The Life of Music in South India

The Life of Music in South India PDF Author: T. Sankaran
Publisher: Wesleyan University Press
ISBN: 0819500755
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 210

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Book Description
This book offers an account of Carnatic music culture drawing on the knowledge of T. Sankaran, a musician raised in an illustrious non-Brahmin devadasi family, and his long affiliation with cultural institutions including All India Radio (AIR) and the Tamil Isai Sangam (Tamil Music Academy). Sankaran examines the cultural and social matrix in which Carnatic music was cultivated and consumed in mid-twentieth century India, including the ways that musicians negotiated caste politics and the double standard for male and female musicians. The memoir provides insight into the way AIR worked as a modern, bureaucratic institution, and how the opening of government music colleges interacted with caste politics and shifted women's participation in public performance. The book is polyvocal, as Sankaran's writing is interwoven with passages from Daniel M. Neuman's book The Life of Music in North India, which inspired Sankaran's project, as well as transcripts from interviews with Sankaran by Matthew Allen. Includes rare archival photos.

The Life of Music in South India

The Life of Music in South India PDF Author: T. Sankaran
Publisher: Wesleyan University Press
ISBN: 0819500755
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 210

Get Book

Book Description
This book offers an account of Carnatic music culture drawing on the knowledge of T. Sankaran, a musician raised in an illustrious non-Brahmin devadasi family, and his long affiliation with cultural institutions including All India Radio (AIR) and the Tamil Isai Sangam (Tamil Music Academy). Sankaran examines the cultural and social matrix in which Carnatic music was cultivated and consumed in mid-twentieth century India, including the ways that musicians negotiated caste politics and the double standard for male and female musicians. The memoir provides insight into the way AIR worked as a modern, bureaucratic institution, and how the opening of government music colleges interacted with caste politics and shifted women's participation in public performance. The book is polyvocal, as Sankaran's writing is interwoven with passages from Daniel M. Neuman's book The Life of Music in North India, which inspired Sankaran's project, as well as transcripts from interviews with Sankaran by Matthew Allen. Includes rare archival photos.

Music as History in Tamilnadu

Music as History in Tamilnadu PDF Author: T. K. Venkatasubramanian
Publisher: Primus Books
ISBN: 9380607067
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 174

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Book Description
Recent scholarship on the history of music in South Asia has examined the processes by which music as an art form was reinvented for nationalist purposes, yet, the disciplined study of music (and its aesthetics) remains only a few centuries old. Studying music through a historical lens has opened new approaches to interdisciplinary studies. Music as History in Tamilnadu examines how history can be interpreted through aesthetics and music and vice versa. Musicologists focus on the study of musical activity, while ethnomusicologists examine this activity first-hand using the 'field' research methods of cultural anthropology. The historian's task, then, is to interpret the musical past as part of cultural production and thereafter relate music to general historical trends. This collection of essays seeks to establish the interdisciplinarity between music (the Karnatak system) and the history of Tamilnadu, south India.

Music in South India

Music in South India PDF Author: T. Viswanathan
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 150

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Book Description


The Life of Music in North India

The Life of Music in North India PDF Author: Daniel M. Neuman
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 0226575160
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 304

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Book Description
Daniel M. Neuman offers an account of North Indian Hindustani music culture and the changing social context of which it is part, as expressed in the thoughts and actions of its professional musicians. Drawing primarily from fieldwork performed in Delhi in 1969-71—from interviewing musicians, learning and performing on the Indian fiddle, and speaking with music connoisseurs—Neuman examines the cultural and social matrix in which Hindustani music is nurtured, listened and attended to, cultivated, and consumed in contemporary India. Through his interpretation of the impact that modern media, educational institutions, and public performances exert on the music and musicians, Neuman highlights the drama of a great musical tradition engaging a changing world, and presents the adaptive strategies its practitioners employ to practice their art. His work has gained the distinction of introducing a new approach to research on Indian music, and appears in this edition with a new preface by the author.

Indian Sun

Indian Sun PDF Author: Oliver Craske
Publisher: Hachette Books
ISBN: 0306874873
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 653

