talking playlist for more videos like this one. • "What do you think of the Dune soundtrack?" Why is everyone bringing up the Dune soundtrack? I'm talking about the representation of real life MENA cultures here. Arrakis isn't a real life culture, you can't represent it accurately or inacurately. Dune's soundtracks falls completely outside the periphery of this discussion. Sci-fi and fantasy *should* create soundtracks by mishmashing real world sounds, that's the entire point of those genres. • I guessed in the video that the accurate pieces of music in the Crusader Kings 3: Legacy of Persia DLC soundtrack were most likely created by the Iranian collaborators of the Swedish composer, but the latter, Håkan Glänte, contacted me and I learned that he indeed did write those songs after careful research into the Persian Classical Dastgah system; which goes to further show my point that Western musicians absolutely have the ability to render authentic foreign music, and that the prevalence of Orientalism is simply due to complacency and laziness in the industry. • "What about Occidentalism? How about the view of non-Westerners towards the West?" So there is such a thing as Occidentalism but it's not the yin to the yang of Orientalism as some may think. Most often, it takes the form of irrational hostility towards the West. Things like rejecting well researched truths presented by Western academia solely on the basis that it's Western. I've been highly critical of this in my videos, as it obfuscates "anti-colonialism," with anti-Western bigotry in order to get away with it. Occidentalism as a stereotypical view of the West, however, doesn't really exist as a perfectly symettrical counterpart to Orientalism. The reason why it's mostly a one way street, and non-Westerners are generally better at representing the West than the other way around is because the West is currently the hegemon of this planet, in terms of cultural soft power. Therefore everyone around the world is intimately familiar with the generalities of Western culture because everyone is exposed to it. The average Iranian who lived in Tehran all their life can tell an English accent is distinct from Scottish, and they do associate Received Pronunciation British with "posh." They do know the organ is a church instrument, and that the banjo doesn't sound fancy. Typical Western associations are well known to the average Iranian in Tehran. At the beginning of the video, my uncle and I mention Mozart and Ketèlbey, Western Classical composers, and the musical form of "alla turcas," and "Baroque music". That's because every musician in the world knows Western music and its genres, styles, composers, etc. But it may take you months to find a single Classical Western musician who knows the names of Sheydā, Dimitrie Cantemir, or who know what the terms "peşrev" or "kalofonía" mean, and what musical forms they refer to. All musicians around the world know the basics of Western music. We all do chords, harmony, play the piano and guitar. Only a tiny fraction of Western musicians learn any music theory outside of their own. There's a reason why Western musicians are the only ones who call their form of ethnic music "Music Theory," whilst everywhere else, even between them, people preface their music theory with the cultural specifier like "Iranian music theory," "Japanese music theory," etc. I'm aware that this presents a rather unflattering picture of the West, but please understand that this is not a consequence of us non-Westerners being oh so wiser. Not trying to portray Westerners as inherently bad or evil. If we were the current cultural hegemons of the planet, we'd be just like that. In 500 years, if China or Brazil become the next superpower, they'll be the ones generally ignorant about other cultures whilst everyone else knows about them. Average Westerners aren't ignorant by default, they simply naturally embody the traits of a region with hegemonic global cultural influence, and we non-Westerners are simply luckier than them because unlike them, we all grow up listening to both our music, and Western music. TLDR: everyone in the world knows that Madonna exists. Most Westerners have no idea who Fairuz or Shajarian are. That's just how it is due to the current geopolitical context. But that's just this context. In 500 years, if Central Asia becomes the next cultural hegemon, they'll be the exact same. • I mistakenly use the term "Southeast Asia" in the video, but what I mean is "South Asia." Southeast Asia is countries like Laos, Cambodia, and I'm talking about the Desi cultures like India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, hence South Asia. 00:00 Iranians react to Orientalist music 03:45 Defining Orientalist music 11:44 Disclaimers 17:44 "Indian, Arab, same thing" 37:50 How to write orientalist music 43:28 The OBSESSION with the Double Harmonic Major 54:52 Why the Double Harmonic Major? 1:00:42 The limitation of digital instruments 1:08:33 The vicious circle of Orientalism 1:12:24 Westerners CAN write Eastern music 1:21:00 How Orientalism sucks for Easterners 1:26:34 How Orientalism sucks for Westerners
@faryafaraji I don't know why you are explaining yourself. The world is heading towards multipolarism and a systematic decentralization of the west. This includes music as well. Your video is just another step among billions of other steps towards that inevitable future. Change towards the better starts with rejecting bs and you are now rejecting orientalist bs because you and your honorable family simply know better than them and you are showing your audience everything real and authentic you know. Thank you for the video!
I read the pinned comment first. As an American musician who was raised poor (relative to other Americans) the problem I ran into was not having the right words to search for. I would hear this stereotypical music in games and want to know more. It was only through immigrants I could get the words, but even then, they wanted to Americanize, and my interest would embarass them. Which is all very sad. I love other music and instruments and chords and sounds and blends and people's relations to it. I just wish I knew the words or a keyboard to type or even the location where I heard the snippet of sound in a taxi once!! I can't chase down that one man in Chicago! ❤❤❤ Thank you so much for this. I'm so happy I found you at last!
@@aubreejobizzarro1208 I think you are hitting an excellent nail on the head here! This video and it’s discourse underpin a much larger concept and actually make good and meaningful insights on the idea of culture, cultural appropriation, and just inspiration. This speaks to how too often a big name media productions and the like will be directly connecting to a culture and be presenting as a representation of said culture…. And then do no leg work to actually represent that fucking culture! Not only is this just cultural appropriation, but it will now be disseminated amongst an audience in the west who will unknowingly walk away with that thing becoming a representation of that culture in their minds, which will then continue an unfortunate cycle of cultural misrepresentation. You denote how this is the best, and imo only good, way to create music that claims a connection to a culture or a history, and I fully agree and love this and the specificity of the idea. Because there is also the issue of people trying to claim large concepts as part of a cultural identity and it’s very use or application in something else as being cultural appropriation, and they will bully and pick on artists, for example, using an instrument in a way or style that isn’t identical to how they would use it culturally, and it’s like “dude I never claimed I was making authentic Egyptian or Jordanian music, I just think the Simsimiyaa sounds and looks dope”
Pfahahaha, that's a funny one! Sorry, I just have a very vivid imagination, and I burst out laughing imagining that one Armenian bloke peeking out of the corners of the recording booths with his duduk. Just to put his duduk where it does not belong, if you catch my drift.
Maybe Djivan Gasparyan. Oh, I just learned he died in 2021. Apparently, he does have a credit on the Gladiator movie soundtrack. Also, I was about to write, he even appeared on a metal album, but I double-checked it to be sure, and now I learned, that was his grandson, Jivan Gasparyan, Jr. (and the album was "Enki" by Melechesh).
Tied closely to Persian rugs and Persian cats. Ironically the caricature of the diaspora Iranian Faraji showed in his Greek Music video is a good representation of how Westerners hold contradictory views. Persia = luxury, always set in an interior or a colorful bazaar Iran = enemy!! Must be desert or some other bad place to live, buildings are run down
Fun fact: The Disney Film "Brother Bear", focuses on an Alaskan 'tribe' ( which could mean any group such as the Alaskan Creoles, Iñupiat, Yupik, Aleut, Tsimshian, Tlingit, Haida, Eyak, Inuk, and a number of Northern Athabaskan tribes). For the 'Spiritual scene, they used a BULGARIAN Choir to sing the tune as it would sound vaguely foreign. They didn't even use music of a "Native American" tribe, they used a Bulgarian group to sing the 'Spiritual' musical scene
This is different because you're probably talking about white Americans but I did get slightly miffed by someone who stopped me on the street to tell me I look Cherokee (I'm mixed but have Creek-Seminole ancestry, I'm not Cherokee at all >:///
I might only be Scottish descended, but I can still feel myself transported back to the land of my ancestors. I can almost perfectly imagine the smell of some famous Scottish pierogi alfredo being cooked up in the kouzína my great great abuela. ❤
I'm an architect and a westerner, and I want to say that I really appreciate your example of Chinese vs. Japanese architecture. I spent time studying in both Japan and Korea, and it was astonishing to me how different the architectural styles of Japan, Korea, and China are. I would argue that the styles of those three cultures are *more* distinct from each other than the styles of France and Germany, especially when you take into account just how enormous China is. But most Westerners (including my younger self) just see big roofs with flying eaves and assume they're all the same. The average person just hasn't had the exposure to these differences that they need in order to understand the differences. All that to say, I really appreciate that you took the time to talk on this. I'm never going to be able to unhear the duduk in pop culture, and that's all your fault.
@@brandonkiehl269 well mostly because they’re architecture from different periods of Chinese history. Japan has Tang dynasty architecture down to pat, and Korea has Ming architecture, while China currently mostly has Qing architecture
But in this case, Chinese and Japanese architecture do in fact share this feature of big roofs with flying eaves. They're not the same, but they have common heritage and it is quite obvious. I think it's worth distinguishing that from what this video deals with, which is using the duduk in everything because it sounds foreign and deserty :D
Reminds me of "Tiki" culture. A strange american imagined "polynesian" aesthetic, consisting of a hodgepodge of cultural products of various different peoples, totally unrelated to eachother, and with nothing in common, other than there shared exoticism in the western mind. There was also a musical component of this, with entire records of "sounds of Polynesia" type stuff, that is in no way actually representative of that peoples music.
Actually, the term "tiki" comes from the Maori mythology of New Zealand, where it refers to the first men created by the gods. Tiki sculptures, which are usually modified representations of men, originated in the Marquesas Islands and are a significant part of French Polynesian culture. Tiki figures are often carved from wood and have spiritual and symbolic significance. Tiki culture is an American art, music, and entertainment movement that began in 1933 with the opening of Don's Beachcomber, a Polynesian-themed restaurant and bar in Hollywood, California. The restaurant is considered the first tiki bar and is credited with inspiring tiki culture, which is a mix of elements from different Polynesian, Melanesian, and Micronesian cultures. Tiki culture is known for its elaborate cocktails, mugs, and clothing. Tiki culture has spread beyond the United States, with tiki restaurants and cocktail bars opening in Europe, including Kanaloa in London and Palm Beach in Berlin
@prime-viscosity absolutely!! I have studied Maori and Polynesian carving techniques extensively and I utilize them in my artwork. All I was saying is I feel like oriantalism comes from a more ignorant and racist viewpoint rather than for admiration and nostalgia. US servicemen were just trying to emulate their experiences they had in the south pacific whereas oriantalism is totally divorced from lived experience. Oriantalism exists purely in the imagination of the western composer it is not trying to capture the experience of travel to Iran or Turkey or wherever.
It’s appropriation. Flattening a whole bunch of different cultures into a cardboard cutout so that outsiders of those cultures can make money. They are completely inaccurate often times disrespectful and always dehumanizing. It is the same as orientalism in many ways, including the history context of war and colonization of the exotified group. It removes and destroys pacific cultures reducing them to easy to consume stereotypes, not harmless, not trivial, and definitely not innocent in any way.
@@jimbocowman511 Apologies, my comment was directed towards the OP. You confused me though, in your initial comment you said you feel that tiki stuff is not aggressively racist, but rather ignorantly nostalgic; and then your second comment kinda switches on that point- was that a typo or am I being a big dunce?
As a Celt, I feel your pain. I like the "Celtic" music on TH-cam but by God is it so far detached from actual Celtic music it blows my mind. No drums, no harps, just bagpipes. Bagpipes, bagpipes and bagpipe which aren't even a traditional Celtic instrument. I do appreciate that bagpipes do have a long tradition in Celtic nations but drums, horns and harps are our real traditional instruments.
@@fa-q-6226 You can check out the Eisteddfod which is a celebration of Welsh music and cultures for Welsh Celtic music. It's held annually and although it does also showcase modern music in Welsh, there's always a section for traditional (usually harp) music. I'm not really sure of Irish/Scottish music but I'm sure there must be equivalents. Calan are the most famous modern Welsh group that play traditional music, there's also the harpist Catrin Finch or Nansi Richards. My family like Ar Log (they're a bit old school but chatty.)
@@MesserMusicI'm Welsh not Scottish but I felt Scotland's pain from that film. Wallace transformed into a kilt wearing, bagpipe playing highlander was really beyond silly.
I'm a half-egyptian singer, who grew up in Egypt, but since I often avoided egyptian and arabic music, because western music was "so much cooler", I never grew into it as naturally. I've been trying to reconnect with my musical roots (binging Um Kulthoum and others), but in the western education system authentic cultural sources are hard to find. Your video puts in words the alienation I feel listening to the youtube orientalist music, but wasn't sure if it's just me. So thank you so much for taking the time to make this video!🙏 Specially diving into the music theory behind it and explaining the nuances of middle-easter modes. Well done!
As a westerner, its so JARRING how the further the video goes the worse the orientalist music starts to sound because i get to hear actual middle eastern music and it's like.... trying the actual food you only had as an artificial flavoring before. Mind blowing experience, like I unlocked the shrimp vision or something
I wouldn't even say it's bad or unenjoyable music, it's just not at all representative of the music it's pretending to represent, which is problematic in an entirely different way from sheer enjoyability
@@sahitdodda5046 that woman singing like that to the turban bro 😂just sounds sooooo bad. It really is like opera combined with baroque music. or hillbilly music. 😂like wtf. the real music examples he showed were SO much better and COOLER!
The thing I really hate about this is people think nobody in Hollywood does the research. What I'm really, really sick of is them doing the research, and then disregarding everything interesting because it's different, defeating the purpose of doing the research. In Ridley Scott's Gladiator they knew gladiators had business sponsorships and flyers, but excluded them, because audiences "would think that was silly" - I saw a whole video about how James Cameron had a small team of people working years to create unique ethnic music for Avatar's Na'avi aliens, based on tribal peoples from around the world, only to disregard it entirely for being too weird... The alien music. You know during the second world war there were battleships painted with diagonal purple and pink stripes, like some kind of fruit-flavored candy cane? How is this not in a movie already? We keep telling people to expand their minds, and pereceptions but consider the smallest of steps to be a bridge too far. And I'm sick of it. So many Hollywood movies want to humanize the middle east, but they don't want to show any of them living like the humans they personally know. Just sand and clay. Not one tree unless it's dead. Ridiculous
The question is who's doing the disregarding? I'm willing to bet a that a lot of the time the soundtrack composers might be a lot more open minded than whoever they're working for, and/or that other things such as budget/time constraints do not allow them to immerse themselves completely into the actual theory and deliver what they'd want to
@@OpticIlluzhion I'm surprised Farya doesn't recognize this, as his experience is that a project lead hires him, a Middle Eastern man, requests an authentically Middle Eastern soundtrack, and then discards what he delivers on the basis that it's not true to the "Middle Eastern sound" _they're looking for,_ and he even insinuated on some primary level that he _might_ be willing to produce that sound, so long as they aren't ignorant of what they ask. While it is probably true that most Hollywood composers are ignorant of foreign music, it's also true that they're not really in a position to put their foot down about any of it anyway
I think it's really telling how in the Hans Zimmer clip, Zimmer indicates that he is fully aware the duduk has nothing to do with Morocco. He straight up says it's Armenian. This knowledge evidently didn't make him rethink using it to represent Morocco.
Well, if you were top Hollywood executive, you would probably do the same thing as they do. Why? Because for every executive, the main purpose of their business model is to make money. Therefore, executives are utterly scared of anything truly innovative and too much different, in any way, be it from storytelling, camera angles, music... And the fact is that they are mostly right, and they are not idiots. They are constantly checking the pulse of the public, and feeding them with what they want. So in a way, that's a kind of loop that's not so easy to break. Only when critical mass of people starts noticing that they are constantly fed with same type of content and simply refuse to consume it, there will be chance for alternative to arise.
This is basically the "Tiffany problem", especially in video games in movies. People have a certain idea of what Persian/Arabic/"desert" music is supposed to sound like, and if they'd hear the actual music from the region they would think it's weird, it doesn't fit and generally what was the composer smoking. For the people that don't know what the "Tiffany problem" is, it's about the fact that people have the misconception that it's a modern name, but it was in fact already used in the medieval times. And because of that misconception you'll never see or hear that name in any historical fiction as to not throw off the viewer/reader
Speaking about Tiffany problem, I've once read a reddit poat ranting about seeing "he computed" in book based in victorian England. 'To compute' was used even in medieval England, meaning to count. There are countless such examples for words. And it's just as bad for period music.
I can vouch for this. Was actually surprised when I've decided to listen to some authentic Arabic music and realized that it sounded nothing like what you'd hear in movies and videogames. That said, I'm East European and have a slight familiarity with eastern music (mostly Turkish and Caucasian).
As a Chinese person I'm reminded of the ways western music creators represent "east asia" as a mysterious land of ninjas, yin yang, and dragons. In a single software-generated piece I might hear the Chinese erhu, the Japanese shamisen, a gong in the background, and Mongolian throat singing but the piece would be titled "dark ninja battle music" or something dumb like that. And just like westerners are obsessed with the duduk and the double harmonic minor scale for desert orientalist music, they're obsessed with the gong and the pentatonic scale for orientalist music pertaining to Eastern countries. It's a form of confirmation bias on the part of the composers who only want to sell to their viewers something they think their viewers are familiar with which is more orientalism
We should include the real deal. I think people can handle it. I get bored of our music after a while. :-) I still enjoy it, I just like hearing other elements.
Please, the people want what they expect. People do not pay money to be educated on these things. When a random american says “play something arabic” he expects somethint fake arabic. And since he’s your customer, why give him something he does not want? It is foolish to condemn anyone for giving ignorant folks what they ask for.
@@Tecmaster96 I specifically looked on TH-cam and Spotify for Middle Eastern/Asian music mixes and found the Orientalist garbage and was pretty pissed about it. I’m not musician but even I could tell it was fake. Maybe some ppl like the fake stuff and that’s fine but I wouldn’t say all ppl do. Especially if they are specifically looking for something authentic and it’s hard af to find. Hopefully it will get easier in time, but not with the attitude that westerners are all dumb yokels who don’t care about music. That’s a backwards attitude in itself if you ask me. From my perspective I don’t pay money to have some lazy work of art that’s inauthentic, especially if it’s advertised as being a specific genre.
I know you're joking but Dutch people did and do use bagpipes, bagpipes are a pan-european instrument much like lutes were, misattributed as being specifically Scottish in popular imagination
@@fartz3808 Indeed. If only people knew how many different types of bagpipes there are. For example, the Central European variant: th-cam.com/video/VvuXs2xvsPQ/w-d-xo.html
@@fartz3808 he knows, he even mentioned Greek bagpipes. But I don't know of any Dutch music from the last 300 years that uses the bagpipes so it would be really weird. But the "foekepot" is a funny instrument to use for this.
As a person who is only half Scottish, has never been to Scotland, and knows nothing about Scottish culture, your William Wallace Epic Scottish Battle Music changed my perception of my ancestry and rekindled the flame of my heart, causing me to rush directly out of my door playing the bagpipes in order to procure a plaid kilt. Thank you.
I don't about you but I'm going to watch Braveheart with this soundtrack playing. After he screams "THEY'LL NEVER TAKE OUR FRRREEEDOM!!" and this rises with the cheers of the raging Scotsmen? Yes. It is as literally accurate as that movie.
I’m from ruralish America and have almost entirely European ancestry. I remember distinctly the first time I heard the term orientalism in a sociology class in college. I remember asking more and more questions because I just could not grasp the concept. They kept showing visual examples or trying to to describe it and I felt dumb, but I just had no idea what it was referring to. I understood theoretically what they meant, but I just couldn’t aesthetically process it…..it took a long time before I realized every. Single. Concept I had access to of the Middle East was orientalist. Every piece of art or music or imagery that came to mind. Even whatever accurate, reflective piece of culture I’d experienced from any part of the Middle East had been flattened by my internal concept into an orientalist mishmash. Jesus Christ. What a surreal realization
@@jhd303 okay, but it's good to share real experiences of growth like this one, because they can be the most helpful to people who are still at that stage. It gives them a direct example of behavior that they can relate to, and it shows that change is possible. It's a form of showing hope and positive change.
Good way to understand orientalism is to recognise it as a depiction of the Middle East and North Africa that is designed in a way to justify the West's personal colonialist aspirations and politics towards Arabs
@@auginetic Hey -- thanks for your response. I know tone and nuance are often lost over text these days. I don't have a problem; I was being silly. Have a great day -
I remember going to a Persian store out of curiosity when I was about 12. I asked for traditional music, thinking that I would like it based on my exposure to the "World music" genre of the 90s an early 2000s. The woman at the counter explained to me that since I can't understand the poetry, Persian classical music wouldn't be very interesting for me. I thought, "she doesn't understand the authenticity of my fascination and affinity for other cultures". Then I listened to it... I was UTTERLY bewildered. I kept waiting for the music to start only to find that the entire thing felt endless and like I had nothing to grasp onto besides brief periods when slow percussion appeared. It didn't fit my naive idea of 'Middle Eastern', it just sounded.... foreign in a way that I had never been exposed to and couldn't anticipate. That same year I ended up studying the Baha'i religion and sought out the local community of mostly Iranian practitioners. I noticed that when I heard Persians chant Baha'i prayers, it was similar to the classical Persian cassette I bought, and gave a tiny bit of context to it. I realized the music was intended to be contemplative and to convey some deeper poetic meaning. So, I began exploring a lot of different genres of Iranian music more and more, still kind of trying to find what I thought it should be, only to fall in love with this revelation of sounds I'd NEVER heard before and didn't know I'd find. I realized that Iranian music isn't really part of the Western imagination, even as a trope, and what we think of as Middle Eastern is typically a Disney Aladdin mish-mash of South-East Asian and Arabic stereotypes.
I got acquainted with a musicologist about 20 years ago who introduced me to Persian classical music, and shortly thereafter I took a world music cultures class from another musicologist. My experience was similar. The first musicologist I talked to was very, very disparaging of the "phony" "World Music" phenomenon of the turn of the century, and after hearing some of the straight dope I could understand why.
I like how you took the generalizations made about Middle-Eastern music/culture and applied it to European music. It's a really effective way of pointing out how absurd those kind of generalizations are. This was a really fascinating and enlightening video. I knew on some level that Western portrayals of Middle-Eastern music wasn't accurate but I didn't truly appreciate how inaccurate it was. I wish more care was taken in media to portray things more accurately. We're not only learning incorrect things from bad portrayals, we're missing out on some really good stuff.
Yeah it reminded of an essay I read in college called “the nacirema” that describes an exotic tribe of people and their daily lives the way anthropologists usually do, only to find out by the end that they’re just describing Americans Lololol
@@deebzscrub not gonna lie I would unironicly enjoy some Netflix "historical drama" with Paris nobles really dancing to bluegrass, no one address it. It'd be great.
"Prisencolinensinainciusol" is a song by Italian artist Adriano Celentano, and I think he encapsulates exactly what you're talking about. He made a song that the lyrics were complete gibberish, but they sounded "American" so the Italian youth who loved rock music but didn't speak English thought it was great. It kinda proved that as long as you have the right "vibe," people will dig it. Personally, I think it's an awesome song and, in some ways, very ahead of it's time with they way they looped the beat and horns.
I really hate how hard those "middle eastern desert sand vibe" videos make finding actual compilations of music from pretty much any non-european culture or region. They flood the results of any TH-cam search unless you know names of artists or regional genres already, but if you don't and are just trying to get introduced to new things you have to go through a lot of that digital junk to find anything remotely authentic.
There is a solution if you know their names, just click on the thing under the thumbnail of a video ( mobile version of youtube ) then click on don't suggest this channel. You can get Rid of the channels that make a lot of channels you don't like this way for your future searches
It's really annoying. You either get these fake stereotypes or you get highly Westernized pop versions with bad synth sounds. The way I do it is to read Wikipedia articles about traditional styles, they usually have examples of representative artists which is a good starting point. If it's from a culture with a different script you can just copy the names which gives you better results than searching for the transcribed version.
Especially those that use the very obviously "VST sounding" instruments. I love listening to Orientalst musics personally because of the "vibe" but if not even the instruments sound real... that's even less immersive.
For real, it's always freaking Derek or Brandon Fiechter lmao. Nothing against them, they make very palatable fantasy music that has enhanced many a Dungeons and Dragons campaign, but that really shouldn't be the top search result for "Middle Eastern music".
As a Russian who moved to Türkiye a few years ago, learned the Turkish language and got completely blown away by Turkish music I can confirm that diving deeper into a culture's musical traditions is almost like discovering a new universe. It's mind blowing how many things there are that we westerners have no idea about. Microtonality, insane percussion rhythms, a huge variety of instruments, some of which have Middle Eastern roots some Mediterranean or Anatolian, but the thing that blew me away is the poetry. The lyrics in Turkish music are much more thoughtful and profound than in music I've heard before which was mostly Russian and American. And I can't even imagine how it is in other middle eastern cultures since without the language knowledge it is not possible for me to comprehend, but I know that Middle East is known for insanely deep poetry. All the things you talked about, like microtonal scales, ornamentation, instruments, rhythms were at first foreign to me but gradually as I heard it more and became more accustomed to it, I also became addicted. For me it was like finding a secret universe full of unseen and amazing things except it wasn't hidden at all. It was out there all this time, it's just living in constraints of our own culture makes us ignorant of other things out there. But when you start exploring it's like a breath of fresh air. Your video was in some way a breath of fresh air too. I was really curious about Middle Eastern musical traditions since they influenced and got implemented into Turkish music and it's one of the unique aspects of it that made me so interested. It is great to hear a native's perspective on western interpretations of Oriental music as well as some explanations of what the real Oriental music is and what isn't. For the past year I have been thinking about getting a Kanun (I absolutely love the sound of it) and starting to learn Makam theory, maybe taking music classes. This documentary made me instantly inspired to learn more about Oriental music. Many thanks brother
I'm not Indian, but I grew up listening to a lot of Indian classical music because my parents enjoyed it. The closest I came to the painful cringe you describe feeling from nonsense Orientalist music is a vague sense of unease when I heard Southeast Asian percussion used in 'Ancient Arabic Persian Desert Market' songs in Western movie soundtracks. Your beautiful composition, "William Wallace Epic Scottish Battle Music," has changed me: I get it now. I've experienced true pain. Also it was hilarious, please make more Occidentalist music.
I second the need for more Occidentalist music. I want to hear Banjos in Roman Army music alongside that Harpsichord. Throw in some non-historical throat singing, and we can call it "Battle of the Teutoberg Forest Epic Battle Music"
It's a hilarious and ironic example because we already have our own "William Wallace" movie full of wildly inaccurate music. It's called Braveheart. The entire soundtrack is played on Irish uilleann pipes. There's even an iconic scene where a scottish bagpiper is seen standing on a hill holding a set of highland pipes, playing "outlawed tunes on outlawed pipes." But instead of highland pipes he's playing... soft, friendly, lilting irish music on irish pipes. Real highland pipes sound harsh as hell and burst eardrums. It's comically well-known among westerners that scottish bagpipes sound like a cross between a screaming pterodactyl and a fire alarm. The tone is not friendly and calming at all. It's also worth mentioning that Uilleann pipes wouldn't even be invented for another five hundred years. _In Ireland!_ If they wanted the soundtrack to be soft and friendly then they should have used harp music. Harp players were EVERYWHERE. They were the storytellers and the lore keepers of their day--extremely important people. This fact is not generally known now because England went about systematically killing off all the harpists in the 17th century. You'd think a movie like Braveheart would've embraced this history to show the audience how badly the English destroyed celtic culture, but this was left out as an oversight because the composers and directors are just that lazy about this stuff. Even on a big budget western soundtrack written by a western composer, they're still just chucking darts at a board and calling it a day.
@@pirojfmifhghek566 I mean we are talking about a movie that featured 14th century Scottish people dressed as 2nd century Picts (wearing kilts that wouldn't be invented for another 300 years), shipped William Wallace with a woman who would have been 13 and living in France at the time, depicted everyone involved as downtrodden peasants rather than privileged nobles, and began with a title card setting the plot ten years too early. Even the name of the film is wrong, as it steals the moniker of "Braveheart" from Robert the Bruce, who it wrongfully portrays as a traitor. The entire film is an affront to history.
@@CodyosVladimiros ok but real talk? the "make all kinds of wild and disconnected instruments fit together" is absolutely my jam aha. Put bagpipes and synths with some sitar and a harpsichord and then an electric guitar aha. Plus a pan pipes solo and some Bulgarian choirs. I am all for that shit.
I had this EXACT problem as a Westerner. At one point years ago I started wondering if "oriental" music was made in any key other than double harmonic minor, and for the life of me couldn't figure out how to find anything authentic. Like, as an utter layman, any search words I could think of kept taking me back to the same nonsense no matter how hard I tried.
breaking out of TH-cam algorhytm is a chore. Start liking small, very small videos with very few views, watch them without skipping. The smaller the video, the better. If algorhytm puts you into a basket "this dude is watching REALLY niche stuff" then be ready to see completely different, shadow TH-cam you couldn't see before. Yes, it's THAT crazy. Man I love dungeon synthwave
@@exquisitecanineaficionado What you need to do is to translate what you want to search to the native language. Then you escape algorithm by logging out your account or you can use VPN too.
@@exquisitecanineaficionadoThe flip side of this is that TH-cam tends to convince itself that you only want at most one or two specific niches at a time... TH-cam seems designed to discourage watching a variety of content.
@@exquisitecanineaficionado to add to this, don't forget to click don't recommend channel without hesitation the moment youtube tries to serve you mainstream slop. you can delete stuff from your watch history as well. it works, and it's not really a chore if you never touch mainstream anything to begin with
Well if you count East Asia as oriental, Japan has its own scale or two. I was under the impression that "traditionnal" middle eastern music was scarce because non-alcoholic music has widely been considered haram and against Islam since it's beginning over a thousand years ago, which is longer ago than most music we have *Edit, non-a cappella music
Honestly, Orientalist music reminds me of this brand of chips in America called "Veggie Straws." They have a picture of vegetables on the bag and say things like "Enjoy a healthy snack made with real vegetables" but then you look at the ingredients and it's literally just potato chips with less salt. You can certainly enjoy them, I love them, but at the end of the day it is just potato chips with a bunch of vegetables on the bag Great video!
@@babula1965 I didn't even think about the fact that potato chips are ALREADY technically made with real vegetables lmao that's honestly genius marketing if you think about it
I'm a person with Armenian heritage, but who grew up in the United States, almost exclusively listening to music in the Western music tradition. I've sought out some Armenian music to get in touch with that part of my heritage... and also watched some movies by Armenian directors that had authentic Armenian music in the soundtrack. I've heard things in other (Orientalist) movie soundtracks where I thought, "huh, that kind of sounds like Armenian music," but then thought, well, maybe there was a lot of cultural interchange between ancient Persia and ancient Armenia.... maybe there was, but this was more evidence of film score composers mixing and matching a bunch of "exotic" elements! Thanks, Farya, for your work!
@@KasumiRINA Шашлик, кебаб, сельвакі, якіторі. Смажене м'ясо на шампурі, чи паличці в тому, чи іншому вигляді існує у всіх народів світу, на середньому сході називається кебаб, кабаб, кабоб. В Україні назва йде з Татарської мови.
As a Brazilian I wanna share an experience in our history. Stan Getz, was a struggling Jazz Musician who was stationed in Brazil during the beginning of Bossa Nova. He decided to cling to the genre for a comeback and in America he made a record using Bossa Nova rhythms called Jazz Samba. It was good, but no Brazilian would call it Bossa Nova. It was only when he collaborated with actual Brazilian Bossa Nova Musicians like João Gilberto, Tom Jobim and Milton Banana. That he got Bossa nova. Not only did he get the sound, the record Getz/Gilberto is considered a stable on the Bossa Tradition. Image how much great music we could've had if Western Composers, choose to collaborate with Middle-Eastern Musicians. Instead of making general assumptions.
I'm not brazilian, but as someone who listens to a lot of music. This is so true! I would listen to real bossa nova and brazilian music and hear people credit Stan Getz. It always boggled my mind because it sounds nothing alike.
Do you have any other Bossa Nova jazz recommendations similar to Getz/Gilberto, particularly from Brazilian jazz musicians? Getz is one of my favorite jazz musicians. I've been using Rate Your Music to find other Bossa nova, including the artists you list above, but I imagine the RYM list is made from the western viewpoint.
@@Ryan-wr8fx Brazilian jazz musician is a strange way to call, but, this is not your fault Go for, Luiz Gonzaga, Elis Regina, Pixinguinha, Dominguinhos, Elza Soares
Hollywood has done the same thing with our own Native American culture. Only recently has Hollywood begun to use Native American actors to portray Native Americans in movies.
@@danubeisreallypeculiarrive7944 lol this reminds me of a time in one of my college classes, when my professor asked if there were any any Native American students in the class and a very white European American boy raised his hand and I was just looking at him utterly confused lol.
@@MesserMusic dances with wolves plays into nearly every stereotype of the noble savage and the dead indian. hell, the lead actress is an irish catholic white woman, but at least they filled out most of the rest of the indians with, you know, actual indians
Casually jumping between Farsi, English, and French is such a flex lol. Great video, thank you for all the insight into these musical traditions and their cultural connections
Same, I just keep replaying it and I die laughing every time. I think especially because of how the opera vocals are on the off-beat of the instrumentals.
One thing I really dislike about orientalist music (and orientalism in general tbh) is that it makes it harder to find music that's actually from "those" regions of the world or representative of "those" cultures, from my westerner position at least The most popular sources I can access in the languages that I can speak so far are oversaturated with these generic, orientalist "oasis shawarma vibes" music
I like to play instrumental music when I'm doing work. I choose my videos based on vibe (do i want 80s vaporwave? Do i want folksy hippie? Etc). I do have some "arabian oud" music that was recommended and it's basically the same digital tune looping over again. Now that this video has opened my eyes, I'm going to delete them from my playlist. If i want Saudi instrumentals or Persian instrumentals, i want the real thing, not an orientalist interpretation which is basically a stereotype
Exactly! There used to be a Spotify bot account I think or something similar to an algorithm based spotify playlist creator called "The sound [country + genre] and it was really great! As a kurd, who lives in the middle east, even I have been westernised and my tastes white washed, so finding music through Spotify playlists really helped a lot. That said, those tools are mostly exclusive to modern music, "ancient" folk and instrumental music are still underrepresented in our digital age. It's so hard to find something like that if you don't speak the language of the culture ur looking for :(
Start with Layth Sidiq, possibly the world's best violinist in the Arab music tradition (and also an excellent Western classical and jazz violinist), and then let the TH-cam algorithm take you from there. Also see videos of the Arab National Orchestra. Key search words would include "maqam," "microtones," and traditional Arab instruments such as the oud, qanun, and ney. th-cam.com/video/LB6qWnqiDYU/w-d-xo.html th-cam.com/video/vABZdfnqqqM/w-d-xo.html th-cam.com/video/H-CxR5X94iQ/w-d-xo.html
I'm just a small town girl from the banjo music area of the US who had this video pop up in her recommendations. I was captivated from beginning to end. You delivered this information flawlessly and I appreciate the humor and sarcasm. I learned so much! The authentic music you shared is beautiful and I'm definitely going to check out more. I has to subscribe to your channel so I see more stuff from you. This video really scratched an itch to learn about something new.
Well, if Americans are watching every single Marvel movie while gorging on copious amount of popcorn at cinema, I guess the bills checks out and brings out profit there's more idiots than smart people. If you want quality, you gotta spend some effort to find it. It's a shame how real quality *isn't* mainstream, but that's how it is.
Because all in all as a society we are idiots. Just look what composes the top music charts across America and other western countries. To listen to good music, we need to look underground, or at least outside the mainstream culture
Think about it: Who's making Hollywood movies? Ots not the most cultured not. intelligent segment of the population, I'll tell you that. They're not producing crap to TREAT YOU like an idiot, they're just mostly idiots doing their nit very good best. Hollywood is notorious for NOT READING. Why do you think so many comic books get made into movies, while much better stories from the literary world are ignored? Because the people making movies read comic books, which are basically just story-boards. Holyrood is nit where the best and the brightest go.
Just out of curiosity typed "Iranian music" in Russian on youtube and got a ton of Iranian singers and musicians. Found a lovely video from a Moscow conservatory - it's breathtakingly beautiful. Thank you for the video and an opportunity to enjoy something new.
I was the westerner you were talking about who really didnt understand the difference before watching this. I probably still will be for a while until the pre-conceived notions are trained out of me. Thanks for the look into a beautiful reality
Seeing your arrangements being played at an event by the actual people of that culture must be the biggest compliment/flex ever. Thank you for talking at the camera for an hour thirty six (and discussing some really interesting themes).
Halfway through the video, but I got an idea. You know what you could do ? Perhaps for a 1st April joke. Making a composition which mixes douzens of european instruments from every country, and title it "The fields of the parisian queen" or "the knight of Helsinki", and say it's a classic "Catalan/Dutch mountain music" EDIT : lmao you made it it's incredible
Lmao omg I would love this. Please, compose the Knight of Helsinki piece, I am a Finn who lives in Helsinki, and would love to hear it. (And make it traditional Scottish bagpipe music instead of Karelian singing 😂😂😂)
I'm American Pakistani. when I was a kid I used to play a game called Medieval 2 total war. Being Muslim, I liked playing as the Muslim factions, especially since the overall vibe of literally anyone I knew who played it was "deus vult" and the Muslim factions were pretty much the underdogs (also horse archers). Being of a Pakistani background and speaking Urdu (a language that is almost completely intelligible with Hindi) I listened to a lot of Bollywood music and watched a lot of Bollywood movies. Playing the game I was genuinely shocked by how Desi it sounded. Some of the vocals were straight up Urdu-Hindi words. I'm not well versed in explaining musical compositions and patterns, but being of the culture, I know what cultures we're similar to, and we're not very similar to people from Morocco or Egypt. I brought it up with some people I played the game with and their reaction was literally 20:36. It annoyed the living shit out of me because it wasn't somewhat wrong, it was completely wrong.
This happens even within Western music itself. One egregious example is "viking metal". There is very little information about actual historical viking music, because they were not really prone to writing down the musical notation, but what little remains is very soft and slow. But the pop-cultural perception about Vikings is that they were wild and chaotic, so "viking metal" music is most often based on Gypsy music from the Balkans, Kusturica-style. And even movies from the Wild West usually have soundtracks which have nothing to do with actual music from that era, and often in a movie set in the 1860's the piano player in the bar plays 1920's ragtime.
Have you heard the OST for Prince of Persia 2 on DOS? The adlib ost is very surprising because the composer did their best to try and replicate the articulations and sounds of actual Persian music, despite falling into some common pitfalls (it still uses that one scale a lot). I was reading the comments on a youtube upload of it and saw some people from Persia saying its far more accurate to actual Persian music than any other game music they had ever heard! You might find it intriguing, especially since it was all done with FM and rudimentary music software. I can't speak for it's accuracy because I know nothing about Persian music, but it sounds like its worth looking into.
Well I'll be damned, just listened to it and the composer even included microtonality. Had I known, I would've definitely included this in the positive examples
@@faryafaraji Also the new Prince of Persia: The Lost Crown worked with Iranian artist Mentrix for its soundtrack, with a core plot revolving around Simurgh and its feathers (which I assumed was inspired by the legend of Rostam's father?). There was a mini-doc called "Prince of Persia: The Lost Crown - A Musical Odyssey" detailing their composing process. That game actually brought me to your extremely educational and insightful channel. I'm deeply appreciative of this introduction to authentic oriental musical traditions and wish I could give your video multiple thumbups.
@@faryafarajion the topic of Prince of Persia the 2008 game did include Ahura Mazda and Ahriman as major parts of the plot. No idea how much cultural basis there is to the depiction though
Showing Paris and playing Appalachian music is the most brilliant way to show someone your perspective. I absolutely love this and want to learn so much more. Thank you, from a new viewer.
