The Scheherazade Delusion: A Rhapsody for Violin and Orchestra

The Scheherazade Delusion is an ‘experimental’ post-programmatic concert rhapsody which critically addresses some of the western musical discourses through which the character of Scheherazade has been historically constructed. The key intertext, Nicolai Rimsky-Korsakov's orchestral poem (perceived by many as the main rendering of Scheherazade in western classical music) was structured as programme music, where Scheherazade's storytelling was framing specific tales from One Thousand and One Nights. This piece was a starting point for an attempt to write a post-programmatic piece. I define ‘post-programmatic’ here as a self-reflexive mode of musical discourse where a musical piece is structured in such a way as to rhetorically articulate its aesthetic and intertextual premise. Through a disavowal of representational functions, self-reflexivity and recursive framing devices, The Scheherazade Delusion is an attempt to reflect on some of the paradoxes inherent in western Orientalist musical discourses and at foregrounding a 'politics of perception' at play.