Interesting, thanks for sharing! A lot of these clichés feature in film scores, to identify anything as eastern/asian, just one note on a pan flute will do for a lot of scores.
It's an old music-hall cliche for sure: he cites tin-pan alley, but you can be sure it was Victorian music hall first.
Actually, Alex North, that great eschewer of cliches, used it in an ironic variation in 'Cleopatra' in the high brass fanfares that open the big (and ludicrous) entry into Rome. The cut of that on the original LP begins with that. But there it was used ironically to subliminally suggest a sort of kitsch orientalism that the witnessing Roman senators disapproved of.
I knew....I probably read it like four years ago at least. It's a very interesting read through. But I say this as someone with a music history degree...
