There's no denying that the reader of Dr. Mueller's book faces a formidable task. This work is dense with 45 years of ripened observations on musical exoticism from a first-rate expert in the field. But the earnest student will find in this study much to learn and ponder.

What sparked the obsessive search by Debussy, Ravel, Falla, and Roussel for new sounds, new forms, new evocations of delicate, strong emotions? For what Dr. Mueller reveals on page after page of his book is the constant pragmatic experimentation of Debussy and three other trailblazers determined to break away from certain traits of central European music.

The reader who patiently follows Dr. Mueller's evidence will see a partiallyunearthed mystery—the mystery of what Debussy, Ravel, Roussel and Falla heard and re-imagined in the music of the Far East in the first decade of the 20th century—brought fully into the daylight of modern professional analysis.

In demonstrating that borrowing means both appropriation and transformation, Dr. Mueller shows how Debussy, Roussel, Ravel and Falla thoroughly re-worked every exotic element. “Color” is an inadequate name for carefully thought-out, nuanced experiments undertaken by his four chosen composers. This book is one extended argument that there's no such thing as borrowing “a little color” from exotic musical cultures just to add spice to one's compositions. Pentatonic scales in a Falla art song are not injected fragments snatched from an alien tradition; they are a new Western musical substance that calls for the subtlest judgment in the critic or musicologist.

Dr. Mueller proves to the skeptical reader that the composers who borrowed color, the exotic, and oriental themes in late 19th-century and early 20th-century music worked like driven scientists in a laboratory to create new melodies, unheard-of harmonies, and unexpected cross-rhythms. The original seed becomes a hybrid with new aesthetic properties; new forms are created from East-Asian rhythms, harmonies, scales, and melodies. The results are revealed on every page, from every example, in Dr. Mueller's book.

It is fascinating to read, too, about Falla's painstaking study and Louis Benedictus's transcriptions of Chinese and Javanese music. Artists can claim to be just as patient and careful as any scientist.