| Summary: | In this text, Rudolf Brucci’s opera Gilgamesh is viewed in the light of Ralph
Locke’s “All the Music in the Full Context” Paradigm which promotes the
approach that one should search for the exotic elements in musical works
first in the discursive components (title, program, accompanying notes),
visual representations (costume, scenery) and a “horizon of expectations” of
a particular culture, and only then to observe exoticism as the aspect of a
musical style. In the light of this Paradigm, “exoticism” of the opera
Gilgamesh is detected at the level of the music material and compositional
procedures, but not in the dramaturgical profiling of characters, narrative
adaptation of the Sumerian epic, costumes and scenery. The plot, costumes and
the scenery of the opera do not construct the Orient with either positive or
negative projections attributed to it by the Western European Orientalist
discourse, but portray Gilgamesh and Enkidu as ancient mythic protagonists on
the margin of the (not-always) exoticist once/now binarism. The musical
language of the opera, which abounds in the usage of oriental musical scales
and citations, indicates that oriental/exotic was one of the author’s “target
levels” when conceiving and composing Gilgamesh. Brucci, however, did not
build the “ethnological model” in his opera, but gave oriental scales and
“exotic” musical citations their meaning within the Western musical
tradition, which is why his approach can be compared with the “veiled
exoticism” of the French composers of the late nineteenth and the early
twentieth centuries. In the light of the self/other binarism, reaching for
the exotic in Gilgamesh can be presented as an auto-exotic creative behavior
of Brucci as a composer who perceives his “minority identity” in a relation
to an imaginary referential system of the Center. However, I am more inclined
to see Brucci’s identificational intention in his advocacy of the Yugoslav
NAM (Non-Aligned Movement) project, and his dealing with the “exotic” as part
of his strategy to support cultural achievements of the Third World which
predominantly participated in that project.
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