The fact that the ‘Epic Scottish Battle Music - William Wallace’ actually went kinda hard when I stopped understanding it as totally incorrect really outlines how Orientalist music works, meaning its music that theoretically is good, just isn’t anywhere near what it is labeled as.
So to me, that begs the question: since this music is clearly enjoyed, and we can’t just snap our fingers and destroy it because we like it, is the solution simply renaming the genre to ‘Orientalist’ music? ‘Euro-Oriental Bastardization’?
@@cheezitboi4202 "Bastardization" is a loaded word, but yeah I think that's one valid solution. Just have the orientalist sound be separate from the actual Middle Eastern variety of sounds
@@Anton15243 Bastardization is a loaded I understand, however it really gets across the point that it’s a not so nice ‘interpretation’ or even recreation of music that exists. It’s just the word I could think of when writing the post, I apologize
@@cheezitboi4202 i think the thing to do would be to normalize using stylistic traits typically associated with orientalist music in other kinds of music with the hope of eventually breaking the association. though i say that mainly because i want to play guitar solos in double harmonic major cause it sounds pretty
@@cheezitboi4202 I think it's the same as "Chinese American" food in the US. Most people generally understand now it bears little resemblance to authentic Chinese food but it's still fire and people of all races enjoy eating it and that's great as long as everyone is aware that it's its own distinct cuisine that doesn't teach them much about Chinese food in China.
When you talk about how orientalism has done western audiences dirty, I would like to add something else, as a Brazilian person: I think it does even more harm for people like me, from non-middle eastern third world countries. We also get our culture misrepresented all the time, but not only that, we only have access to misrepresented versions of all the other cultures in the world except for the western, european and american culture. All of us, third world countries, live in a different bubble, where we have access only to our own cultures and to the dominant culture in the world, and that makes it much harder for us to realise how much we’re being robbed of. If the entire world had access to the entire world, culturally, the western hegemony could not be mantained, they would not be able to be the main characters in all of our perceptions of the world. Videos like this are very important, not only for middle easterners, americans and europeans, but also for east asians, africans, latin americans and more. When we learn about the diversity of the world, we become more free ourselves.
I mean, even American/European cultures are rarely accurately represented by our own media. I have no doubt that it’s to a lesser degree than foreign cultures, but it’s not like the common tropes associated with Westerns or pirate movies or medieval flicks or Victorian novels are particularly accurate to the historical periods they’re set in. We don’t really even need to go historical to find huge discrepancies between fictional stereotypes and the real world - the stereotypical American high school setting bears little resemblance to what American high schools are actually like, outside of maybe the general aesthetic. At the end of the day fiction is meant to entertain, not educate. Sometimes that means knowingly playing into inaccurate stereotypes simply because it’s what audiences expect.
very well said!!! as an arab i agree completely. when i started comparing notes with a mexican friend for example i started to realize how much we all had in common and how fascinating our differences were
That is an extremly underrated comment. I am from Germany and you just gave me a completely new perspective, that I have totally missed so far. Thank you very much
This reminds me so much of a short but very good talk by Rami Ismail. He spends just 20 minutes teaching the audience the basics of how to read Arabic script, then he shows some screenshots of popular games (like, military shooters and stuff), and even with only 20 minutes of learning, the audience can see immediately that the "Arabic script" in the screenshots are completely garbled and nonsense. It takes *so little* learning to do miles better than we have so far. It doesn't take long to show a little respect.
Thank you a lot for your work. I must admit that I used to get clickbaited by these titles with "Arabic/Persian music", but then I just figured out to look up differently; in my case what I was searching was XVIth century Safavid and Ottoman music pieces, and yes, I'm putting them together, because what I'm researching is related to Ottoman-Safavid dyplomacy, so what I wanted was to find music remotely connected to this topic, seperate pieces to differentiate them and get the essence of each respectively. It took me a while before I found your channel and others, because I've started typing e.g. "bağlama müzik" or "setar iranian" instead of "ottoman court music" and "persian safavid music", and clicking on videos with the artist actually playing them. I did the same thing for italian renaissance, like "venetian lute" or "florentine lute" and sometimes I just use phrases from a specific language to get better results (unfortunately, I depend on google translate, but it still gives better results than using English only). I guess we, Westeners, can never be truly free of having these orientalistic lenses, but it takes time and effort to dig deeper and deeper. Honestly, in my case I had to go down the rabbit hole of learning about Albanian culture, history and dialects, in order to write a single Albanian character and understand their perspective, and I'm not Albanian, but by God, I was immediately immersed in this culture while watching and listening to an elderly man playing his çifteli. Music helps to convey these nuances in a compressed way, since it's part of every day life and that's why authentic musical representation matters so much.
Thank you for not being afraid to challenge the Western norms in your videos, thank you for spreading a sliver of our true cultures and thank you for being the person that you are, Adam.
Funnily enough, this even applies to traditional Western\European music, in the imagination of the 'average' Western\European consumer\music producer. The "Medieval" music, as it is often rendered in modern media, usually bears little resemblance to the actual European Medieval music, whether folk or institutional itual. Because the average consumer\music producer just couldn't care less..
And even more, the common medieval clichés, from society to material culture, are often just that, deeply ingrained clichés, and not really medieval at all. And if they are medieval, they freely mix a thousand years of history and various regions together in a big stew.
That's one thing I like about the bardcore genre, since it has an actual genre name and usually just parodies existing pop music, more people seem to be aware that it's not historically accurate. On the other hand the orientalist music issue is just as rampant as Farya stated
Can 100% confirm what you're saying about western music training and microtonality! I started playing the violin when I was six years old. If you learn the violin, 99% of what you play is gonna be european classical. When I was about 18, my teacher gave me a piece with some microtonal elements and it completely broke my brain. Like, on a conceptual level I knew what I was supposed to do, but at that point I had spent ca two thirds of my entire life training myself to play with 12 notes in an octave, I had trained my hearing to get those notes exactly right (because a violin doesn't have frets so you actually have to hit them properly like you do in singing). Trying to reliably hit a note that was right between the two notes that my brain would accept was insanely difficult because I didn't just have to hit that note, I had to hold it while fighting the visceral, instinctive reaction of my brain screaming at me that I was playing the wrong note Great teaching moment, 10/10, would recommend! (couple years later I got to try out a Cura in an improvised music session and experimenting with microtonality when I had frets to help me was actually a lot of fun!)
Yeah I’m a jazz/country guitarist and even though there are some microtonal elements for “bluesy” notes hearing real microtonal music is really harsh to my ears. I just want to reach out and tune the peg up a bit. For jazzy stuff the idea of microtonalilty is that you are approaching notes or getting that dissonance intentionally not for melodic but expressive purposes. Middle eastern music will straight up hit the in between note in a melody or chord and although I try to understand it I just have spent my life training my ear to hear it’s a flat note.
you would have to retune to strings. it's super weird, i believe,on the fingerings if you don't redo the strings. it will make more sense if you do the right tuning
@@PhaedraDarwish From what I can tell, middle eastern music uses various tunings, but the microtonality doesn't come from those, it's in the fingering. Either way, the piece my teacher gave me to try was written with a standard european GDAE tuning in mind, so for that one, it was all down to fingering anyway
Yeah, I'm not nearly as trained as you, and every time he demonstrated microtones a little voice in my head said "Error! go double check your notes!" Western musical traditional really does hate microtones.
This video is the perfect example of constructive criticism, you're calling out orientalism but you're not judging the westerners who grew up hearing orientalist music, but pointing out how it's a sad reality that we can't hear actual Middle Eastern music. I grew up hearing soundtracks of Lawrence of Arabia, Aladdin, etc. and they sounded really beautiful, but I always knew that something was off and I wasn't getting the full thing. Ironically it led me to search out for real Middle Eastern music and led me here, just hearing the difference between orientalist music and actual Iranian music shocked me as the Iranian music feels more emotional and hits me harder. Also I love the humor of the video, especially with writing "William Wallace Epic Scottish European Battle Music" and it made me laugh harder than I had in a while.
I remember the Arabic Nokia ringtone that became viral, and someone turned it into an “epic”, orchestral piece… And its microtonality was changed into the most cliched “Eastern”-sounding progression 😭
Isn't the original piece the ringtone was modelled after way better anyway? Like, I listened to all these videos and the "epic orchestral" piece just... sounded boring af
I studied classical arabic music, and my partner is an iranian who's a classically trained violinist in iranian music. I admit that this is the most hilarious shit ever due to how accurate it is. I totally understand how it feels as a Tunisian. We have a lot of traditional north african music that is being overlooked at as it's all "arabs", "desert", whatever... While actually, the instruments are not from the arabs, and the language is not even arabic. The arabic influence exists but it's a huge difference. Some bands are fighting this by writing about how "oriental music" is just whatever is in the middle east from the western perspective (eg. a song called: Znous زنوس - Salih صليح). Anyway, you made my day and I am even more attached to this channel now!
Do you know the Nuubaat music and Chaabi music? If you do I have a question for you which I searched but able to find nothing due to language barrier I guess.
Exactly, I was thinking that just as how "orientalism" lumps all middle eastern cultures into a weird frankestein that doesn't reflect reality, "arabism" is also not far from that. Arabs have very different cultures that span two continents with very different music styles and traditions.
@@aresatlasdurmus9656 I am moroccan and I can answer any questions that you have about chaabi. Although chaabi is used as a blanket term to refer to the music that is played wildly within a culture, hence why algerian chaabi, would be entirely different than the tunisian one or moroccan one.
@@minoassal chaabi is not exclusively algerian, it is a genre of music that is spread across north african regions and it takes many forms. Just like how "el ayta" is also a depiction of colonial struggle under the french protectrat. It is a very cultural piece of heritage .
Oooh this is excellent, instant follow from me. Bless you for not skimping on the captions! As someone who relies on them no matter what people are speaking, they're important
I have been bellydancing for about 20 years, and early on, I began to notice there was *something* about the different types of music I was being exposed to in various classes. Sometimes the songs felt "real" and sometimes they felt "fake." I wasn't sure how else to describe it, I was in high school and had no knowledge of music theory or ethnomusicology. As I got older, I read Edward Said's "Orientalism," I studied the history of all the dances that made up "belly dance," and came to learn and identify the instruments and rhythms unique to different regions of the MENAT. Often times I was on my own searching for this stuff. I was afraid to ask dumb questions that would betray my ignorance, but I was eager to learn. I would have killed to have seen this documentary when I was 16. It would have allowed me to articulate my feelings so much better, and give more power to that little voice in my head that wanted to scream "this is cringe," "something is wrong," "this ain't it," whenever I heard a song called "Eternal Arabia" Dancers are often visual symbols of a culture's musical heritage. Understanding the music you're dancing to isn't just important -- it's the damn point. Thank you so, so much for making this doc and posting it free on TH-cam, so hopefully other young dancers can have an easier time learning about the music they are dancing to.
As a fellow bellydancer, I have seen the same bullshit in Western "belly dance". Faked costuming with no regard for areas of origin; bindis on the forehead, a mishmash of jewellery from different areas, weird music and bad attitudes toward the cultures of origin. 60's and 70's white feminism has a lot to answer for here.
The minimum that belly dancers should do is educate themselves with the cultures and musical traditions of the regions that this dance draws from. Orientalism was the draw for me, then when I realized what Orientalism was, it was an invitation to really come to know these cultures. You are right in that we do have a responsibility to accurately portray the cultures we aim to depict, there's just no getting around it if you love the dance. You dignify them if you present them authentic dance and understanding. There was no greater compliment that I have received as a dancer than when I was told by an Iranian musician that I danced to his music like I understood it in my body. That being said, I mainly dance fusion, but in the right settings. Honor the rich traditions, and celebrate the artistry and innovation when appropriate. And for goddsakes, please stop dancing to Arabian Nights! I don't care how good the version of the song is! It's peak cringe.
Thanks for posting this! I have 'belly danced' in the past, and had similar feelings but couldn't articulate them. Watching this video really gave me some great insights and thoughts of 'oh dear, I have really fallen into that trap'. And then feeling a bit ashamed for not realising sooner. Fantastic, clearly articulated and expressed video and so happy to see other belly dancers on here expressing much more eloquently what I am trying to say than I can. Looking forward to doing some reading and growing my understanding. Starting with the Edward Said :)
as a japanese woman, i dunno what you're talking about. all we do is eat sushi and commit seppuku. also i live in the part of town where all the middle eastern immigrants live so i actually do get to hear cool oriental music when they barbecue and stuff, its cool. we've also got a bazaar with cool music and tasty mangoes
As a japanese you aren't part of that Samurai caste so I doubt you were expected to do Seppuku. I guess they don't teach japanese caste system in Japanese school.
@@SafavidAfsharid3197 So you're part of said caste and expected to disembowel yourself in case of dishonor? Living in your lord's pavilion in the middle of modern Tokyo, having crazy duels against cars at intersections? Clearly you were not taught sarcasm in whatever school you attended.
being iranian myself, this video not only is a critique of orientalism, but also a great reminder of deeply cultural arts and how they should be appriciated. great video, love your channel, just found it. :)
being an Appalachian traditional musician, the juxtaposition of Cumberland Gap over a picture of soviet Russia has me in tears! lol! The level at which orientalist composers have lost the plot is so absurd!
What's so frustrating about the excessive usage of the Duduk is that we have wind instruments that sounds just as mystic, raspy and eerie!! The Gasba, The Zoukra and The Mezoued exists and they're played by actual tribesmen and Amazighi people! and they're VERY omnipresent in north african folk music and have an immense potential to be utilized.
@@Jolly_Jelly_ that just shows how much research and respect he shows toward anything that is not eurocentric, and the prejudice that comes with it. I was so disappointed when i heard that he was the one in charge for the Dune soundtrack, and my concern can be heard through it
@@MarkHogan994 and the duduk is a fremen instrument.. like cmon lets stay in good faith and not pretending that Dune universe was created in a vaccum and doesnt wear its arabic influences on its sleeve. Even frank herbert admits it, and the books are pretty well researched and respectful of the cultures that served as the blueprint of Dune. I cant say that about the films im afraid as much as i liked them, they’re a neutered and diluted story of what Herbert was trying to tell, in fear of not being too gratting to western audiences
I’m not even middle-eastern, just a regular American, and I even find the duduk over used to the point that it’s grating. I am a composer, so maybe I’m more sensitive to these over use of the instruments and scales, but yes I found it just as grating way before I even saw this video. Just do something different Hollywood, it can’t be that hard!
In trying to find middle-eastern music, I've gotten pretty good over the years at recognising what is clearly inauthentic. (Fiechter brothers and AI-thumbnail stuff) Despite this, it's been difficult still to find actual authentic music here on youtube. So I appreciate you making these videos :) I also appreciate your very nuanced take on western cultural perspectives. Edit: I honestly posted this comment before watching the video (just reading your pinned comment). I'm glad you talked about the Fiechter brothers!
To defend western composers for games and movies a little bit is that they're usually not the creative be all end all for the projects they're working on and have to navigate around temp music and project lead expections. Which means that even if they go out and do their research and put a lot of effort into creating authentic music their demos might just get shut down and they're told to do what's familiar. While not specific to Orientalist music, one of the biggest examples to me is the Soundtrack of Avatar. Composer James Homer worked with ethnomusicologist Wanda Bryant for like two years to create a unique sound for the Na'vi and virtually none of their work made it into the final movie and what did make it in was extremely watered down because everything they came up with was shut down for being too alien. In general the amount of work and effort that went into the world building of Avatar is absolutely unhinged. A fully developed Na'vi language, various scientists hired to make sure that the world was as plausible as it could be. Every plant, every animal, every piece of tech has detailed background information. And it was all wasted on a movie that boils down to "Pocahontas but blue".
Imagine shutting down demos for being "too alien" when we're dealing with a culture of actual aliens. I wish it was possible to re-discover some of those.
There is some dramatic irony in the making of the movie, how it ended up reinforcing the "noble savage" and orientalist/exoticising myth it originally tried to deconstruct
@@aimee9478 happened with the avatar soundtrack, they told horner to do something different so he did research in unknown music traditions and used those and almost all of it got thrown except one little vocal thingie going on in the background
@@tj-co9go What the guy above said. I like Avatar, but the Na'vi were definitely the 'noble savage living one with nature and everything's perfect' and the humans were 'the evil, exploiting conquerors who only cares about money and other stuff the audience doesn't care about'.
What makes this video so great is there's no hatred towards individuals, no moral grandstanding or performative exaggeration, just genuine annoyance and a sense of how *tired* he is of this stuff. And of course he's totally right, the ignorance is especially galling in a modern context where the internet is availiable to just Google a list of instruments, scales, modes and time signatures associated with a style of music. They're so lazy they can't be bothered to do at least 10 minutes of research.
I will fully admit, I was with you mentally and conceptually for the first 40 minutes, but it didn't fully hit home until you composed the epic William Walace song. Well played, and an amazing way to make a point. These youtube titles of "Epic persian desert pyramid sand iranian" are like Amazon/AliExpress labeling a product...
I am grateful for your teaching / knowledge. I have learned much today and will endeavor to listen to more Persian songs and music. We humans have so many beautiful cultures , so many, and it fills my heart to hear or witness the expression of a culture through those medians - untainted and true. Its says 'Here we are! this is us!' As a New Zealand Maori I feel I can understand the issues that come with cultural appropriation and abuse and feel disrespected on so many levels at times. But as you have demonstrated that through communication, sharing and teaching we help others to see us, to understand who we are and to respect and celebrate our difference's. Peace be upon you and your people brother or as we say 'kia tau te rangimarie ki o nga tangata katoa'...
people from the culture using the music you wrote of their culture for their cultural events is the greatest compliment an ethnomusicologist could get. that is so cool
The apology by FaolanMusic is so crazy to me, like... "We called it Princess of Persia because our song, that we freely admit was not influenced by traditional Persian music, reminded us of Persia, a place we likely have never been." And then to just say "driven by our thoughts," as though the rhythms and melodies they produce aren't - at least in some part - derived from popular culture.
@@EmyrianMusic 'drive by our thoughts' made me laugh out loud Like yeah, no shit, most humans are driven by their thoughts, if those thoughts could be educated in future that would be great
I'm forever grateful that in the early 2010s, I met someone across the world from me, who lives in Pakistan, and was in a shoegaze band. It was the most real and undeniable shattering of orientalism for me. I saw firsthand proof that 20 year olds over there listened to the same exact music, played the same exact video games, created the same exact indie bands.. lived the same exact lives that we live here. So much to unpack in this video, gonna keep coming back to this.
Orientalism is bad, but then globalism also has its caveats. It would be ideal for more people to hold nuance in their perception... In Pakistan, some people listen to shoegaze, most people listen to whatever is on Coke Studio, but also others may just be into, say, religious music - I remember reading about how there nasheed CDs around Ramadan are a smash sale at least as if not more so than Coke Studio... (that being said, even nasheed music may sometimes include elements like... trap beats) So things are actually complex. There are also things in Western culture that remain largely unknown to many Western people. How many Americans listen to or are even much aware of zydeco? How many of the British are aware of avant-garde guitarist Keith Rowe?
I'm french child of Algerian immigrants and I found the passage 21:02 hilarious 😭😆! This "vague east vibe" representation that affects musical representation extends also to social representations as well. For example when I was in 6th grade I made a friend and when she invited me her mom said that her daughter told her I'm armenian. And I turned to my friend and said "Algerian not Armenian", and she shrugged and said "that's almost the same thing". Like, this girl just Duduk-ed me.
oh my god that really sucks but its also incredibly funny 😭 reminds me of when my sister was asked to translate for an elderly arabic lady at work, and she had to explain that sorry she can't, she speaks persian and thats not anywhere close to arabic lmao
Was recommended a barber by a friend once, he assured me that the guy spoke Arabic and we would really get along. Turns out the barber was Turkish and we didn’t have a single language in common 😂 The cut still turned out fire tho.
