Now it is recognised as a masterpiece whose power is derived, in part, from Wong's skilful manipulation of familiar oriental cliches.
Although his keyboard is preset to familiar oriental scales, timbres and notes, he entirely deconstructs the typical shaabi sonic sphere, morphing it into something that is both familiar and outer worldly.
Since 1970 when former President Nixon went to China, many Americans have become familiar with acupuncture and Oriental medicine, having either visited a practitioner or knowing someone who has.
It had been imported from the Islamic world and Luca would have been familiar with accounts of Oriental buildings clad in maiolica tiles.
If the palate cries out for something familiar, how about a visit to the Oriental Singapore hotel for a snack of finger sandwiches, scones, crumpets and Dundee cakes served on silver trays with a choice selection of very British tea?
By setting most of the opera in the American Consulate of Nagasaki, Zambello has both heightened the drama's clash of cultures and stripped the all-too-familiar opera of its sentimental overlay of Oriental exoticism.
Future foreign visitors will find new hotels with such familiar names as Four Seasons, Grand Hyatt and Mandarin Oriental.
Its lead single Ch-Ching is perhaps the best example of how they tie unusual sounds – oriental bells, 1970s saxophone – and the more familiar slink of R&B hooks and smoky synths into elegant knots.
The bleeps and blips of early sound chips are celebrated in chiptune culture, while the familiar computerized rhythms of Super Mario Bros. and the almost oriental sounding Tetris soundtrack, with its anxiety-producing increase in speed, have been endlessly parodied, sampled, covered, and re-rearranged within the remix culture of the web.
Archie Bunker image and low-rise landscape notwithstanding, Queens is also the most polyethnic borough in a polyethnic city, and for its Oriental, Hispanic and West Indian communities baseball is a sport familiar from the old country.
More likely, however, melismatic organum reflected the free melodic flow of Oriental music with which crusaders in particular must have been thoroughly familiar.
