I like 19th C. Orientalism in European music.
If a consortium of industrialists and financiers and militarists took over a nation, and other peoples as well as their own nation’s underclasses were made to suffer, is that reason to condemn their culture?
Russian Orientalism contains more “we’re on a civilizing mission” than, say, the French product of Delacroix or Saint-Saëns which was more about Frenchy voluptuousness (and more guilty of misogyny than colonial conquest-ennobling). Borodin more so than Rimsky-Korsakoff, with on the Steppes of Central Asia for example.
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Still, context is everything. I like Shostakovich’s Leningrad Symphony. But in Augustus 2008, as Putin was about to invade Georgia, NPR played a performance of it live from Russia, oblivious to its propaganda purpose. Sheesh-takovich!