She "duduk-ed" you!! 😅🤣🤣 How freakin rude of the mom though, I'm so sorry that happened to you, it sucks. When someone doesn't know any better, yet is so attached to the belief that they do 🙄
It's even funnier if you read this as a Turkish person, because the term "duduk-ed" (düdükledi) exists in your language and means totally different, but fits in with the situation. 😂 (an old slang word which has the exact same slang meaning of "scr*wed")
I was learning japanese in 4th grade and i spoke a bit with my japanese classmate, and another girl came up and said "oh you know chinese? Thats so cool!" When i explained to her that they're two different languages and cultures, she shrugged and said "oh well its the same thing basically." It pisses me off how much the west is conditioned not to care about other cultures.
When you started discussing how when we’re used to elements in a certain category it’s easy to distinguish between differences, but when we interact with a new category we often can’t distinguish the differences, it’s so true. And I’m experiencing that right now but with language, particularly Español. I recently moved to Miami from Portland and holy crap my brain still struggles to distinguish the different Latino/a accents and I’m stumped by portugués. I’m making progress (slowly) the more I study, but holy crap my brain implodes after work sometimes. If any of you guys are in this position too don’t give up, we can learn new things!
Hell yeah that slapped so hard , I want the full version of the music and it on a Scottish Highlands music playlist (1 hour long, so you can feel like a true scot)
I sort of want to see an Occidentalist movie as well. Harmonica blues when showing european royalty, french fries, blue jeans and top hats in 16th century portugal, greece shown overcast all the time and ice filled ports using viking longships in the modern era?
As a white-washed lebanese pianist who's been (western) classically trained, this video was ear-opening for me. I can't even begin to imagine how much I've missed out on all the subtleties and richness of the music of LITERALLY MY OWN RELATIVES, because of the hegemony of western culture. More specifially, the overwhelming presence in pop culture of what oriental music sounds like to the western-trained ear. W essay.
It's kind of like getting mad at McD's for selling junk food though. That's what they sell. In my experience, with the internet or with live events in any big city with an art scene, I've never had any difficulty finding music faithful to non western traditions.
@@hurremhightower it's being born from non-white parents, but being so exposed to western traditions (music related or not) that you get assimilated to them, forgetting about your own roots. I'm from arabic descent, yet I barely know ANYTHING about its language, its history, its art and traditions, etc. I don't speak arabic with my parents, I speak french. I think I got my point across.
Honestly, most people are ignorant even of their own country and culture: My grandma is part of a group that tries to preserve and learn local culture to people, as modern day life uproots everything and makes people less connected with their roots. Part of that is singing, singing songs from their youth, lullebys but also songs of grief. My family is from Scheveningen/Duindorp. But why i bring this up is that often people just go "ah you from Urk". Urk is a different place with different history and different styles of clothing. There are so many people not knowing their own country's culture... To expect them to know a thing about what's for them the other side of the world is like expecting the fish to walk. Warm greetings from the Netherlands🇳🇱. Also completely made up "epic William Wallace Scottish Battle music" probably exists. I have spoken with Scottish people and every time Hollywood makes a movie about something Scottish it's a whole can of worms.
And the "just give them scimitars and turbans" trope in movies is also sadly used for many other cultures, even European ones. Romans ALWAYS have big, square shields with SPQR on it, we all know the look. As with all cultures evolving through time the Roman army changed drastically throughout time to the point they don't look alike at all. But Hollywood says SPQR so that is all we get. Ignorance sucks and it's great you address these stupid and lame tropes! There is a whole world unknown to most that is right there! So much to discover and enjoy, to limit ourselves is to torture ourselves!
What a king!! Thank you so much for a deeply informative and generous video. Also, Thank you for calling out Zimmy! in the light of Dune films coming out.
I think the final boss of orientalism would be the nation of Sumeru in Genshin Impact. From Chinese developers, it doesn’t claim to be based on any particular culture, but is a hodgepodge of Indian, Persian, Arabic, Egyptian and Turkish cultural elements, mashed together with a soundtrack that tries to represent every single one of them in some way with varying levels of authenticity. There’s the Indian sitar, bansuri, tabla; the Persian santur, daf, tombak; the Arabic oud, ney, qanun, darbuka; the Armenian duduk; the Turkish baglama, even the Greek bouzouki, the Italian mandolin and the Chinese erhu, with one track going out as far as the African udu. And the insane thing is, it’s also one of the only games I’ve ever seen that does an actual decent attempt at representing Persian culture, from a character doing a pretty authentic looking Persian dance, to an entire area dedicated to Persian folklore reframed in the context of the game’s lore - Sorush, Mihir and Rashnu of the Pari race descended from the divine bird Simurgh whose home is the Vourukasha Oasis sets out to perform the rite of Chinvat to stop the Dev, extinguish the sign of Apaosha and restore the Harvisptokhm using the power of Khvarena, etc etc. It’s obvious they’ve done a great amount of research, so it’s not like they don’t know about the cultures they’re representing, but they’ve still chosen to mix them in a way that's so strange it honestly has no precedent in Western media. To call it orientalism would be too reductive, but they’re also too double-harmonic-major-duduk brained to be accurate, so it exists in this purgatory of orientalism.
Also regions there are usually based on one country, meanwhile Sumeru is just... everywhere from the entire MENA region to Indian subcontinent squeezed into one region. I've seen an Iranian fan interpret it as the Chinese creators being inspired by the history of the Silk Road trade (same person also contrasted Sumeru characters that represent particular real life cultures well with an Aladdin-based orientalism personification of a character, lol). All in all, those circumstances surely create one hell of a case of "purgatory of orientalism" as you said
Play the Civilization games..they do a great job in nailing the authenticity of the cultures of the world. King Cyrus is depicted just how he should look in Civ 6
Another disservice of Orientalism to people in the West is how it's also shaped the perceptions of people's own ancestry depending on how many generations removed they are and will undoubtedly get worse as time goes on. I am of Armenian and Lebanese descent from my dad's side, but all of ny great grandparents were immigrants to the U.S. Very few cultural traditions were passed down, and he passed when I was young, so my mom (of Polish and German descent) also wasn't able to share those cultural traditions with me. I've listened to some traditional Armenian music before, but this video has really inspired to me to seek out more and better connect with my ancestry. Sadly, most people in similar situations and later generations will likely not do the same and will forever have a very western colonialist view of their ancestry unless accurate portrayals of middle eastern cultures become more common in western spheres.
@BababooeyGooey Hammerfell is based off of northern africa, not the middle east. Elswyr is more "arab(????)" than Hammerfell. But it's also weird because I talked to an Iraqi woman who said the ashlanders in Morrowind reminded her of her nomadic ancestors in Iraq more than any other group. At the end of the day, it's a blender of nonsense and I also once talked to an italian who was miffed that Oblivion's Cyrodiil had new world fruits in the renaissance "italian(????)" culture of Cyrodiil. Actually, this comment made me realize I don't think any of the music in TES:Redguard were even vaguely North African inspired, it's very... it's not anything. It just sounds like RPG music.
Led Zeppelin’s lyrics for Kashmir, “ All I see turns to brown As the sun burns the ground And my eyes fill with sand As I scan this wasted land Try to find, try to find the way I feel” Obviously they knew nothing about Kashmir.
That’s crazy. Azad Kashmir is often called heaven on earth for its beautiful landscape. Filled with greenery and very mountainous. In winter, in every place in west and east Kashmir, the snow reaches up to people’s knees.
You may want to try and learn about the song before you slam them. The band had never been to kashmir. Rather, the inspiration for the song was from a drive through a long, desert road in Morocco that Robert Plant had taken. The actual song was not meant to be about a geographical location but about a journey in a seemingly endless road through a desolate desert. The song itself is legendary and highly regarded, a unique & standout track from the album.
"The band had never been to Kashmir." Literally the entire point of Orientalism. Not knowing anything about a foreign, eastern location and assuming stereotypes about it. "The inspiration for the song was from a drive through a desert road in Morocco." And they gave it a South Asian title. Again, literally the point of the video. Orientalism lumping all the "East" together because it can't distinguish it. "The actual song was not meant to be about a geographical location." Yeah, but they took the name of a specific geographical location as a vague "vibe" signifier of "exotic, eastern." Again, literally the point of the vid. Reducing anthropological markers to vague vibe signifiers. "but about a journey in a seemingly endless road through a desolate desert." And they named it after a specific geographical location that is green and lush. "The song itself is legendary and highly regarded, a unique & standout track from the album." Ok? This doesn't change anything about the absurdity of the title. I can write a song about a seeminlgy endless journey through snowy tundras. If I call it "Sicily," it's stupid. The song may slap. It may be legendary. The ignorance at the root of the title is still stupid. I get that you're fans of those musicians, but it doesn't mean you have to put your fingers in your ears and go "la la la," when asked to recognise that they emulated broader cultural reflexes of the society they were part of. Enjoying a musician doesn't mean you have to idolise them to the point of putting your head in the sand. And looking at you, you'd probably go to Kashmir looking for sand to put your head in.
❤ this channel is a gold mine. I was a student of cultural anthropology (but haven't yet obtained a degree cuz....funding.) this is the kind of content I have been craving. Thank you so much for calling attention to this issue. I personally enjoy the sound of orientalist music HOWEVER I agree that it should not be used to generalize the entire region and varying cultures.
The architecture analogy makes a lot of sense, I could instantly recognize differences in Asian architecture, but I wouldn’t be able to tell European architecture apart, except for major landmarks. Pop culture plays a huge role in cultural understanding. A lot more people can recognize Korean architecture nowadays due to the rise of K-dramas/K-pop compared to the last decade, and the same applies to Japan for similar reasons. If media in general had more care instead of generalizing, many more people would be able to make distinctions. Before watching this, I was only vaguely aware of the idea, “it’s kinda funny that every movie/game/etc in the middle east has that yellow filter, camels, street markets, women with face-covers, desert, that samey-sound” but I didn’t realize just how crazy stereotypes got. Great video.
I am a white Danish person and I can easily tell traditional Japanese and Chinese architecture styles apart but I have also studied art history including architectural history at university, and take an active interest in the topic way more than I imagine most people anywhere do - I don't expect the average person in China to even notice the cultural differences between the Scandinavian countries either
it's the same reason as how raya the last dragon made me wince so many times just from the trailer. i know they said they consulted southeast asians, but the thing is, they consulted young urban southeast asians (who are at least partly westernised), and southeast asians of migrant origin (e.g. from china). if you're heartland southeast asian, who still have some inherited familiarity with what things go together, and what things and worldviews just don't go together, doesn't exist or even antithetical to our worldviews, it feels jarring. but i was able to enjoy aladdin even though i knew intellectually that the design aesthetic is not actually arabic.
@@nurainiarsad7395 yeah, I felt the same way about Raya, it feels jarring seeing them mix different SEA cultures when they could have just focused on one.
@@nurainiarsad7395 I've never seen "Raya and the Last Dragon", I guess I am not missing much? I do remember reading a review of it on someone's blog and thinking the plot (as he described it) came across as a total ripoff of Hayao Miyazaki's "Nausicaä of the Valley of the Winds" just transplanted into a heroic fantasy setting instead of a unique surrealistic post-apocalyptic world. (which for me was half the fun of "Nausicaä")
Holy smokes. TH-cam has a looot of video format junkfood and other trash. But every once in a while, you come across a place like this, a rich deposit of valuable nutrition, chock full of vitamins and minerals.
The rhythm during your Turkish vocal posture clip at 30:48 does something strange to my feelings. It is (to my ears), a curious rhythm that I feel compelled to hear and learn more of. Thank you!
Music in TH-cam is also like that. I have seen extremely obscure but extremely good music (In My Taste not for Everyone of course) that has on average less than 100,000 Views and some even have less than 15,000 but I listen to and love everyday
I was just talking to my wife about how one of the hardest things about getting older is learning all the "History" and "Culture" we were taught in school, games, films, and documentaries was 99% B.S. When I choose to really study a culture I find music and food to be invaluable tools to really get a feeling for the heart of a culture. I've recently discovered that there has been a HUGE gap in my historical knowledge of the Middle East, and this video has been one of the best videos for (apologies for the term) "mythbusting" one of the biggest myths we've been told to just accept as fact as a westerner. Thank you!
"the "History" and "Culture" we were taught in school, games, films, and documentaries was 99% B.S." Well, it is still kind of your responsibility if pieces of FICTION such as video games or films were your reference for an existing culture or history.. Trying to blame these for "teaching" you (even though that's OBVIOUSLY never been their intend) is entirely on you.
@@FindingsOfAnArmouredMind wow you are so clever and critical-thinking. Nice to you to exclude part of their sentence (schools and documentaries) where they refer to actual teaching resources. You must be really proud of putting them in their place.
J'avais cette vidéo depuis longtemps dans ma liste à regarder plus tard et j'ai finalement pris le temps de la regarder aujourd'hui. Autant le sujet m'est intéressant et m'en apprend énormément, autant j'ai fait un maudit saut en entendant un accent québécois dans la vidéo! Incroyable réalisation et j'apprécie énormément le travail de recherche et d'explication. La musique comme véhicule de culture est tellement important, je n'imagine pas à quel point cela doit être frustrant lorsqu'elle est mal ou faussement représentée. Bravo !
CORRECTIONS AND CLARIFICATIONS:
• For those wanting examples of authentic Iranian, Turkish etc, music, you're on the right channel. That's my specialisation. Browse my channel and you'll find plenty of authentically arranged/composed music of the region, all the videos accompanied with descriptions that'll give you a good base with which to do your own searches afterwards. Check out playlists dedicated to the specific cultures. Check out my Epic Talking playlist for more videos like this one.
• "What do you think of the Dune soundtrack?" Why is everyone bringing up the Dune soundtrack? I'm talking about the representation of real life MENA cultures here. Arrakis isn't a real life culture, you can't represent it accurately or inacurately. Dune's soundtracks falls completely outside the periphery of this discussion. Sci-fi and fantasy *should* create soundtracks by mishmashing real world sounds, that's the entire point of those genres.
• I guessed in the video that the accurate pieces of music in the Crusader Kings 3: Legacy of Persia DLC soundtrack were most likely created by the Iranian collaborators of the Swedish composer, but the latter, Håkan Glänte, contacted me and I learned that he indeed did write those songs after careful research into the Persian Classical Dastgah system; which goes to further show my point that Western musicians absolutely have the ability to render authentic foreign music, and that the prevalence of Orientalism is simply due to complacency and laziness in the industry.
• "What about Occidentalism? How about the view of non-Westerners towards the West?"
So there is such a thing as Occidentalism but it's not the yin to the yang of Orientalism as some may think. Most often, it takes the form of irrational hostility towards the West. Things like rejecting well researched truths presented by Western academia solely on the basis that it's Western. I've been highly critical of this in my videos, as it obfuscates "anti-colonialism," with anti-Western bigotry in order to get away with it. Occidentalism as a stereotypical view of the West, however, doesn't really exist as a perfectly symettrical counterpart to Orientalism.
The reason why it's mostly a one way street, and non-Westerners are generally better at representing the West than the other way around is because the West is currently the hegemon of this planet, in terms of cultural soft power. Therefore everyone around the world is intimately familiar with the generalities of Western culture because everyone is exposed to it.
The average Iranian who lived in Tehran all their life can tell an English accent is distinct from Scottish, and they do associate Received Pronunciation British with "posh." They do know the organ is a church instrument, and that the banjo doesn't sound fancy. Typical Western associations are well known to the average Iranian in Tehran.
At the beginning of the video, my uncle and I mention Mozart and Ketèlbey, Western Classical composers, and the musical form of "alla turcas," and "Baroque music". That's because every musician in the world knows Western music and its genres, styles, composers, etc. But it may take you months to find a single Classical Western musician who knows the names of Sheydā, Dimitrie Cantemir, or who know what the terms "peşrev" or "kalofonía" mean, and what musical forms they refer to.
All musicians around the world know the basics of Western music. We all do chords, harmony, play the piano and guitar. Only a tiny fraction of Western musicians learn any music theory outside of their own. There's a reason why Western musicians are the only ones who call their form of ethnic music "Music Theory," whilst everywhere else, even between them, people preface their music theory with the cultural specifier like "Iranian music theory," "Japanese music theory," etc.
I'm aware that this presents a rather unflattering picture of the West, but please understand that this is not a consequence of us non-Westerners being oh so wiser. Not trying to portray Westerners as inherently bad or evil. If we were the current cultural hegemons of the planet, we'd be just like that. In 500 years, if China or Brazil become the next superpower, they'll be the ones generally ignorant about other cultures whilst everyone else knows about them. Average Westerners aren't ignorant by default, they simply naturally embody the traits of a region with hegemonic global cultural influence, and we non-Westerners are simply luckier than them because unlike them, we all grow up listening to both our music, and Western music.
TLDR: everyone in the world knows that Madonna exists. Most Westerners have no idea who Fairuz or Shajarian are. That's just how it is due to the current geopolitical context. But that's just this context. In 500 years, if Central Asia becomes the next cultural hegemon, they'll be the exact same.
• I mistakenly use the term "Southeast Asia" in the video, but what I mean is "South Asia." Southeast Asia is countries like Laos, Cambodia, and I'm talking about the Desi cultures like India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, hence South Asia.
00:00 Iranians react to Orientalist music
03:45 Defining Orientalist music
11:44 Disclaimers
17:44 "Indian, Arab, same thing"
37:50 How to write orientalist music
43:28 The OBSESSION with the Double Harmonic Major
54:52 Why the Double Harmonic Major?
1:00:42 The limitation of digital instruments
1:08:33 The vicious circle of Orientalism
1:12:24 Westerners CAN write Eastern music
1:21:00 How Orientalism sucks for Easterners
1:26:34 How Orientalism sucks for Westerners
Brazil is culturally western, so things wouldn't change so drastically if they were the global hegemon. China would be a very different story.
@faryafaraji I don't know why you are explaining yourself. The world is heading towards multipolarism and a systematic decentralization of the west. This includes music as well. Your video is just another step among billions of other steps towards that inevitable future. Change towards the better starts with rejecting bs and you are now rejecting orientalist bs because you and your honorable family simply know better than them and you are showing your audience everything real and authentic you know. Thank you for the video!
@@faryafaraji Thank you for sharing your knowledge! Your videos are full of nutrients for the soul.
I read the pinned comment first. As an American musician who was raised poor (relative to other Americans) the problem I ran into was not having the right words to search for. I would hear this stereotypical music in games and want to know more. It was only through immigrants I could get the words, but even then, they wanted to Americanize, and my interest would embarass them.
Which is all very sad. I love other music and instruments and chords and sounds and blends and people's relations to it.
I just wish I knew the words or a keyboard to type or even the location where I heard the snippet of sound in a taxi once!! I can't chase down that one man in Chicago! ❤❤❤ Thank you so much for this. I'm so happy I found you at last!
We need the complete works of your mother, dude. She has a divine voice
"My music is authentic enough that it's played for actual cultural events" is a flex and you should be proud of yourself
The biggest flex imho- that type of accuracy and collaboration should be the standard for “historical” musical recreation and composition.
Yeah, "my music got played in front of the Roman coliseum" is a way bigger flex than I think he made it out to be.
Indeed
@@aubreejobizzarro1208 I think you are hitting an excellent nail on the head here! This video and it’s discourse underpin a much larger concept and actually make good and meaningful insights on the idea of culture, cultural appropriation, and just inspiration.
This speaks to how too often a big name media productions and the like will be directly connecting to a culture and be presenting as a representation of said culture…. And then do no leg work to actually represent that fucking culture! Not only is this just cultural appropriation, but it will now be disseminated amongst an audience in the west who will unknowingly walk away with that thing becoming a representation of that culture in their minds, which will then continue an unfortunate cycle of cultural misrepresentation.
