Desert Music
Composers have long been inspired by landscapes, but when it comes to the world’s sunbaked deserts, these landscapes and surrounding imagined worlds can be freighted with the cultural and historical attitudes of Empire. This playlist explores music that explicitly describes deserts themselves, that conjures up such pictures in the mind and that captures the mirage-like imagined Orient that proved so alluring and inspiring especially for European composers in the 19th and early-20th centuries – whether or not they ever experienced such worlds for themselves.