Interculturalism through a cognitive filter: How Gilles Tremblay recomposes gamelan in Oralléluiants
In an article on the well-documented impact of gamelan on the musical language of Claude Debussy, Nicholas Cook suggests an interpretation of Debussy’s music that navigates between a point of view that claims that gamelan presented a “confirmation” of principles already acquired by the French composer, and another that judges his gamelan-inspired techniques to be imitations of a foreign musical culture. This article applies Cook’s reasoning to the case of Javanese inspiration in the work Oralléluiants (1975) by Gilles Tremblay (1932-2017), by attempting to go beyond the opposition between orientalist stylistic pastiche and a more profound “stylistic assimilation” with respect to the Québécois composer. It proposes the notion of “cognitive filter” as a way to understand the way gamelan influenced Tremblay without having the same effect on other composers exposed to the same musical cultures. The expression “cognitive filter” designates any schematisation of music that listeners owe to training, ability, acculturation and their psychological particularities, and which represent and order perceptual data in order to allow for the apprehension of previously unfamiliar musics.