You denote how this is the best, and imo only good, way to create music that claims a connection to a culture or a history, and I fully agree and love this and the specificity of the idea. Because there is also the issue of people trying to claim large concepts as part of a cultural identity and it’s very use or application in something else as being cultural appropriation, and they will bully and pick on artists, for example, using an instrument in a way or style that isn’t identical to how they would use it culturally, and it’s like “dude I never claimed I was making authentic Egyptian or Jordanian music, I just think the Simsimiyaa sounds and looks dope”
Right, like, how do you just causally drop off such an insane feat on us like it's just another monday.
conspiracy theory: there's one Armenian duduk player in hollywood with HELLA connections
Yes it is true, all of Hollywood is in fact controlled by the Armenians. Some people thought it was those other guys!
duduk monopolist :D
I mean Glendale isn't that far
Pfahahaha, that's a funny one! Sorry, I just have a very vivid imagination, and I burst out laughing imagining that one Armenian bloke peeking out of the corners of the recording booths with his duduk. Just to put his duduk where it does not belong, if you catch my drift.
Maybe Djivan Gasparyan. Oh, I just learned he died in 2021. Apparently, he does have a credit on the Gladiator movie soundtrack. Also, I was about to write, he even appeared on a metal album, but I double-checked it to be sure, and now I learned, that was his grandson, Jivan Gasparyan, Jr. (and the album was "Enki" by Melechesh).
I'm pretty sure the basic conception of "Persian" among a lot of westerners is just "Luxury Arabic"
This is so accurate wth
If only they had the arabic part right lol
Tied closely to Persian rugs and Persian cats.
Ironically the caricature of the diaspora Iranian Faraji showed in his Greek Music video is a good representation of how Westerners hold contradictory views.
Persia = luxury, always set in an interior or a colorful bazaar
Iran = enemy!! Must be desert or some other bad place to live, buildings are run down
Kinda like how my one coworker (from Afghanistan) told me once that Farsi is luxury Dari.
Because of the carpets and cats
Fun fact: The Disney Film "Brother Bear", focuses on an Alaskan 'tribe' ( which could mean any group such as the Alaskan Creoles, Iñupiat, Yupik, Aleut, Tsimshian, Tlingit, Haida, Eyak, Inuk, and a number of Northern Athabaskan tribes).
For the 'Spiritual scene, they used a BULGARIAN Choir to sing the tune as it would sound vaguely foreign. They didn't even use music of a "Native American" tribe, they used a Bulgarian group to sing the 'Spiritual' musical scene
Song name?
Hollywood: Duduk - Sandstorm
Duduk? Isn't that an Indonesian word seriously
"Persian and Arabs are the same" says some Texan who would literally throw hands if you said he looks like he's form Oklahoma.
-stares in Texan- Don’t go throwing us all under the bus, man. We don’t take kindly to that. ESPECIALLY even the hint that we look like Okies. Mf… 😂
This is different because you're probably talking about white Americans but I did get slightly miffed by someone who stopped me on the street to tell me I look Cherokee (I'm mixed but have Creek-Seminole ancestry, I'm not Cherokee at all >:///
Calling a Persian an Arab is like calling a Native American a European
Why did you choose Texas, and not say…Oregon?
@@Shakshuka69 it is more like calling a german polish
As a Scottish person, I am amazed how well you nailed our william wallace grouse-pop bonjour hasta la morgen dziękuję style
Sums up of national hero perfectly
Ahaha! Sei un genio comico, je suis mort de rire! Ты молодец! Das ist so gut gefunden. Köszönöm! Και καλή ημέρα!
😂😂😂
Also a Scottish person, I totally agree!
I might only be Scottish descended, but I can still feel myself transported back to the land of my ancestors. I can almost perfectly imagine the smell of some famous Scottish pierogi alfredo being cooked up in the kouzína my great great abuela. ❤
I'm an architect and a westerner, and I want to say that I really appreciate your example of Chinese vs. Japanese architecture. I spent time studying in both Japan and Korea, and it was astonishing to me how different the architectural styles of Japan, Korea, and China are. I would argue that the styles of those three cultures are *more* distinct from each other than the styles of France and Germany, especially when you take into account just how enormous China is. But most Westerners (including my younger self) just see big roofs with flying eaves and assume they're all the same. The average person just hasn't had the exposure to these differences that they need in order to understand the differences.
All that to say, I really appreciate that you took the time to talk on this. I'm never going to be able to unhear the duduk in pop culture, and that's all your fault.
@@brandonkiehl269 well mostly because they’re architecture from different periods of Chinese history. Japan has Tang dynasty architecture down to pat, and Korea has Ming architecture, while China currently mostly has Qing architecture
But in this case, Chinese and Japanese architecture do in fact share this feature of big roofs with flying eaves. They're not the same, but they have common heritage and it is quite obvious. I think it's worth distinguishing that from what this video deals with, which is using the duduk in everything because it sounds foreign and deserty :D
"Scimitars of the turban hummus of the desert allahu akbar shawarma oasis" if released would no doubt be a total success
There's a restaurant called Shawarma Oasis around the block from my house. Good to hear they're getting press
Release it Farya!
I bet Farya almost had a heart-attack when ubisoft released that prince os persia new game with a hip hop track as its theme.
Shit......you just gave me an idea for a comedy/satire film that makes fun of orientalism.
😂😹
Reminds me of "Tiki" culture. A strange american imagined "polynesian" aesthetic, consisting of a hodgepodge of cultural products of various different peoples, totally unrelated to eachother, and with nothing in common, other than there shared exoticism in the western mind. There was also a musical component of this, with entire records of "sounds of Polynesia" type stuff, that is in no way actually representative of that peoples music.
I feel like tiki is less aggressively racist and more ignorantly nostalgic.
Actually, the term "tiki" comes from the Maori mythology of New Zealand, where it refers to the first men created by the gods. Tiki sculptures, which are usually modified representations of men, originated in the Marquesas Islands and are a significant part of French Polynesian culture. Tiki figures are often carved from wood and have spiritual and symbolic significance.
Tiki culture is an American art, music, and entertainment movement that began in 1933 with the opening of Don's Beachcomber, a Polynesian-themed restaurant and bar in Hollywood, California. The restaurant is considered the first tiki bar and is credited with inspiring tiki culture, which is a mix of elements from different Polynesian, Melanesian, and Micronesian cultures. Tiki culture is known for its elaborate cocktails, mugs, and clothing.
Tiki culture has spread beyond the United States, with tiki restaurants and cocktail bars opening in Europe, including Kanaloa in London and Palm Beach in Berlin
@prime-viscosity absolutely!! I have studied Maori and Polynesian carving techniques extensively and I utilize them in my artwork. All I was saying is I feel like oriantalism comes from a more ignorant and racist viewpoint rather than for admiration and nostalgia. US servicemen were just trying to emulate their experiences they had in the south pacific whereas oriantalism is totally divorced from lived experience. Oriantalism exists purely in the imagination of the western composer it is not trying to capture the experience of travel to Iran or Turkey or wherever.
It’s appropriation. Flattening a whole bunch of different cultures into a cardboard cutout so that outsiders of those cultures can make money. They are completely inaccurate often times disrespectful and always dehumanizing. It is the same as orientalism in many ways, including the history context of war and colonization of the exotified group. It removes and destroys pacific cultures reducing them to easy to consume stereotypes, not harmless, not trivial, and definitely not innocent in any way.
@@jimbocowman511 Apologies, my comment was directed towards the OP. You confused me though, in your initial comment you said you feel that tiki stuff is not aggressively racist, but rather ignorantly nostalgic; and then your second comment kinda switches on that point- was that a typo or am I being a big dunce?
As a Celt, I feel your pain. I like the "Celtic" music on TH-cam but by God is it so far detached from actual Celtic music it blows my mind. No drums, no harps, just bagpipes. Bagpipes, bagpipes and bagpipe which aren't even a traditional Celtic instrument. I do appreciate that bagpipes do have a long tradition in Celtic nations but drums, horns and harps are our real traditional instruments.
Is there a celtic band or something on yt to know how it actually is?
@@fa-q-6226 You can check out the Eisteddfod which is a celebration of Welsh music and cultures for Welsh Celtic music. It's held annually and although it does also showcase modern music in Welsh, there's always a section for traditional (usually harp) music. I'm not really sure of Irish/Scottish music but I'm sure there must be equivalents. Calan are the most famous modern Welsh group that play traditional music, there's also the harpist Catrin Finch or Nansi Richards. My family like Ar Log (they're a bit old school but chatty.)
Youd hate braveheart
@@fa-q-6226 I’m not celtic myself but I really enjoy Altan, Capercaillie (scottish), Flook (they are Irish)
@@MesserMusicI'm Welsh not Scottish but I felt Scotland's pain from that film. Wallace transformed into a kilt wearing, bagpipe playing highlander was really beyond silly.
I'm a half-egyptian singer, who grew up in Egypt, but since I often avoided egyptian and arabic music, because western music was "so much cooler", I never grew into it as naturally. I've been trying to reconnect with my musical roots (binging Um Kulthoum and others), but in the western education system authentic cultural sources are hard to find. Your video puts in words the alienation I feel listening to the youtube orientalist music, but wasn't sure if it's just me. So thank you so much for taking the time to make this video!🙏 Specially diving into the music theory behind it and explaining the nuances of middle-easter modes. Well done!
Oum Koulthoum!
Umm Khultum still rocks
As a westerner, its so JARRING how the further the video goes the worse the orientalist music starts to sound because i get to hear actual middle eastern music and it's like.... trying the actual food you only had as an artificial flavoring before. Mind blowing experience, like I unlocked the shrimp vision or something
The shrimp vision.
@@wooblydooblygod3857 it's as shrimple as that
I wouldn't even say it's bad or unenjoyable music, it's just not at all representative of the music it's pretending to represent, which is problematic in an entirely different way from sheer enjoyability
@@sahitdodda5046 that woman singing like that to the turban bro 😂just sounds sooooo bad. It really is like opera combined with baroque music. or hillbilly music. 😂like wtf. the real music examples he showed were SO much better and COOLER!
😂😂😂 I came for the crab, but shrimp will certainly do
The thing I really hate about this is people think nobody in Hollywood does the research. What I'm really, really sick of is them doing the research, and then disregarding everything interesting because it's different, defeating the purpose of doing the research. In Ridley Scott's Gladiator they knew gladiators had business sponsorships and flyers, but excluded them, because audiences "would think that was silly" - I saw a whole video about how James Cameron had a small team of people working years to create unique ethnic music for Avatar's Na'avi aliens, based on tribal peoples from around the world, only to disregard it entirely for being too weird... The alien music.
You know during the second world war there were battleships painted with diagonal purple and pink stripes, like some kind of fruit-flavored candy cane? How is this not in a movie already?
We keep telling people to expand their minds, and pereceptions but consider the smallest of steps to be a bridge too far. And I'm sick of it. So many Hollywood movies want to humanize the middle east, but they don't want to show any of them living like the humans they personally know. Just sand and clay. Not one tree unless it's dead. Ridiculous
The question is who's doing the disregarding? I'm willing to bet a that a lot of the time the soundtrack composers might be a lot more open minded than whoever they're working for, and/or that other things such as budget/time constraints do not allow them to immerse themselves completely into the actual theory and deliver what they'd want to
@@OpticIlluzhion I'm surprised Farya doesn't recognize this, as his experience is that a project lead hires him, a Middle Eastern man, requests an authentically Middle Eastern soundtrack, and then discards what he delivers on the basis that it's not true to the "Middle Eastern sound" _they're looking for,_ and he even insinuated on some primary level that he _might_ be willing to produce that sound, so long as they aren't ignorant of what they ask. While it is probably true that most Hollywood composers are ignorant of foreign music, it's also true that they're not really in a position to put their foot down about any of it anyway
I think it's really telling how in the Hans Zimmer clip, Zimmer indicates that he is fully aware the duduk has nothing to do with Morocco. He straight up says it's Armenian. This knowledge evidently didn't make him rethink using it to represent Morocco.
@@Krixwell He is also one person
Well, if you were top Hollywood executive, you would probably do the same thing as they do.
Why? Because for every executive, the main purpose of their business model is to make money.
Therefore, executives are utterly scared of anything truly innovative and too much different, in any way, be it from storytelling, camera angles, music...
And the fact is that they are mostly right, and they are not idiots. They are constantly checking the pulse of the public, and feeding them with what they want.
So in a way, that's a kind of loop that's not so easy to break.
Only when critical mass of people starts noticing that they are constantly fed with same type of content and simply refuse to consume it, there will be chance for alternative to arise.
Man now I really wanna hear European music made with the Orientalist mindset. That fusion goes way too hard.
I would listen to it, I know I would be laughing uncontrollably a it.
I never knew how much I wanted that until he gave me the briefest taste
This is basically the "Tiffany problem", especially in video games in movies. People have a certain idea of what Persian/Arabic/"desert" music is supposed to sound like, and if they'd hear the actual music from the region they would think it's weird, it doesn't fit and generally what was the composer smoking.
For the people that don't know what the "Tiffany problem" is, it's about the fact that people have the misconception that it's a modern name, but it was in fact already used in the medieval times. And because of that misconception you'll never see or hear that name in any historical fiction as to not throw off the viewer/reader
Speaking about Tiffany problem, I've once read a reddit poat ranting about seeing "he computed" in book based in victorian England. 'To compute' was used even in medieval England, meaning to count.
There are countless such examples for words. And it's just as bad for period music.
Tiffany is actually a Greek name. Theophania...
I can vouch for this. Was actually surprised when I've decided to listen to some authentic Arabic music and realized that it sounded nothing like what you'd hear in movies and videogames. That said, I'm East European and have a slight familiarity with eastern music (mostly Turkish and Caucasian).
CPG Grey’s Tiffany? 🙃
As a Chinese person I'm reminded of the ways western music creators represent "east asia" as a mysterious land of ninjas, yin yang, and dragons. In a single software-generated piece I might hear the Chinese erhu, the Japanese shamisen, a gong in the background, and Mongolian throat singing but the piece would be titled "dark ninja battle music" or something dumb like that. And just like westerners are obsessed with the duduk and the double harmonic minor scale for desert orientalist music, they're obsessed with the gong and the pentatonic scale for orientalist music pertaining to Eastern countries. It's a form of confirmation bias on the part of the composers who only want to sell to their viewers something they think their viewers are familiar with which is more orientalism
We should include the real deal. I think people can handle it. I get bored of our music after a while. :-) I still enjoy it, I just like hearing other elements.
This is not at all confined to western music creators. Plenty of Japanese created games also do this.
@@Mechanomics most non-westerners are just as ignorant if not more ignorant of other non-Western cultures as the average Westerner
Please, the people want what they expect. People do not pay money to be educated on these things. When a random american says “play something arabic” he expects somethint fake arabic. And since he’s your customer, why give him something he does not want? It is foolish to condemn anyone for giving ignorant folks what they ask for.
@@Tecmaster96 I specifically looked on TH-cam and Spotify for Middle Eastern/Asian music mixes and found the Orientalist garbage and was pretty pissed about it. I’m not musician but even I could tell it was fake. Maybe some ppl like the fake stuff and that’s fine but I wouldn’t say all ppl do. Especially if they are specifically looking for something authentic and it’s hard af to find. Hopefully it will get easier in time, but not with the attitude that westerners are all dumb yokels who don’t care about music. That’s a backwards attitude in itself if you ask me. From my perspective I don’t pay money to have some lazy work of art that’s inauthentic, especially if it’s advertised as being a specific genre.
Farya needs to make a song called “authentic Dutch music” and use a Balalaika and Bagpipes
I think we all need to start doing stuff like that. Even the playing field a little.
As long as he rhymes "blauw" with "ik hou van jou" it will be fine. 😂
I know you're joking but Dutch people did and do use bagpipes, bagpipes are a pan-european instrument much like lutes were, misattributed as being specifically Scottish in popular imagination
@@fartz3808 Indeed. If only people knew how many different types of bagpipes there are. For example, the Central European variant: th-cam.com/video/VvuXs2xvsPQ/w-d-xo.html
@@fartz3808 he knows, he even mentioned Greek bagpipes. But I don't know of any Dutch music from the last 300 years that uses the bagpipes so it would be really weird. But the "foekepot" is a funny instrument to use for this.
"A piece of music I wrote in a French-Hungarian-Temprerate climate theme" haha I'm dying. Thank you for the video Farya, you are a gem!
Yes! Just reading the "scimitars of the turban hummus of the desert allahu akbar shawarma oasis" I already burst out laughing 😂😂😂😂😂😂
I had to stop the vid I was laughing so much hahahha. His example of blending banjo & harpsichord is really spot on.
after this video I'd rather listen to modern day iranian singers like Ebi, Kourosh Yaghmaei and Marjan.
@@Jaxck77 should add a few random accordions for enhanced effects 😂
@@cleitondecarvalho431 um br que escuta música iraniana? Que interessante
As a person who is only half Scottish, has never been to Scotland, and knows nothing about Scottish culture, your William Wallace Epic Scottish Battle Music changed my perception of my ancestry and rekindled the flame of my heart, causing me to rush directly out of my door playing the bagpipes in order to procure a plaid kilt. Thank you.
I don't about you but I'm going to watch Braveheart with this soundtrack playing. After he screams "THEY'LL NEVER TAKE OUR FRRREEEDOM!!" and this rises with the cheers of the raging Scotsmen? Yes. It is as literally accurate as that movie.
@@lucinda3964 pirating braveheart as we speak (ive never watched it)
A bheil fèileadh mhòr agad a-nis?
@@ChrisPorterMusic it's in the video at 42:02
@@MW_Asura what is this supposed to mean
I’m from ruralish America and have almost entirely European ancestry. I remember distinctly the first time I heard the term orientalism in a sociology class in college. I remember asking more and more questions because I just could not grasp the concept. They kept showing visual examples or trying to to describe it and I felt dumb, but I just had no idea what it was referring to. I understood theoretically what they meant, but I just couldn’t aesthetically process it…..it took a long time before I realized every. Single. Concept I had access to of the Middle East was orientalist. Every piece of art or music or imagery that came to mind. Even whatever accurate, reflective piece of culture I’d experienced from any part of the Middle East had been flattened by my internal concept into an orientalist mishmash. Jesus Christ. What a surreal realization
This is one we keep in the personal growth diary
@@jhd303 okay, but it's good to share real experiences of growth like this one, because they can be the most helpful to people who are still at that stage. It gives them a direct example of behavior that they can relate to, and it shows that change is possible. It's a form of showing hope and positive change.
@@jhd303 I'm not sure what your problem is here because there is nothing wrong with this comment.
Good way to understand orientalism is to recognise it as a depiction of the Middle East and North Africa that is designed in a way to justify the West's personal colonialist aspirations and politics towards Arabs
@@auginetic Hey -- thanks for your response. I know tone and nuance are often lost over text these days. I don't have a problem; I was being silly. Have a great day -
I remember going to a Persian store out of curiosity when I was about 12. I asked for traditional music, thinking that I would like it based on my exposure to the "World music" genre of the 90s an early 2000s. The woman at the counter explained to me that since I can't understand the poetry, Persian classical music wouldn't be very interesting for me. I thought, "she doesn't understand the authenticity of my fascination and affinity for other cultures". Then I listened to it... I was UTTERLY bewildered. I kept waiting for the music to start only to find that the entire thing felt endless and like I had nothing to grasp onto besides brief periods when slow percussion appeared. It didn't fit my naive idea of 'Middle Eastern', it just sounded.... foreign in a way that I had never been exposed to and couldn't anticipate.
That same year I ended up studying the Baha'i religion and sought out the local community of mostly Iranian practitioners. I noticed that when I heard Persians chant Baha'i prayers, it was similar to the classical Persian cassette I bought, and gave a tiny bit of context to it. I realized the music was intended to be contemplative and to convey some deeper poetic meaning. So, I began exploring a lot of different genres of Iranian music more and more, still kind of trying to find what I thought it should be, only to fall in love with this revelation of sounds I'd NEVER heard before and didn't know I'd find. I realized that Iranian music isn't really part of the Western imagination, even as a trope, and what we think of as Middle Eastern is typically a Disney Aladdin mish-mash of South-East Asian and Arabic stereotypes.
I am envious of your personal musical journey. I applaud you for persisting.
I got acquainted with a musicologist about 20 years ago who introduced me to Persian classical music, and shortly thereafter I took a world music cultures class from another musicologist. My experience was similar. The first musicologist I talked to was very, very disparaging of the "phony" "World Music" phenomenon of the turn of the century, and after hearing some of the straight dope I could understand why.
You seeking out a local community of Baha'i practitioners at the age of 12 is wild
Bahai is a interesting religion, you don't hear about it very often. I first heard of it in a Onion skit 😂.
Thanks for sharing your experience, that sounds neat.
Orientalism is basically: 1) All Arab countries are the same 2) All middle easterners are Arab 3) All Arabs are Indians
Blame Briɂain.
I like how you took the generalizations made about Middle-Eastern music/culture and applied it to European music. It's a really effective way of pointing out how absurd those kind of generalizations are.
This was a really fascinating and enlightening video. I knew on some level that Western portrayals of Middle-Eastern music wasn't accurate but I didn't truly appreciate how inaccurate it was. I wish more care was taken in media to portray things more accurately. We're not only learning incorrect things from bad portrayals, we're missing out on some really good stuff.
yeah this part is so funny and eye opening
Yeah it reminded of an essay I read in college called “the nacirema” that describes an exotic tribe of people and their daily lives the way anthropologists usually do, only to find out by the end that they’re just describing Americans Lololol
@@jimtams took me a second to realise the name is american in reverse
@@deebzscrub not gonna lie I would unironicly enjoy some Netflix "historical drama" with Paris nobles really dancing to bluegrass, no one address it. It'd be great.
not gonna lie, his 'western' themed whatever was pretty funny
"Prisencolinensinainciusol" is a song by Italian artist Adriano Celentano, and I think he encapsulates exactly what you're talking about. He made a song that the lyrics were complete gibberish, but they sounded "American" so the Italian youth who loved rock music but didn't speak English thought it was great. It kinda proved that as long as you have the right "vibe," people will dig it.
Personally, I think it's an awesome song and, in some ways, very ahead of it's time with they way they looped the beat and horns.
@@KasumiRINA I had no idea Celentano was so popular over there! I've always loved "Il Ragazzo Della via Gluck".
in his defense, if there were actual words, then I'd say it would be authentic. If he wanted Americana, he nailed it.
That song is awesome and catchy as fuck
@@KasumiRINAno one here called him "some italian artist" my guy
I just listened to this song for the first time, it's hilarious:)
I really hate how hard those "middle eastern desert sand vibe" videos make finding actual compilations of music from pretty much any non-european culture or region. They flood the results of any TH-cam search unless you know names of artists or regional genres already, but if you don't and are just trying to get introduced to new things you have to go through a lot of that digital junk to find anything remotely authentic.
There is a solution if you know their names, just click on the thing under the thumbnail of a video ( mobile version of youtube ) then click on don't suggest this channel. You can get Rid of the channels that make a lot of channels you don't like this way for your future searches
It's really annoying. You either get these fake stereotypes or you get highly Westernized pop versions with bad synth sounds. The way I do it is to read Wikipedia articles about traditional styles, they usually have examples of representative artists which is a good starting point. If it's from a culture with a different script you can just copy the names which gives you better results than searching for the transcribed version.
Especially those that use the very obviously "VST sounding" instruments. I love listening to Orientalst musics personally because of the "vibe" but if not even the instruments sound real... that's even less immersive.
For real, it's always freaking Derek or Brandon Fiechter lmao. Nothing against them, they make very palatable fantasy music that has enhanced many a Dungeons and Dragons campaign, but that really shouldn't be the top search result for "Middle Eastern music".
As a Russian who moved to Türkiye a few years ago, learned the Turkish language and got completely blown away by Turkish music I can confirm that diving deeper into a culture's musical traditions is almost like discovering a new universe. It's mind blowing how many things there are that we westerners have no idea about. Microtonality, insane percussion rhythms, a huge variety of instruments, some of which have Middle Eastern roots some Mediterranean or Anatolian, but the thing that blew me away is the poetry. The lyrics in Turkish music are much more thoughtful and profound than in music I've heard before which was mostly Russian and American. And I can't even imagine how it is in other middle eastern cultures since without the language knowledge it is not possible for me to comprehend, but I know that Middle East is known for insanely deep poetry. All the things you talked about, like microtonal scales, ornamentation, instruments, rhythms were at first foreign to me but gradually as I heard it more and became more accustomed to it, I also became addicted. For me it was like finding a secret universe full of unseen and amazing things except it wasn't hidden at all. It was out there all this time, it's just living in constraints of our own culture makes us ignorant of other things out there. But when you start exploring it's like a breath of fresh air.
Your video was in some way a breath of fresh air too. I was really curious about Middle Eastern musical traditions since they influenced and got implemented into Turkish music and it's one of the unique aspects of it that made me so interested. It is great to hear a native's perspective on western interpretations of Oriental music as well as some explanations of what the real Oriental music is and what isn't. For the past year I have been thinking about getting a Kanun (I absolutely love the sound of it) and starting to learn Makam theory, maybe taking music classes. This documentary made me instantly inspired to learn more about Oriental music. Many thanks brother
I'm not Indian, but I grew up listening to a lot of Indian classical music because my parents enjoyed it. The closest I came to the painful cringe you describe feeling from nonsense Orientalist music is a vague sense of unease when I heard Southeast Asian percussion used in 'Ancient Arabic Persian Desert Market' songs in Western movie soundtracks. Your beautiful composition, "William Wallace Epic Scottish Battle Music," has changed me: I get it now. I've experienced true pain. Also it was hilarious, please make more Occidentalist music.
I second the need for more Occidentalist music. I want to hear Banjos in Roman Army music alongside that Harpsichord. Throw in some non-historical throat singing, and we can call it "Battle of the Teutoberg Forest Epic Battle Music"
most japanese RPGs are full of occidentialism!
It's a hilarious and ironic example because we already have our own "William Wallace" movie full of wildly inaccurate music. It's called Braveheart. The entire soundtrack is played on Irish uilleann pipes. There's even an iconic scene where a scottish bagpiper is seen standing on a hill holding a set of highland pipes, playing "outlawed tunes on outlawed pipes." But instead of highland pipes he's playing... soft, friendly, lilting irish music on irish pipes. Real highland pipes sound harsh as hell and burst eardrums. It's comically well-known among westerners that scottish bagpipes sound like a cross between a screaming pterodactyl and a fire alarm. The tone is not friendly and calming at all. It's also worth mentioning that Uilleann pipes wouldn't even be invented for another five hundred years. _In Ireland!_
If they wanted the soundtrack to be soft and friendly then they should have used harp music. Harp players were EVERYWHERE. They were the storytellers and the lore keepers of their day--extremely important people. This fact is not generally known now because England went about systematically killing off all the harpists in the 17th century. You'd think a movie like Braveheart would've embraced this history to show the audience how badly the English destroyed celtic culture, but this was left out as an oversight because the composers and directors are just that lazy about this stuff. Even on a big budget western soundtrack written by a western composer, they're still just chucking darts at a board and calling it a day.
@@pirojfmifhghek566 I mean we are talking about a movie that featured 14th century Scottish people dressed as 2nd century Picts (wearing kilts that wouldn't be invented for another 300 years), shipped William Wallace with a woman who would have been 13 and living in France at the time, depicted everyone involved as downtrodden peasants rather than privileged nobles, and began with a title card setting the plot ten years too early. Even the name of the film is wrong, as it steals the moniker of "Braveheart" from Robert the Bruce, who it wrongfully portrays as a traitor. The entire film is an affront to history.
@@CodyosVladimiros ok but real talk? the "make all kinds of wild and disconnected instruments fit together" is absolutely my jam aha. Put bagpipes and synths with some sitar and a harpsichord and then an electric guitar aha. Plus a pan pipes solo and some Bulgarian choirs. I am all for that shit.
I had this EXACT problem as a Westerner. At one point years ago I started wondering if "oriental" music was made in any key other than double harmonic minor, and for the life of me couldn't figure out how to find anything authentic. Like, as an utter layman, any search words I could think of kept taking me back to the same nonsense no matter how hard I tried.
breaking out of TH-cam algorhytm is a chore. Start liking small, very small videos with very few views, watch them without skipping. The smaller the video, the better. If algorhytm puts you into a basket "this dude is watching REALLY niche stuff" then be ready to see completely different, shadow TH-cam you couldn't see before. Yes, it's THAT crazy.
Man I love dungeon synthwave
@@exquisitecanineaficionado
What you need to do is to translate what you want to search to the native language.
Then you escape algorithm by logging out your account or you can use VPN too.
@@exquisitecanineaficionadoThe flip side of this is that TH-cam tends to convince itself that you only want at most one or two specific niches at a time... TH-cam seems designed to discourage watching a variety of content.
@@exquisitecanineaficionado to add to this, don't forget to click don't recommend channel without hesitation the moment youtube tries to serve you mainstream slop. you can delete stuff from your watch history as well. it works, and it's not really a chore if you never touch mainstream anything to begin with
Well if you count East Asia as oriental, Japan has its own scale or two.
I was under the impression that "traditionnal" middle eastern music was scarce because non-alcoholic music has widely been considered haram and against Islam since it's beginning over a thousand years ago, which is longer ago than most music we have
*Edit, non-a cappella music
Honestly, Orientalist music reminds me of this brand of chips in America called "Veggie Straws." They have a picture of vegetables on the bag and say things like "Enjoy a healthy snack made with real vegetables" but then you look at the ingredients and it's literally just potato chips with less salt. You can certainly enjoy them, I love them, but at the end of the day it is just potato chips with a bunch of vegetables on the bag
Great video!
Honestly a really good comparison
Damn. I really thought those were healthy as a kid lol
@@isaiahromero9861 Lol, I mean, it has less sodium technically and potatoes are a vegetable but it is basically just potato chips
@@babula1965 I didn't even think about the fact that potato chips are ALREADY technically made with real vegetables lmao that's honestly genius marketing if you think about it
You can't forget the green and orange food colouring, that's pretty key xD
I'm a person with Armenian heritage, but who grew up in the United States, almost exclusively listening to music in the Western music tradition. I've sought out some Armenian music to get in touch with that part of my heritage... and also watched some movies by Armenian directors that had authentic Armenian music in the soundtrack. I've heard things in other (Orientalist) movie soundtracks where I thought, "huh, that kind of sounds like Armenian music," but then thought, well, maybe there was a lot of cultural interchange between ancient Persia and ancient Armenia.... maybe there was, but this was more evidence of film score composers mixing and matching a bunch of "exotic" elements! Thanks, Farya, for your work!
15:22
-Who are you to critique them?
*Starts grilling kebabs*
-Understandable, proceed with your critique, sir
The guy also speaks Farsi. What more do you need?]
Saw the kabobs, thought the same thing. I really just want his hair though.
Watching this at 4am and I want them so bad!
Nice Ermine pfp
@@KasumiRINA Шашлик, кебаб, сельвакі, якіторі. Смажене м'ясо на шампурі, чи паличці в тому, чи іншому вигляді існує у всіх народів світу, на середньому сході називається кебаб, кабаб, кабоб.
В Україні назва йде з Татарської мови.
As a Brazilian I wanna share an experience in our history. Stan Getz, was a struggling Jazz Musician who was stationed in Brazil during the beginning of Bossa Nova. He decided to cling to the genre for a comeback and in America he made a record using Bossa Nova rhythms called Jazz Samba. It was good, but no Brazilian would call it Bossa Nova. It was only when he collaborated with actual Brazilian Bossa Nova Musicians like João Gilberto, Tom Jobim and Milton Banana. That he got Bossa nova. Not only did he get the sound, the record Getz/Gilberto is considered a stable on the Bossa Tradition. Image how much great music we could've had if Western Composers, choose to collaborate with Middle-Eastern Musicians. Instead of making general assumptions.
I'm not brazilian, but as someone who listens to a lot of music. This is so true! I would listen to real bossa nova and brazilian music and hear people credit Stan Getz. It always boggled my mind because it sounds nothing alike.
Do you have any other Bossa Nova jazz recommendations similar to Getz/Gilberto, particularly from Brazilian jazz musicians? Getz is one of my favorite jazz musicians.
I've been using Rate Your Music to find other Bossa nova, including the artists you list above, but I imagine the RYM list is made from the western viewpoint.
Mano eu acho um lixo esse disco do Stan Getz
@@Ryan-wr8fx Brazilian jazz musician is a strange way to call, but, this is not your fault
Go for, Luiz Gonzaga, Elis Regina, Pixinguinha, Dominguinhos, Elza Soares
I heard there was a lot of back and forth influence between NYC jazz and Rio jazz.
Hollywood has done the same thing with our own Native American culture. Only recently has Hollywood begun to use Native American actors to portray Native Americans in movies.
What do you mean?
Blue eyed people that Nazis would consider to be ubermench and Native Americans look so alike!
(sarcasm)
@@danubeisreallypeculiarrive7944 lol this reminds me of a time in one of my college classes, when my professor asked if there were any any Native American students in the class and a very white European American boy raised his hand and I was just looking at him utterly confused lol.
What about Dances with Wolves?
@@MesserMusic dances with wolves plays into nearly every stereotype of the noble savage and the dead indian. hell, the lead actress is an irish catholic white woman, but at least they filled out most of the rest of the indians with, you know, actual indians
@@MesserMusicDances With Wolves IS a very recent movie, when considering the ~80 years of hollywood history that preceded it
Casually jumping between Farsi, English, and French is such a flex lol. Great video, thank you for all the insight into these musical traditions and their cultural connections
I love how he just casually started grilling kebabs and never even mentioned it.
Fr like drop a recipe at least those look TASTY
@@ItsAllNunya I got really hungry at those parts.
With your "European William Wallace epic Scottish western music" example I nearly fell out of my chair😂😂😂
Same, I just keep replaying it and I die laughing every time. I think especially because of how the opera vocals are on the off-beat of the instrumentals.
*Add Bulgarian chants and an aulos for the hell of it, because hey, vibes.
Also because I like the aulos.
It's almost good in a kitbash sort of way.
As a European I really felt I was supposed to be offended, which really makes the point even clearer but in a funny way. Love it
It was high key a bop imo
One thing I really dislike about orientalist music (and orientalism in general tbh) is that it makes it harder to find music that's actually from "those" regions of the world or representative of "those" cultures, from my westerner position at least
The most popular sources I can access in the languages that I can speak so far are oversaturated with these generic, orientalist "oasis shawarma vibes" music
I like to play instrumental music when I'm doing work. I choose my videos based on vibe (do i want 80s vaporwave? Do i want folksy hippie? Etc). I do have some "arabian oud" music that was recommended and it's basically the same digital tune looping over again. Now that this video has opened my eyes, I'm going to delete them from my playlist. If i want Saudi instrumentals or Persian instrumentals, i want the real thing, not an orientalist interpretation which is basically a stereotype
yeahh i looked up persian music on youtube, and i had to dig rreally far into the search results to find any real iranian music
Agree. And some of that music is beautiful. But I would like to find lists of great music that is original. I found some, but it"s hard to get.
Exactly! There used to be a Spotify bot account I think or something similar to an algorithm based spotify playlist creator called "The sound [country + genre] and it was really great!
As a kurd, who lives in the middle east, even I have been westernised and my tastes white washed, so finding music through Spotify playlists really helped a lot.
That said, those tools are mostly exclusive to modern music, "ancient" folk and instrumental music are still underrepresented in our digital age. It's so hard to find something like that if you don't speak the language of the culture ur looking for :(
Start with Layth Sidiq, possibly the world's best violinist in the Arab music tradition (and also an excellent Western classical and jazz violinist), and then let the TH-cam algorithm take you from there. Also see videos of the Arab National Orchestra. Key search words would include "maqam," "microtones," and traditional Arab instruments such as the oud, qanun, and ney.
th-cam.com/video/LB6qWnqiDYU/w-d-xo.html
th-cam.com/video/vABZdfnqqqM/w-d-xo.html
th-cam.com/video/H-CxR5X94iQ/w-d-xo.html
I'm just a small town girl from the banjo music area of the US who had this video pop up in her recommendations. I was captivated from beginning to end. You delivered this information flawlessly and I appreciate the humor and sarcasm. I learned so much! The authentic music you shared is beautiful and I'm definitely going to check out more. I has to subscribe to your channel so I see more stuff from you. This video really scratched an itch to learn about something new.
As an American, this makes me mad - why does Hollywood insist on treating us all like idiots?
because the people in charge of the entertainment business ARE idiots
Well, if Americans are watching every single Marvel movie while gorging on copious amount of popcorn at cinema, I guess the bills checks out and brings out profit
there's more idiots than smart people. If you want quality, you gotta spend some effort to find it. It's a shame how real quality *isn't* mainstream, but that's how it is.
Well we keep paying money to see slop like the 20th fast and furious movie. Maybe we should raise our standards and vote with our wallets
Because all in all as a society we are idiots. Just look what composes the top music charts across America and other western countries. To listen to good music, we need to look underground, or at least outside the mainstream culture
Think about it:
Who's making Hollywood movies?
Ots not the most cultured not. intelligent segment of the population, I'll tell you that. They're not producing crap to TREAT YOU like an idiot, they're just mostly idiots doing their nit very good best. Hollywood is notorious for NOT READING. Why do you think so many comic books get made into movies, while much better stories from the literary world are ignored?
Because the people making movies read comic books, which are basically just story-boards. Holyrood is nit where the best and the brightest go.
Therapist: "The Orientalist Camel isn't real, it can't hurt you..."
40:00 is a cinematic masterpiece
Just out of curiosity typed "Iranian music" in Russian on youtube and got a ton of Iranian singers and musicians. Found a lovely video from a Moscow conservatory - it's breathtakingly beautiful. Thank you for the video and an opportunity to enjoy something new.
I was the westerner you were talking about who really didnt understand the difference before watching this. I probably still will be for a while until the pre-conceived notions are trained out of me. Thanks for the look into a beautiful reality
Seeing your arrangements being played at an event by the actual people of that culture must be the biggest compliment/flex ever. Thank you for talking at the camera for an hour thirty six (and discussing some really interesting themes).
Halfway through the video, but I got an idea. You know what you could do ? Perhaps for a 1st April joke. Making a composition which mixes douzens of european instruments from every country, and title it "The fields of the parisian queen" or "the knight of Helsinki", and say it's a classic "Catalan/Dutch mountain music"
EDIT : lmao you made it it's incredible
Lmao omg I would love this.
Please, compose the Knight of Helsinki piece, I am a Finn who lives in Helsinki, and would love to hear it.
(And make it traditional Scottish bagpipe music instead of Karelian singing 😂😂😂)
The word "Dutch" and "mountain" is so hilarious put together
Wait I have to hear it💀 where's the link
@@MM-vs2etThat's true xD
The Knight of Helsinki sounds fucking amazing, mostly because of the anachronism lol
I'm American Pakistani. when I was a kid I used to play a game called Medieval 2 total war. Being Muslim, I liked playing as the Muslim factions, especially since the overall vibe of literally anyone I knew who played it was "deus vult" and the Muslim factions were pretty much the underdogs (also horse archers). Being of a Pakistani background and speaking Urdu (a language that is almost completely intelligible with Hindi) I listened to a lot of Bollywood music and watched a lot of Bollywood movies. Playing the game I was genuinely shocked by how Desi it sounded. Some of the vocals were straight up Urdu-Hindi words. I'm not well versed in explaining musical compositions and patterns, but being of the culture, I know what cultures we're similar to, and we're not very similar to people from Morocco or Egypt. I brought it up with some people I played the game with and their reaction was literally 20:36. It annoyed the living shit out of me because it wasn't somewhat wrong, it was completely wrong.