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Book Description
One of Library Journal's "Best Arts Books of 2020" The definitive biography of Ravi Shankar, one of the most influential musicians and composers of the twentieth century, told with the cooperation of his estate, family, and friends For over eight decades, Ravi Shankar was India's greatest cultural ambassador. He was a groundbreaking performer and composer of Indian classical music, who brought the music and rich culture of India to the world's leading concert halls and festivals, charting the map for those who followed in his footsteps. Renowned for playing Monterey Pop, Woodstock, and the Concert for Bangladesh-and for teaching George Harrison of The Beatles how to play the sitar-Shankar reshaped the musical landscape of the 1960s across pop, jazz, and classical music, and composed unforgettable scores for movies like Pather Panchali and Gandhi. In Indian Sun: The Life and Music of Ravi Shankar, writer Oliver Craske presents readers with the first full portrait of this legendary figure, revealing the personal and professional story of a musician who influenced-and continues to influence-countless artists. Craske paints a vivid picture of a captivating, restless workaholic-from his lonely and traumatic childhood in Varanasi to his youthful stardom in his brother's dance troupe, from his intensive study of the sitar to his revival of India's national music scene. Shankar's musical influence spread across both genres and generations, and he developed close friendships with John Coltrane, Philip Glass, Yehudi Menuhin, George Harrison, and Benjamin Britten, among many others. For ninety-two years, Shankar lived an endlessly colorful and creative life, a life defined by musical, emotional, and spiritual quests-and his legacy lives on. Benefiting from unprecedented access to Shankar's archives, and drawing on new interviews with over 130 subjects-including his second wife and both of his daughters, Norah Jones and Anoushka Shankar- Indian Sun gives readers unparalleled insight into a man who transformed modern music as we know it today.

A Southern Music: Exploring the Karnatik Tradition

A Southern Music: Exploring the Karnatik Tradition PDF Author: T.M. Krishna
Publisher: Harpercollins
ISBN: 9789350298213
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
One of the foremost Karnatik vocalists today, T.M. Krishna writes lucidly and passionately about the form, its history, its problems and where it stands today T.M. Krishna begins his sweeping exploration of the tradition of Karnatik music with a fundamental question: what is music? Taking nothing for granted and addressing readers from across the spectrum - musicians, musicologists as well as laypeople - Krishna provides a path-breaking overview of south Indian classical music.

More Than Real

More Than Real PDF Author: David Shulman
Publisher: Harvard University Press
ISBN: 0674059913
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 349

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Book Description
From the late fifteenth to the eighteenth centuries, the imagination came to be recognized in South Indian culture as the defining feature of human beings. Shulman elucidates the distinctiveness of South Indian theories of the imagination and shows how they differ radically from Western notions of reality and models of the mind.

OF GIFTED VOICE

OF GIFTED VOICE PDF Author: Keshav Desiraju
Publisher: HarperCollins
ISBN: 9390327555
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 565

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Book Description
M.S. Subbulakshmi's life was one of extraordinary achievement. Although she was portrayed in many ways - as a musician who sought and achieved an all-India appeal; a philanthropist and supporter of noble causes; an icon of style; a woman of piety and devotion; and a friend and associate of the good and the great - she was first and foremost a classical vocalist of the highest rank, of unmatched gifts, who lives on in the musical history of India. Of Gifted Voice looks at her life and times, and the great musical tradition she belonged to and to which she brought so much, against the larger backdrop of the developments in the world of Carnatic music. It describes how music came to be performed in concerts; the impact the gramophone, the radio and the talkie had on music; the decline of the traditional performing families; and the appearance of women on public platforms. The book also delves into Subbulakshmi's brush with films as well as her concert style and that of her celebrated contemporaries. Though her story has often been told, we know little of the woman behind the image and the musician behind the public persona. Of Gifted Voice attempts, with warmth and keen-eyed perception, to understand the music, the history, the artiste and her incomparable presence.

Unfinished Gestures

Unfinished Gestures PDF Author: Davesh Soneji
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 0226768090
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 329

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Book Description
'Unfinished Gestures' presents the social and cultural history of courtesans in South India, focusing on their encounters with colonial modernity in the 19th and early 20th centuries.

Singing the Classical, Voicing the Modern

Singing the Classical, Voicing the Modern PDF Author: Amanda J. Weidman
Publisher: Duke University Press
ISBN: 0822388057
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 367

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Book Description
While Karnatic music, a form of Indian music based on the melodic principle of raga and time cycles called tala, is known today as South India’s classical music, its status as “classical” is an early-twentieth-century construct, one that emerged in the crucible of colonial modernity, nationalist ideology, and South Indian regional politics. As Amanda J. Weidman demonstrates, in order for Karnatic music to be considered classical music, it needed to be modeled on Western classical music, with its system of notation, composers, compositions, conservatories, and concerts. At the same time, it needed to remain distinctively Indian. Weidman argues that these contradictory imperatives led to the emergence of a particular “politics of voice,” in which the voice came to stand for authenticity and Indianness. Combining ethnographic observation derived from her experience as a student and performer of South Indian music with close readings of archival materials, Weidman traces the emergence of this politics of voice through compelling analyses of the relationship between vocal sound and instrumental imitation, conventions of performance and staging, the status of women as performers, debates about language and music, and the relationship between oral tradition and technologies of printing and sound reproduction. Through her sustained exploration of the way “voice” is elaborated as a trope of modern subjectivity, national identity, and cultural authenticity, Weidman provides a model for thinking about the voice in anthropological and historical terms. In so doing, she shows that modernity is characterized as much by particular ideas about orality, aurality, and the voice as it is by regimes of visuality.