Thanks to everyone for some very interesting suggestions. Jack, were there any troupes of ethnic musicians playing at the 1886 exhibition? It would surprise me if the exhibition promoter would go to all the trouble and cost of bringing said musicians over, especially when most of the exhibition visitors wouldn't have a clue what to make of the music.

Overall, I'm left in a quandary. Wilde is clearly describing organised troupes of professional musicians, not itinerant buskers, and I still feel the opportunities for hearing such musicians in Victorian London would have been very slender indeed. On the other hand, he was known to lift pieces of research as background information when the occasion suited him. Indeed, I seem to recall that there are other parts of "The Picture" which have been assembled in just such a way.

My guess therefore is that Wilde may well have heard ethnic musicians at the Great Exhibition, but that he drew the section in question from some early ethnomusicological writing.

Which leads me on to Metro-Goldwyn's suggestion. IE., that the more interesting question is not whether Wilde actually heard these sounds, but why he worked their description into the book. Remember of course that Wilde was writing for effect, not for accuracy. Also, I think TPODG is actually Wilde confronting his own degenerate slide into hell.

If so, what does the fascination with 'barbaric' music represent? Wilde was writing at the height of the British empire. This was a time when anthropologists were assembling bizarre tales of 'backward' savages and hideous practices, in order to argue that these peoples were on lower planes of evolution than we in Western Europe. Most people, hearing these sounds at the time Wilde was describing them, would have concluded that they were indeed degenerate and were indeed made by savage backward people. Therefore, the only people who could be expected to enjoy such sounds would themselves have degenerated to something equally savage barbarism.

Was Wilde offering his own enjoyment of this music as proof of his own degeneracy? I've been racking my brains trying to remember whether he frequented opium dens and I can't. However, the districts of London where opium dens existed would have been the most likely places to have heard 'exotic' musicians. If not the cream of third world court musicians, then certainly their lower class street equivalents.

And it's possible that, even if he was not an opium user, his sexual tastes may well have him to such quarters.

Just a thought in passing. Whilst I love the 'harsh intervals and shrill discords' of third world music, I pity anyone for whom Schubert, Chopin, and the mighty harmonies of Beethoven fall unheeded on the ear. Was the inability to enjoy Beethoven a cause or an effect of DG's descent into his own form of discord?