When composers get culturally curious
Classical music's sometimes awkward, often beautiful attempts to sound 'foreign'
Last week, while I was aimlessly scrolling, the algorithm served me a clip from Indian Idol. The singer Mayuri Saha is incredible by any standard and the speed here is also very impressive. Although I know nothing about Indian music, something about it sounded familiar, and before I knew it, I’d fallen into a bit of a classical Indian music rabbit hole trying to understand what I was hearing. So I learned about sargam– singing the notes instead of the words, much like Western solfège (do, re, mi), about ragas, which are kind of like Western modes (but, I think, more intricate), and about the world of playback singers like Lata Mangeshkar. What struck me was how familiar it all felt. The classical music I know, which almost always means Western classical music, seems to share some structural ideas with Indian classical music, even though they sound completely different.
Western composers have long looked outside Europe for inspiration, drawn to music from other cultures not just for its sound, but for the sense of “otherness” it created. Sometimes this led to works of real beauty and curiosity. Other times, it veered into fantasy, pastiche, or even appropriation. It’s complicated. But today, I want to look at some pieces that were inspired by music and stories from far outside the traditional Western canon.
Scheherazade - Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov
One Thousand and One Nights, also known as Arabian Nights, is a collection of Middle Eastern and South Asian folktales gathered over centuries. The framing story is, let’s be honest, deeply problematic: a king, after discovering his wife’s infidelity, vows to marry a new virgin each day and execute her the next morning. Enter Scheherazade, who understands the power of storytelling. Each night, she tells the king a new tale but stops just before the ending. The king, curious to hear what happens next, spares her for another day. This continues for 1001 nights.
I’m pretty sure, Russian composer Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov never set foot in the Middle East, but that didn’t stop him from imagining what those stories might sound like. His orchestral suite Scheherazade doesn’t follow the tales beat for beat, he didn’t want it to be too literal. Instead, he aimed for atmosphere. Sweeping strings, dramatic swells, and this haunting solo violin (representing Scheherazade herself) all work together to create a rich, ‘other’ soundscape. It’s fantasy, for sure, Rimsky-Korsakov’s version of “the East” is entirely imagined, but it captures the drama and storytelling as a life-or-death art.
The Pearl Fishers - Georges Bizet
Now we’re headed to Ceylon, modern day Sri Lanka, or at least Bizet’s 19th-century French imagination of it. The Pearl Fishers was written by Georges Bizet (of Carmen fame) when he was just 25. At the time, critics weren’t exactly thrilled, they found the music unoriginal and the story a bit far-fetched. And to be fair, there’s not much that sounds particularly Sri Lankan about it. But the opera is still being performed, thanks to a few unforgettable musical moments.
The most famous is the tenor-baritone duet, Au fond du temple saint—a beautiful piece about friendship and no-woman-will-go-between-them kind of vibe, sung by Nadir and Zurga. It’s one of those melodies that sticks with you long after it’s over.
And then there’s Nadir’s aria, Je crois entendre encore. It sits high in the tenor voice, floating up to these shining high notes and if you can sing it well, it’s a bit of a party trick. I’ve got a soft spot for this one, as it used to be one of my audition pieces that always delivered.
Pagodes - Claude Debussy
Debussy never traveled to Asia, but hearing a Javanese gamelan ensemble in Paris, that's traditional Indonesian percussive music, completely changed the way he thought about music. Years later, that memory turned into Pagodes, a piece for solo piano that opens his suite Estampes. The title means “Pagodas,” and the music is full of layers and gentle, bell-like sounds. Debussy wasn’t trying to copy what he heard exactly, this was more like a dream version, his own impression of the rhythms and textures that had stayed with him for years.
You don’t need to know much about the source to feel the atmosphere, but you can hear an example here. Debussy uses soft, repeating patterns and scales that sound more open and floating than the major and minor ones we’re used to in Western music. The result is music that feels suspended in air, calm, delicate, and quietly mesmerising. Pagodes doesn’t tell a story or follow a big dramatic arc. It just invites you to sit still for a few minutes and listen to the beautiful sound.
Madama Butterfly - Giacomo Puccini
While Un bel dì vedremo (one fine day, we’ll see) is the opera’s most famous aria (and rightly so), I’ve chosen to share an earlier moment: an excerpt from the love duet between Cio-Cio San and Pinkerton. “Love duet” in name, at least. It’s complicated.
Cio-Cio San (Butterfly) is a 15-year-old Japanese girl. Pinkerton is an American naval officer, a grown man, who marries her in what is essentially a marriage of convenience. He leaves. She’s pregnant. She raises their child alone, still believing he’ll return for her. And he does, years later, with his American wife, there to take the child. Butterfly does the math, makes the decision to let her son go, and then takes her own life. It’s tragic, deeply problematic, and emotionally devastating. But the music? The music is exquisite. Puccini gives the melody in this section to the orchestra while the singers conversing above. It’s so clever, you get the most beautiful tune and the story carries on.
When I was 17, I sang in the chorus of a concert performance of the opera and it was the first time I’d ever been on a stage with international opera singers, and honestly, my mind was blown. The power of the singing, thepower of the music, it’s just so lush, you don’t need to understand a word of the libretto to feel it.
Rhapsody in blue - Geroge Gershwin
No conversation about classical music inspired by non-Western traditions would be complete without a nod to jazz. In 1924, George Gershwin’s Rhapsody in Blue burst onto the scene, crashing through the boundaries between the concert hall and the dance hall. With its unmistakable opening clarinet glissando and the swagger of a New York skyline, the piece blends the improvisational spirit of jazz with classical form. Commissioned for a concert daringly titled An Experiment in Modern Music, Rhapsody delivered exactly that, a bold, American sound rooted in ragtime rhythms, blues harmonies, and sweeping orchestration.
Though Gershwin was composing within Western classical traditions, his musical language leaned heavily on African American jazz idioms. The result is something that feels both grounded and completely new. In Rhapsody in Blue, the piano doesn't just play, it talks, weaving through the orchestra like a streetwise narrator in a bustling city. It's not just music, it’s motion, it’s culture, it’s a snapshot of a particular place and time. If you're looking for a gateway into how global sounds reshaped the classical world, this is the place to start.
I hope youl enjoyed this one. Feel free to send questions my way, requests, or anything else that comes to mind.
Have a great weekend!