Examines the parallel documentation and imagining of non-Western music cultures both in works of European concert music and in the discipline of musicology (particularly in its sub-discipline of ethnomusicology). Looks at the rise of exoticism in European music and its grounding in the imperial encounter. Links the nineteenth and early twentieth century fascination with the exotic to the developing discipline of ethnomusicology, examining early accounts, both journalistic and academic, of traditional musics. Examines the 'presence' of Australian Aboriginal music and of Asian music in the work of some contemporary Australian composers.