Music in Art XXXVIII/1–2 (2013) MUSICAL ICONOGRAPHIES AND THE CONSTRUCTION OF HISTORICAL NARRATIVES: THE MUSEO ORIENTAL OF VALLADOLID RAQUEL JIMÉNEZ PASALODOS & JUAN P. ARREGUI Universidad de Valladolid Exhibitions are often organized as a practical way of showing valuable materials in a certain order, both on panels and in display boxes, but despite this being the very essence of the museum, the displayed mate- rials and panels promote a particular historical speech toward which the visitor is lead, credulously assuming that the historical truth must be the basis of the narration. Nevertheless, “museums were born during the Age of Imperialism, often served and benefited capitalism, and continue to be instruments of the ruling classes and corporate powers, working for them ‘in the vineyards of consciousness’”. 1 Consequently, understanding the underlying discourse of an exhibition and its configuration is not only necessary in order to liberate the materials from a particular narrative, but it also permit us to understand the socio-political and cultural context of the museum’s creation and reveals its hidden agendas. This has been one of the main goals of the academic criticism towards the museums during the last decades. 2 In this paper, we will offer an interpretation of the historical narratives that underlie the display of objects at the Museo Oriental of Valladolid, the largest collection of Asian art in Spain, established by the Order of Saint Augustine in 1874, in order to show the objects collected by the Augustinian friars since 1565. Under the evocative name of “Museo Oriental” the presentation of the collection follows a specific Roman Catholic narrative of the historical process occurring within the missions in the Far East, together with a particular view of the Other that suits some of the key notions of Said’s Orientalism (1978): The exhibition is a testimony of the European-Atlantic power over the Orient, and not a veridic discourse about the Orient, despite it claims to be so. 3 To understand the parallel discourses, we have selected visual objects related to music and dance, musical instruments and panels about music, and analyzed how do they integrate in this particular Western narrative, to what extent do they suit the colonial discourse of the Otherness, and how do they promote the Western way of being in the world. UNDERSTANDING THE EXHIBITION. The origin of the collection is the arrival of the Augustinian missi- onaries to Philippines in 1565, commanded by Fray Andrés de Urdaneta, in the earliest Spanish attempt to evangelize the island. Afterwards, they visited China (1575) and founded their first convent in Macao in 1884. Their presence in Japan was shorter and less significant: they arrived in 1584 and established the first church in 1602, but after the 1614 decree of extinction of Christianity, they did not land there again until 1681. For more than 400 years, the friars took back to the Valladolid convent artistic and ethnographic objects (at least 2000 out of 3000 missionaries attested in 400 years were formed in Valladolid), occasionally aiming to use them for instruction of young friars that would travel to the missions. With the opening of the Suez Canal in 1869, the exchange of people and objects with East Asia became securer and faster, thus resulting in an increase of the East Asian holdings of the order. During the twentieth century, the arrival of pieces from the Vatican Universal Exhibition of 1925 and, during the second half of the century, the private donations, completed the collection. The first exhibition of the holdings took place in 1874, but the modern museum was created and opened to the public as a city museum in 1980, under the advice of Luis González Robledo. 4 101 © 2013 Research Center for Music Iconography CUNY This content downloaded from 157.88.20.42 on Wed, 07 Feb 2018 20:11:45 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms