on the question of cultural appropriation in the nutcracker suite

has there been a discussion around cultural appropriation and the nutcracker suite? is it even really christmas music?

dunno. but this arrangement for classical guitar is a personal favourite.

in all truth, the spanish dance sounds like german music. i'll give tchaikovsky free reign with the russian dance. the arabic dance should probably be called the chechen dance or something; it might not sound like something from the heart of the arab world, but russia has a very large muslim population with it's own culture and you can sort of hear a synthesis between russian and muslim ideas in a way that kind of makes sense, if you only assume that the composer had no real understanding of anything south of the caucasus mountains. and, likewise, tchaikovsky's concept of "chinese" probably relates more to mongolian settlement in central russia than to anything legitimately sinic. russian/mongolian as a hybrid culture is also a pretty real thing.

but, i'm missing the point. i don't want to comment on the actual ballet other than to concede any points about trivialization as entirely valid.

the thing is that the composer was probably mostly working with scales, modes and tonalities. we can debate the value of doing so, but starting off on a specific note is said - within western music theory - to have an ethnic character. so, there is a "spanish mode" and an "arabic mode". and there is a real correlation there. that's probably the extent to which tchaikovsky made any attempt to sound genuine.

that's how davis got the name of this jam. it's not spanish in any way, it's just phrygian.