European fascination with East Asia grew enormously during the 18th century, leaving a notable imprint upon the culture and music of the period. This seminar explores musical Chinoiserie and other related phenomena in the Age of the Enlightenment. We will devote the semester both to becoming closely familiar with specific musical works of the era which provide evidence for how Europeans musically constructed their own conceptions of the “Far” East, such as Jean-Philippe Rameau’s Les indes galantes (1735) and Christoph Willibald Gluck’s Le cinesi (1754), and to engaging the challenge of theorizing the encounter of disparate cultures in a manner that goes beyond banal notions of mixture, fusion, and the like. Among the concepts which will inform this theoretical component of the course are hybridity, assimilation, exoticism, ambivalence, and masquerade/disguise, drawn from essential writings in the fields of cultural studies and postcolonial studies.