@@dwarasamudra8889he meant more like using Indian instruments and composition style, but it is not pure Indian music it's more like a fusion style
0:17 father was a teacher of violin and santour AND A NOBEL PRIZE WINNING ASTROPHYSICIST 😃
This happens even within Western music itself. One egregious example is "viking metal". There is very little information about actual historical viking music, because they were not really prone to writing down the musical notation, but what little remains is very soft and slow. But the pop-cultural perception about Vikings is that they were wild and chaotic, so "viking metal" music is most often based on Gypsy music from the Balkans, Kusturica-style. And even movies from the Wild West usually have soundtracks which have nothing to do with actual music from that era, and often in a movie set in the 1860's the piano player in the bar plays 1920's ragtime.
he has another video dedicated to the viking metal thing
wait, can you give an example of performers that present Romani music from the Balkans as "viking"?
Heilung suffers from the same misunderstanding.
Have you heard the OST for Prince of Persia 2 on DOS? The adlib ost is very surprising because the composer did their best to try and replicate the articulations and sounds of actual Persian music, despite falling into some common pitfalls (it still uses that one scale a lot). I was reading the comments on a youtube upload of it and saw some people from Persia saying its far more accurate to actual Persian music than any other game music they had ever heard! You might find it intriguing, especially since it was all done with FM and rudimentary music software. I can't speak for it's accuracy because I know nothing about Persian music, but it sounds like its worth looking into.
Well I'll be damned, just listened to it and the composer even included microtonality. Had I known, I would've definitely included this in the positive examples
@@faryafaraji Also the new Prince of Persia: The Lost Crown worked with Iranian artist Mentrix for its soundtrack, with a core plot revolving around Simurgh and its feathers (which I assumed was inspired by the legend of Rostam's father?). There was a mini-doc called "Prince of Persia: The Lost Crown - A Musical Odyssey" detailing their composing process. That game actually brought me to your extremely educational and insightful channel. I'm deeply appreciative of this introduction to authentic oriental musical traditions and wish I could give your video multiple thumbups.
@@faryafarajion the topic of Prince of Persia the 2008 game did include Ahura Mazda and Ahriman as major parts of the plot. No idea how much cultural basis there is to the depiction though
Alternative title: Farya Vs the Duduk
Farya Vs Italian Americans
The Duduks of Hazzard?
Farya vs Scimitars
As an Armenian, even when totally misplaced, I’m glad the duduk is at least recognized as an Armenian sound/instrument. I have very low standards. 😁
@@parap7697 And that's the problem. Nobody's recognising it as Armenian. Most think it's Arabic.
Showing Paris and playing Appalachian music is the most brilliant way to show someone your perspective. I absolutely love this and want to learn so much more. Thank you, from a new viewer.
The fact that the ‘Epic Scottish Battle Music - William Wallace’ actually went kinda hard when I stopped understanding it as totally incorrect really outlines how Orientalist music works, meaning its music that theoretically is good, just isn’t anywhere near what it is labeled as.
So to me, that begs the question: since this music is clearly enjoyed, and we can’t just snap our fingers and destroy it because we like it, is the solution simply renaming the genre to ‘Orientalist’ music? ‘Euro-Oriental Bastardization’?
@@cheezitboi4202 "Bastardization" is a loaded word, but yeah I think that's one valid solution. Just have the orientalist sound be separate from the actual Middle Eastern variety of sounds
@@Anton15243 Bastardization is a loaded I understand, however it really gets across the point that it’s a not so nice ‘interpretation’ or even recreation of music that exists. It’s just the word I could think of when writing the post, I apologize
@@cheezitboi4202 i think the thing to do would be to normalize using stylistic traits typically associated with orientalist music in other kinds of music with the hope of eventually breaking the association. though i say that mainly because i want to play guitar solos in double harmonic major cause it sounds pretty
@@cheezitboi4202 I think it's the same as "Chinese American" food in the US. Most people generally understand now it bears little resemblance to authentic Chinese food but it's still fire and people of all races enjoy eating it and that's great as long as everyone is aware that it's its own distinct cuisine that doesn't teach them much about Chinese food in China.
When you talk about how orientalism has done western audiences dirty, I would like to add something else, as a Brazilian person: I think it does even more harm for people like me, from non-middle eastern third world countries.
We also get our culture misrepresented all the time, but not only that, we only have access to misrepresented versions of all the other cultures in the world except for the western, european and american culture.
All of us, third world countries, live in a different bubble, where we have access only to our own cultures and to the dominant culture in the world, and that makes it much harder for us to realise how much we’re being robbed of. If the entire world had access to the entire world, culturally, the western hegemony could not be mantained, they would not be able to be the main characters in all of our perceptions of the world.
Videos like this are very important, not only for middle easterners, americans and europeans, but also for east asians, africans, latin americans and more. When we learn about the diversity of the world, we become more free ourselves.
I mean, even American/European cultures are rarely accurately represented by our own media. I have no doubt that it’s to a lesser degree than foreign cultures, but it’s not like the common tropes associated with Westerns or pirate movies or medieval flicks or Victorian novels are particularly accurate to the historical periods they’re set in. We don’t really even need to go historical to find huge discrepancies between fictional stereotypes and the real world - the stereotypical American high school setting bears little resemblance to what American high schools are actually like, outside of maybe the general aesthetic.
At the end of the day fiction is meant to entertain, not educate. Sometimes that means knowingly playing into inaccurate stereotypes simply because it’s what audiences expect.
very well said!!! as an arab i agree completely. when i started comparing notes with a mexican friend for example i started to realize how much we all had in common and how fascinating our differences were
Well said
Such a good point.
That is an extremly underrated comment. I am from Germany and you just gave me a completely new perspective, that I have totally missed so far. Thank you very much
This reminds me so much of a short but very good talk by Rami Ismail. He spends just 20 minutes teaching the audience the basics of how to read Arabic script, then he shows some screenshots of popular games (like, military shooters and stuff), and even with only 20 minutes of learning, the audience can see immediately that the "Arabic script" in the screenshots are completely garbled and nonsense. It takes *so little* learning to do miles better than we have so far. It doesn't take long to show a little respect.
Thanks for the recommendation!
Thank you a lot for your work.
I must admit that I used to get clickbaited by these titles with "Arabic/Persian music", but then I just figured out to look up differently; in my case what I was searching was XVIth century Safavid and Ottoman music pieces, and yes, I'm putting them together, because what I'm researching is related to Ottoman-Safavid dyplomacy, so what I wanted was to find music remotely connected to this topic, seperate pieces to differentiate them and get the essence of each respectively. It took me a while before I found your channel and others, because I've started typing e.g. "bağlama müzik" or "setar iranian" instead of "ottoman court music" and "persian safavid music", and clicking on videos with the artist actually playing them. I did the same thing for italian renaissance, like "venetian lute" or "florentine lute" and sometimes I just use phrases from a specific language to get better results (unfortunately, I depend on google translate, but it still gives better results than using English only).
I guess we, Westeners, can never be truly free of having these orientalistic lenses, but it takes time and effort to dig deeper and deeper. Honestly, in my case I had to go down the rabbit hole of learning about Albanian culture, history and dialects, in order to write a single Albanian character and understand their perspective, and I'm not Albanian, but by God, I was immediately immersed in this culture while watching and listening to an elderly man playing his çifteli. Music helps to convey these nuances in a compressed way, since it's part of every day life and that's why authentic musical representation matters so much.
Thanks for making that William Wallace music, haha, I think it was extremely effective at proving the point for westerners!
Banger essay!
Eyyy it's the man himself. Thanks mate!
We need an orientalist version of the lick
@@Bryophyta the whole "Obsession with double-harmonic" part IS the orientalist lick, my dude.
Thank you for not being afraid to challenge the Western norms in your videos, thank you for spreading a sliver of our true cultures and thank you for being the person that you are, Adam.
I was going to say someone needs to send Adam Neely this video, well he found his way here himself :D
Funnily enough, this even applies to traditional Western\European music, in the imagination of the 'average' Western\European consumer\music producer. The "Medieval" music, as it is often rendered in modern media, usually bears little resemblance to the actual European Medieval music, whether folk or institutional
itual.
Because the average consumer\music producer just couldn't care less..
And even more, the common medieval clichés, from society to material culture, are often just that, deeply ingrained clichés, and not really medieval at all. And if they are medieval, they freely mix a thousand years of history and various regions together in a big stew.
I lose my shit every time I look for medieval music and find dungeon synth instead
That's one thing I like about the bardcore genre, since it has an actual genre name and usually just parodies existing pop music, more people seem to be aware that it's not historically accurate. On the other hand the orientalist music issue is just as rampant as Farya stated
Hey I happen to like oldschool rpg style fakedieval music. It has a charm of it's own.
I despise fakedieval music with every tissue and organ of my very being, there is no objective soul and I feel complete emptiness when I hear it.
Can 100% confirm what you're saying about western music training and microtonality!
I started playing the violin when I was six years old. If you learn the violin, 99% of what you play is gonna be european classical.
When I was about 18, my teacher gave me a piece with some microtonal elements and it completely broke my brain. Like, on a conceptual level I knew what I was supposed to do, but at that point I had spent ca two thirds of my entire life training myself to play with 12 notes in an octave, I had trained my hearing to get those notes exactly right (because a violin doesn't have frets so you actually have to hit them properly like you do in singing). Trying to reliably hit a note that was right between the two notes that my brain would accept was insanely difficult because I didn't just have to hit that note, I had to hold it while fighting the visceral, instinctive reaction of my brain screaming at me that I was playing the wrong note
Great teaching moment, 10/10, would recommend!
(couple years later I got to try out a Cura in an improvised music session and experimenting with microtonality when I had frets to help me was actually a lot of fun!)
Yeah I’m a jazz/country guitarist and even though there are some microtonal elements for “bluesy” notes hearing real microtonal music is really harsh to my ears. I just want to reach out and tune the peg up a bit. For jazzy stuff the idea of microtonalilty is that you are approaching notes or getting that dissonance intentionally not for melodic but expressive purposes. Middle eastern music will straight up hit the in between note in a melody or chord and although I try to understand it I just have spent my life training my ear to hear it’s a flat note.
you would have to retune to strings. it's super weird, i believe,on the fingerings if you don't redo the strings. it will make more sense if you do the right tuning
on violin, i mean
@@PhaedraDarwish From what I can tell, middle eastern music uses various tunings, but the microtonality doesn't come from those, it's in the fingering.
Either way, the piece my teacher gave me to try was written with a standard european GDAE tuning in mind, so for that one, it was all down to fingering anyway
Yeah, I'm not nearly as trained as you, and every time he demonstrated microtones a little voice in my head said "Error! go double check your notes!" Western musical traditional really does hate microtones.
This video is the perfect example of constructive criticism, you're calling out orientalism but you're not judging the westerners who grew up hearing orientalist music, but pointing out how it's a sad reality that we can't hear actual Middle Eastern music. I grew up hearing soundtracks of Lawrence of Arabia, Aladdin, etc. and they sounded really beautiful, but I always knew that something was off and I wasn't getting the full thing. Ironically it led me to search out for real Middle Eastern music and led me here, just hearing the difference between orientalist music and actual Iranian music shocked me as the Iranian music feels more emotional and hits me harder. Also I love the humor of the video, especially with writing "William Wallace Epic Scottish European Battle Music" and it made me laugh harder than I had in a while.
How am I supposed to sleep when Farya dropped an hour and a half long video essay?
Ha-haha. Wrong side of the globe. I enjoy it for breakfast
I literally didn't sleep for watching this.
Move to a different time zone!
......oh i hadn't looked at the runtime until i saw this comment LOL. i. Will have to come back to this video later ynnnng
you mean a massacre❓❓❓💀💀💀 dude had it for them annoying songs lol
I remember the Arabic Nokia ringtone that became viral, and someone turned it into an “epic”, orchestral piece… And its microtonality was changed into the most cliched “Eastern”-sounding progression 😭
They made a phase two as well, and it’s just as generic and flat 😭
Isn't the original piece the ringtone was modelled after way better anyway? Like, I listened to all these videos and the "epic orchestral" piece just... sounded boring af
@@DarthLenaPlant The original song is called "يا طرشي" by the way
that song goes so hard (the nokia version)
@@loop4569 Just search "ya tareshy". I guess this is not the most accurate Latin, but you'll get it from that.
I studied classical arabic music, and my partner is an iranian who's a classically trained violinist in iranian music.
I admit that this is the most hilarious shit ever due to how accurate it is.
I totally understand how it feels as a Tunisian. We have a lot of traditional north african music that is being overlooked at as it's all "arabs", "desert", whatever...
While actually, the instruments are not from the arabs, and the language is not even arabic. The arabic influence exists but it's a huge difference.
Some bands are fighting this by writing about how "oriental music" is just whatever is in the middle east from the western perspective (eg. a song called: Znous زنوس - Salih صليح).
Anyway, you made my day and I am even more attached to this channel now!
Do you know the Nuubaat music and Chaabi music? If you do I have a question for you which I searched but able to find nothing due to language barrier I guess.
Exactly, I was thinking that just as how "orientalism" lumps all middle eastern cultures into a weird frankestein that doesn't reflect reality, "arabism" is also not far from that. Arabs have very different cultures that span two continents with very different music styles and traditions.
@@aresatlasdurmus9656 I am moroccan and I can answer any questions that you have about chaabi. Although chaabi is used as a blanket term to refer to the music that is played wildly within a culture, hence why algerian chaabi, would be entirely different than the tunisian one or moroccan one.
@@aresatlasdurmus9656 hi, i know that Chaabi is algerian (Algiers/blida region), hope i could help but im no musician.
Good luck
@@minoassal chaabi is not exclusively algerian, it is a genre of music that is spread across north african regions and it takes many forms. Just like how "el ayta" is also a depiction of colonial struggle under the french protectrat. It is a very cultural piece of heritage .
Oooh this is excellent, instant follow from me. Bless you for not skimping on the captions! As someone who relies on them no matter what people are speaking, they're important
Farya and his mom interacting is the best part of this channel
I have been bellydancing for about 20 years, and early on, I began to notice there was *something* about the different types of music I was being exposed to in various classes. Sometimes the songs felt "real" and sometimes they felt "fake." I wasn't sure how else to describe it, I was in high school and had no knowledge of music theory or ethnomusicology. As I got older, I read Edward Said's "Orientalism," I studied the history of all the dances that made up "belly dance," and came to learn and identify the instruments and rhythms unique to different regions of the MENAT. Often times I was on my own searching for this stuff. I was afraid to ask dumb questions that would betray my ignorance, but I was eager to learn.
I would have killed to have seen this documentary when I was 16. It would have allowed me to articulate my feelings so much better, and give more power to that little voice in my head that wanted to scream "this is cringe," "something is wrong," "this ain't it," whenever I heard a song called "Eternal Arabia"
Dancers are often visual symbols of a culture's musical heritage. Understanding the music you're dancing to isn't just important -- it's the damn point.
Thank you so, so much for making this doc and posting it free on TH-cam, so hopefully other young dancers can have an easier time learning about the music they are dancing to.
I'm also picking up bellydancing (which also has been a great hook into learning more about rich middle-eastern cultures
As a fellow bellydancer, I have seen the same bullshit in Western "belly dance". Faked costuming with no regard for areas of origin; bindis on the forehead, a mishmash of jewellery from different areas, weird music and bad attitudes toward the cultures of origin. 60's and 70's white feminism has a lot to answer for here.
The minimum that belly dancers should do is educate themselves with the cultures and musical traditions of the regions that this dance draws from. Orientalism was the draw for me, then when I realized what Orientalism was, it was an invitation to really come to know these cultures.
You are right in that we do have a responsibility to accurately portray the cultures we aim to depict, there's just no getting around it if you love the dance. You dignify them if you present them authentic dance and understanding. There was no greater compliment that I have received as a dancer than when I was told by an Iranian musician that I danced to his music like I understood it in my body.
That being said, I mainly dance fusion, but in the right settings. Honor the rich traditions, and celebrate the artistry and innovation when appropriate.
And for goddsakes, please stop dancing to Arabian Nights! I don't care how good the version of the song is! It's peak cringe.
Thanks for posting this! I have 'belly danced' in the past, and had similar feelings but couldn't articulate them. Watching this video really gave me some great insights and thoughts of 'oh dear, I have really fallen into that trap'. And then feeling a bit ashamed for not realising sooner. Fantastic, clearly articulated and expressed video and so happy to see other belly dancers on here expressing much more eloquently what I am trying to say than I can. Looking forward to doing some reading and growing my understanding. Starting with the Edward Said :)
« This is cringe » is a very recent import from US slang talk.
as a japanese woman, i dunno what you're talking about. all we do is eat sushi and commit seppuku.
also i live in the part of town where all the middle eastern immigrants live so i actually do get to hear cool oriental music when they barbecue and stuff, its cool. we've also got a bazaar with cool music and tasty mangoes
Do you eat sushi as beautiful japanese.mp3 music plays as you walk out in robes and holding a fan?
You killed me at "commit seppuku" 😂
@johndoe70770 Not for long :)
As a japanese you aren't part of that Samurai caste so I doubt you were expected to do Seppuku. I guess they don't teach japanese caste system in Japanese school.
@@SafavidAfsharid3197 So you're part of said caste and expected to disembowel yourself in case of dishonor? Living in your lord's pavilion in the middle of modern Tokyo, having crazy duels against cars at intersections?
Clearly you were not taught sarcasm in whatever school you attended.
being iranian myself, this video not only is a critique of orientalism, but also a great reminder of deeply cultural arts and how they should be appriciated. great video, love your channel, just found it. :)
being an Appalachian traditional musician, the juxtaposition of Cumberland Gap over a picture of soviet Russia has me in tears! lol! The level at which orientalist composers have lost the plot is so absurd!
What's so frustrating about the excessive usage of the Duduk is that we have wind instruments that sounds just as mystic, raspy and eerie!!
The Gasba, The Zoukra and The Mezoued exists and they're played by actual tribesmen and Amazighi people! and they're VERY omnipresent in north african folk music and have an immense potential to be utilized.
FR
I'm not gonna lie I'm not interested in seeing/hearing myself through the lens or someone who thinks of us as "tribal, dirty and gritty"
@@Jolly_Jelly_ that just shows how much research and respect he shows toward anything that is not eurocentric, and the prejudice that comes with it.
I was so disappointed when i heard that he was the one in charge for the Dune soundtrack, and my concern can be heard through it
@@MarkHogan994 and the duduk is a fremen instrument.. like cmon lets stay in good faith and not pretending that Dune universe was created in a vaccum and doesnt wear its arabic influences on its sleeve. Even frank herbert admits it, and the books are pretty well researched and respectful of the cultures that served as the blueprint of Dune. I cant say that about the films im afraid as much as i liked them, they’re a neutered and diluted story of what Herbert was trying to tell, in fear of not being too gratting to western audiences
I’m not even middle-eastern, just a regular American, and I even find the duduk over used to the point that it’s grating. I am a composer, so maybe I’m more sensitive to these over use of the instruments and scales, but yes I found it just as grating way before I even saw this video. Just do something different Hollywood, it can’t be that hard!
As Malaysian, orientalist music for Malays are basically Chinese music mix with tribal drums and small gongs.
In trying to find middle-eastern music, I've gotten pretty good over the years at recognising what is clearly inauthentic. (Fiechter brothers and AI-thumbnail stuff)
Despite this, it's been difficult still to find actual authentic music here on youtube. So I appreciate you making these videos :) I also appreciate your very nuanced take on western cultural perspectives.
Edit: I honestly posted this comment before watching the video (just reading your pinned comment). I'm glad you talked about the Fiechter brothers!
To defend western composers for games and movies a little bit is that they're usually not the creative be all end all for the projects they're working on and have to navigate around temp music and project lead expections. Which means that even if they go out and do their research and put a lot of effort into creating authentic music their demos might just get shut down and they're told to do what's familiar.
While not specific to Orientalist music, one of the biggest examples to me is the Soundtrack of Avatar. Composer James Homer worked with ethnomusicologist Wanda Bryant for like two years to create a unique sound for the Na'vi and virtually none of their work made it into the final movie and what did make it in was extremely watered down because everything they came up with was shut down for being too alien.
In general the amount of work and effort that went into the world building of Avatar is absolutely unhinged. A fully developed Na'vi language, various scientists hired to make sure that the world was as plausible as it could be. Every plant, every animal, every piece of tech has detailed background information. And it was all wasted on a movie that boils down to "Pocahontas but blue".
Imagine shutting down demos for being "too alien" when we're dealing with a culture of actual aliens. I wish it was possible to re-discover some of those.
There is some dramatic irony in the making of the movie, how it ended up reinforcing the "noble savage" and orientalist/exoticising myth it originally tried to deconstruct
@@aimee9478 happened with the avatar soundtrack, they told horner to do something different so he did research in unknown music traditions and used those and almost all of it got thrown except one little vocal thingie going on in the background
@@tj-co9goI’m unconvinced they were committed to that.
@@tj-co9go
What the guy above said. I like Avatar, but the Na'vi were definitely the 'noble savage living one with nature and everything's perfect' and the humans were 'the evil, exploiting conquerors who only cares about money and other stuff the audience doesn't care about'.
What makes this video so great is there's no hatred towards individuals, no moral grandstanding or performative exaggeration, just genuine annoyance and a sense of how *tired* he is of this stuff.
And of course he's totally right, the ignorance is especially galling in a modern context where the internet is availiable to just Google a list of instruments, scales, modes and time signatures associated with a style of music. They're so lazy they can't be bothered to do at least 10 minutes of research.
Even if they did they often aren't trained in those styles so research would be kinda pointless. They'd just end up back at DHM and Phrygian.
I will fully admit, I was with you mentally and conceptually for the first 40 minutes, but it didn't fully hit home until you composed the epic William Walace song. Well played, and an amazing way to make a point. These youtube titles of "Epic persian desert pyramid sand iranian" are like Amazon/AliExpress labeling a product...
As an Iranian I was so confused when browsing the Internet for iranian music, same as arabic music which is equally foreign to our ears
great comparison :D
Yeah that brought it home
I am grateful for your teaching / knowledge. I have learned much today and will endeavor to listen to more Persian songs and music. We humans have so many beautiful cultures , so many, and it fills my heart to hear or witness the expression of a culture through those medians - untainted and true. Its says 'Here we are! this is us!'
As a New Zealand Maori I feel I can understand the issues that come with cultural appropriation and abuse and feel disrespected on so many levels at times. But as you have demonstrated that through communication, sharing and teaching we help others to see us, to understand who we are and to respect and celebrate our difference's.
Peace be upon you and your people brother or as we say 'kia tau te rangimarie ki o nga tangata katoa'...
William Wallace - Scottish Music goes incredibly hard. Beautiful European temperate climate American vodka vibes.
people from the culture using the music you wrote of their culture for their cultural events is the greatest compliment an ethnomusicologist could get. that is so cool
toki..
20:59 “For the scenes set in Paris, I’ve used the sound of a Cretan mandola” Don’t know why, but that cracked me up
Cretan... Croissant... They're basically the same thing, amiright? 🤌
One of the best videos I've seen on TH-cam, seriously, make it a series!
The apology by FaolanMusic is so crazy to me, like...
"We called it Princess of Persia because our song, that we freely admit was not influenced by traditional Persian music, reminded us of Persia, a place we likely have never been."
And then to just say "driven by our thoughts," as though the rhythms and melodies they produce aren't - at least in some part - derived from popular culture.
@@EmyrianMusic 'drive by our thoughts' made me laugh out loud
Like yeah, no shit, most humans are driven by their thoughts, if those thoughts could be educated in future that would be great
I'm forever grateful that in the early 2010s, I met someone across the world from me, who lives in Pakistan, and was in a shoegaze band. It was the most real and undeniable shattering of orientalism for me. I saw firsthand proof that 20 year olds over there listened to the same exact music, played the same exact video games, created the same exact indie bands.. lived the same exact lives that we live here.
So much to unpack in this video, gonna keep coming back to this.
Orientalism is bad, but then globalism also has its caveats. It would be ideal for more people to hold nuance in their perception... In Pakistan, some people listen to shoegaze, most people listen to whatever is on Coke Studio, but also others may just be into, say, religious music - I remember reading about how there nasheed CDs around Ramadan are a smash sale at least as if not more so than Coke Studio... (that being said, even nasheed music may sometimes include elements like... trap beats)
So things are actually complex. There are also things in Western culture that remain largely unknown to many Western people. How many Americans listen to or are even much aware of zydeco? How many of the British are aware of avant-garde guitarist Keith Rowe?
I'm french child of Algerian immigrants and I found the passage 21:02 hilarious 😭😆! This "vague east vibe" representation that affects musical representation extends also to social representations as well. For example when I was in 6th grade I made a friend and when she invited me her mom said that her daughter told her I'm armenian. And I turned to my friend and said "Algerian not Armenian", and she shrugged and said "that's almost the same thing". Like, this girl just Duduk-ed me.
oh my god that really sucks but its also incredibly funny 😭
reminds me of when my sister was asked to translate for an elderly arabic lady at work, and she had to explain that sorry she can't, she speaks persian and thats not anywhere close to arabic lmao
Was recommended a barber by a friend once, he assured me that the guy spoke Arabic and we would really get along.
Turns out the barber was Turkish and we didn’t have a single language in common 😂
The cut still turned out fire tho.
She "duduk-ed" you!! 😅🤣🤣 How freakin rude of the mom though, I'm so sorry that happened to you, it sucks. When someone doesn't know any better, yet is so attached to the belief that they do 🙄
It's even funnier if you read this as a Turkish person, because the term "duduk-ed" (düdükledi) exists in your language and means totally different, but fits in with the situation. 😂 (an old slang word which has the exact same slang meaning of "scr*wed")
I was learning japanese in 4th grade and i spoke a bit with my japanese classmate, and another girl came up and said "oh you know chinese? Thats so cool!" When i explained to her that they're two different languages and cultures, she shrugged and said "oh well its the same thing basically." It pisses me off how much the west is conditioned not to care about other cultures.
When you started discussing how when we’re used to elements in a certain category it’s easy to distinguish between differences, but when we interact with a new category we often can’t distinguish the differences, it’s so true. And I’m experiencing that right now but with language, particularly Español. I recently moved to Miami from Portland and holy crap my brain still struggles to distinguish the different Latino/a accents and I’m stumped by portugués. I’m making progress (slowly) the more I study, but holy crap my brain implodes after work sometimes. If any of you guys are in this position too don’t give up, we can learn new things!
Hey, Farya, can you make more Occidentalist music? "William Wallace" kinda slaps.
Hell yeah!
Hell yeah that slapped so hard , I want the full version of the music and it on a Scottish Highlands music playlist (1 hour long, so you can feel like a true scot)
I sort of want to see an Occidentalist movie as well. Harmonica blues when showing european royalty, french fries, blue jeans and top hats in 16th century portugal, greece shown overcast all the time and ice filled ports using viking longships in the modern era?
I actually want the full song to be released
Watch chinese movies about westerners. PS: western music is just irish river dance for the rest of the world
As a white-washed lebanese pianist who's been (western) classically trained, this video was ear-opening for me. I can't even begin to imagine how much I've missed out on all the subtleties and richness of the music of LITERALLY MY OWN RELATIVES, because of the hegemony of western culture. More specifially, the overwhelming presence in pop culture of what oriental music sounds like to the western-trained ear. W essay.
It's kind of like getting mad at McD's for selling junk food though. That's what they sell. In my experience, with the internet or with live events in any big city with an art scene, I've never had any difficulty finding music faithful to non western traditions.
what does whyte washed means in this context?
@@hurremhightower it's being born from non-white parents, but being so exposed to western traditions (music related or not) that you get assimilated to them, forgetting about your own roots. I'm from arabic descent, yet I barely know ANYTHING about its language, its history, its art and traditions, etc. I don't speak arabic with my parents, I speak french. I think I got my point across.
@@theoboueid6450 ok got it now
You can start with Fairouz. She is the most famous Lebanese singer and she has an incredible voice!
Honestly, most people are ignorant even of their own country and culture:
My grandma is part of a group that tries to preserve and learn local culture to people, as modern day life uproots everything and makes people less connected with their roots.
Part of that is singing, singing songs from their youth, lullebys but also songs of grief.
My family is from Scheveningen/Duindorp.
But why i bring this up is that often people just go "ah you from Urk". Urk is a different place with different history and different styles of clothing. There are so many people not knowing their own country's culture...
To expect them to know a thing about what's for them the other side of the world is like expecting the fish to walk.
Warm greetings from the Netherlands🇳🇱.
Also completely made up "epic William Wallace Scottish Battle music" probably exists. I have spoken with Scottish people and every time Hollywood makes a movie about something Scottish it's a whole can of worms.
Hell yeah look up "Celtic epic battle music" you won't be disappointed. Has Gregorian singing and all kinds of good stuff in it.
And the "just give them scimitars and turbans" trope in movies is also sadly used for many other cultures, even European ones. Romans ALWAYS have big, square shields with SPQR on it, we all know the look. As with all cultures evolving through time the Roman army changed drastically throughout time to the point they don't look alike at all. But Hollywood says SPQR so that is all we get.
Ignorance sucks and it's great you address these stupid and lame tropes! There is a whole world unknown to most that is right there! So much to discover and enjoy, to limit ourselves is to torture ourselves!
Duindorp, Urk, it's all near water isn't it? 😂
It's true Braveheart is the bane of my existence
@@youteacher78 cultuurbarbaar!🤣
What a king!! Thank you so much for a deeply informative and generous video. Also, Thank you for calling out Zimmy! in the light of Dune films coming out.
I think the final boss of orientalism would be the nation of Sumeru in Genshin Impact.
From Chinese developers, it doesn’t claim to be based on any particular culture, but is a hodgepodge of Indian, Persian, Arabic, Egyptian and Turkish cultural elements, mashed together with a soundtrack that tries to represent every single one of them in some way with varying levels of authenticity.
There’s the Indian sitar, bansuri, tabla; the Persian santur, daf, tombak; the Arabic oud, ney, qanun, darbuka; the Armenian duduk; the Turkish baglama, even the Greek bouzouki, the Italian mandolin and the Chinese erhu, with one track going out as far as the African udu.
And the insane thing is, it’s also one of the only games I’ve ever seen that does an actual decent attempt at representing Persian culture, from a character doing a pretty authentic looking Persian dance, to an entire area dedicated to Persian folklore reframed in the context of the game’s lore - Sorush, Mihir and Rashnu of the Pari race descended from the divine bird Simurgh whose home is the Vourukasha Oasis sets out to perform the rite of Chinvat to stop the Dev, extinguish the sign of Apaosha and restore the Harvisptokhm using the power of Khvarena, etc etc.
It’s obvious they’ve done a great amount of research, so it’s not like they don’t know about the cultures they’re representing, but they’ve still chosen to mix them in a way that's so strange it honestly has no precedent in Western media. To call it orientalism would be too reductive, but they’re also too double-harmonic-major-duduk brained to be accurate, so it exists in this purgatory of orientalism.
Also regions there are usually based on one country, meanwhile Sumeru is just... everywhere from the entire MENA region to Indian subcontinent squeezed into one region. I've seen an Iranian fan interpret it as the Chinese creators being inspired by the history of the Silk Road trade (same person also contrasted Sumeru characters that represent particular real life cultures well with an Aladdin-based orientalism personification of a character, lol). All in all, those circumstances surely create one hell of a case of "purgatory of orientalism" as you said
Play the Civilization games..they do a great job in nailing the authenticity of the cultures of the world. King Cyrus is depicted just how he should look in Civ 6
Post-Orientalist syncreticism
I was just thinking about where Genshin lays in this discussion and you're so correct. It's like Orientalism+
@@rasurin japan is a western country
Another disservice of Orientalism to people in the West is how it's also shaped the perceptions of people's own ancestry depending on how many generations removed they are and will undoubtedly get worse as time goes on. I am of Armenian and Lebanese descent from my dad's side, but all of ny great grandparents were immigrants to the U.S. Very few cultural traditions were passed down, and he passed when I was young, so my mom (of Polish and German descent) also wasn't able to share those cultural traditions with me. I've listened to some traditional Armenian music before, but this video has really inspired to me to seek out more and better connect with my ancestry. Sadly, most people in similar situations and later generations will likely not do the same and will forever have a very western colonialist view of their ancestry unless accurate portrayals of middle eastern cultures become more common in western spheres.
Me and my musically inclined buddies where stoked when we found your video on Viking music, this one is gonna be such a treat.
this is EXACTLY the video I was looking for in searching this topic. Grateful new subscriber..thanks for honoring our culture.
So if eastern music's strength is the variety of mods, does it mean it's a Bethesda game?
Todd Howard invented the Middle-East
"All of it just works"
@@MarvinT0606 lol
@@faryafaraji Hammerfell just might be the most immersive Elder Scrolls region since they had so much practice with the Middle East.
@BababooeyGooey Hammerfell is based off of northern africa, not the middle east. Elswyr is more "arab(????)" than Hammerfell. But it's also weird because I talked to an Iraqi woman who said the ashlanders in Morrowind reminded her of her nomadic ancestors in Iraq more than any other group.
At the end of the day, it's a blender of nonsense and I also once talked to an italian who was miffed that Oblivion's Cyrodiil had new world fruits in the renaissance "italian(????)" culture of Cyrodiil.
Actually, this comment made me realize I don't think any of the music in TES:Redguard were even vaguely North African inspired, it's very... it's not anything. It just sounds like RPG music.
I NEED, repeat, NEED the occidentalist composing as a short
I wanna hear an actual piece like that.
Meme value is valuable.
Basically hollywood and anything USA makes calling it western, celt, viking, roman you call it
Led Zeppelin’s lyrics for Kashmir,
“ All I see turns to brown
As the sun burns the ground
And my eyes fill with sand
As I scan this wasted land
Try to find, try to find the way I feel”
Obviously they knew nothing about Kashmir.
That’s crazy. Azad Kashmir is often called heaven on earth for its beautiful landscape. Filled with greenery and very mountainous.
In winter, in every place in west and east Kashmir, the snow reaches up to people’s knees.
You may want to try and learn about the song before you slam them. The band had never been to kashmir. Rather, the inspiration for the song was from a drive through a long, desert road in Morocco that Robert Plant had taken. The actual song was not meant to be about a geographical location but about a journey in a seemingly endless road through a desolate desert.
The song itself is legendary and highly regarded, a unique & standout track from the album.
"The band had never been to Kashmir." Literally the entire point of Orientalism. Not knowing anything about a foreign, eastern location and assuming stereotypes about it.
"The inspiration for the song was from a drive through a desert road in Morocco." And they gave it a South Asian title. Again, literally the point of the video. Orientalism lumping all the "East" together because it can't distinguish it.
"The actual song was not meant to be about a geographical location." Yeah, but they took the name of a specific geographical location as a vague "vibe" signifier of "exotic, eastern." Again, literally the point of the vid. Reducing anthropological markers to vague vibe signifiers.
"but about a journey in a seemingly endless road through a desolate desert." And they named it after a specific geographical location that is green and lush.
"The song itself is legendary and highly regarded, a unique & standout track from the album." Ok? This doesn't change anything about the absurdity of the title.
I can write a song about a seeminlgy endless journey through snowy tundras. If I call it "Sicily," it's stupid. The song may slap. It may be legendary. The ignorance at the root of the title is still stupid.
I get that you're fans of those musicians, but it doesn't mean you have to put your fingers in your ears and go "la la la," when asked to recognise that they emulated broader cultural reflexes of the society they were part of. Enjoying a musician doesn't mean you have to idolise them to the point of putting your head in the sand. And looking at you, you'd probably go to Kashmir looking for sand to put your head in.
I did a quick Google Image search for "kashmir" after I read this...
...and immediately burst into laughter 🤣🤣🤣❄❄🏔
Orientalism all the same.
❤ this channel is a gold mine. I was a student of cultural anthropology (but haven't yet obtained a degree cuz....funding.) this is the kind of content I have been craving. Thank you so much for calling attention to this issue. I personally enjoy the sound of orientalist music HOWEVER I agree that it should not be used to generalize the entire region and varying cultures.
The architecture analogy makes a lot of sense, I could instantly recognize differences in Asian architecture, but I wouldn’t be able to tell European architecture apart, except for major landmarks. Pop culture plays a huge role in cultural understanding. A lot more people can recognize Korean architecture nowadays due to the rise of K-dramas/K-pop compared to the last decade, and the same applies to Japan for similar reasons. If media in general had more care instead of generalizing, many more people would be able to make distinctions.
Before watching this, I was only vaguely aware of the idea, “it’s kinda funny that every movie/game/etc in the middle east has that yellow filter, camels, street markets, women with face-covers, desert, that samey-sound” but I didn’t realize just how crazy stereotypes got. Great video.
I am a white Danish person and I can easily tell traditional Japanese and Chinese architecture styles apart but I have also studied art history including architectural history at university, and take an active interest in the topic way more than I imagine most people anywhere do - I don't expect the average person in China to even notice the cultural differences between the Scandinavian countries either
kpop is black american culture🤷♀️the language is korean hut that’s it
it's the same reason as how raya the last dragon made me wince so many times just from the trailer. i know they said they consulted southeast asians, but the thing is, they consulted young urban southeast asians (who are at least partly westernised), and southeast asians of migrant origin (e.g. from china). if you're heartland southeast asian, who still have some inherited familiarity with what things go together, and what things and worldviews just don't go together, doesn't exist or even antithetical to our worldviews, it feels jarring. but i was able to enjoy aladdin even though i knew intellectually that the design aesthetic is not actually arabic.
@@nurainiarsad7395 yeah, I felt the same way about Raya, it feels jarring seeing them mix different SEA cultures when they could have just focused on one.
@@nurainiarsad7395 I've never seen "Raya and the Last Dragon", I guess I am not missing much? I do remember reading a review of it on someone's blog and thinking the plot (as he described it) came across as a total ripoff of Hayao Miyazaki's "Nausicaä of the Valley of the Winds" just transplanted into a heroic fantasy setting instead of a unique surrealistic post-apocalyptic world. (which for me was half the fun of "Nausicaä")
Holy smokes. TH-cam has a looot of video format junkfood and other trash. But every once in a while, you come across a place like this, a rich deposit of valuable nutrition, chock full of vitamins and minerals.
The rhythm during your Turkish vocal posture clip at 30:48 does something strange to my feelings. It is (to my ears), a curious rhythm that I feel compelled to hear and learn more of. Thank you!
Music in TH-cam is also like that.
I have seen extremely obscure but extremely good music (In My Taste not for Everyone of course) that has on average less than 100,000 Views and some even have less than 15,000 but I listen to and love everyday
I was just talking to my wife about how one of the hardest things about getting older is learning all the "History" and "Culture" we were taught in school, games, films, and documentaries was 99% B.S. When I choose to really study a culture I find music and food to be invaluable tools to really get a feeling for the heart of a culture. I've recently discovered that there has been a HUGE gap in my historical knowledge of the Middle East, and this video has been one of the best videos for (apologies for the term) "mythbusting" one of the biggest myths we've been told to just accept as fact as a westerner. Thank you!
"the "History" and "Culture" we were taught in school, games, films, and documentaries was 99% B.S."
Well, it is still kind of your responsibility if pieces of FICTION such as video games or films were your reference for an existing culture or history.. Trying to blame these for "teaching" you (even though that's OBVIOUSLY never been their intend) is entirely on you.
@@FindingsOfAnArmouredMind wow you are so clever and critical-thinking. Nice to you to exclude part of their sentence (schools and documentaries) where they refer to actual teaching resources. You must be really proud of putting them in their place.
J'avais cette vidéo depuis longtemps dans ma liste à regarder plus tard et j'ai finalement pris le temps de la regarder aujourd'hui. Autant le sujet m'est intéressant et m'en apprend énormément, autant j'ai fait un maudit saut en entendant un accent québécois dans la vidéo! Incroyable réalisation et j'apprécie énormément le travail de recherche et d'explication. La musique comme véhicule de culture est tellement important, je n'imagine pas à quel point cela doit être frustrant lorsqu'elle est mal ou faussement représentée. Bravo !