Cultural Specificities in Carnatic and Hindustani Music: Commentary on the Saraga Open Dataset

This commentary explores features of the "Saraga" article and open dataset, discussing some of the issues arising. I argue that the CompMusic project and this resulting dataset are impressive for their sensitivity to cultural specificities of the Hindustani and Carnatic musical styles; for example, the dataset includes manual annotations based on music theoretical concepts from within the styles, rather than imposing conceptual categories from outside. However, I propose there are aspects of the dataset's manual annotations that require clarification in order for them to be used as ground truths by other researchers. In addition, I raise questions regarding the representativeness of the dataset – an issue that has ethical implications.

Vinay Mishra and the Artistry of the Harmonium

Vinay Mishra is an accomplished Indian solo and accompanying harmonium player born and brought up in Benaras and currently residing in Delhi serving as a faculty member of the Department of Music, Faculty of Music and Fine Arts, University of Delhi. The rigorous training of both vocal and instrumental music under veteran Hindustani Music virtuosos, the academic and scholarly scope built up till the degree of PhD in Music, the realizations, and understandings on music must have conspicuously made an impact of his practice and artistry as a harmonium player. Harmonium was originated in the west and adopted by Indian musicians in the colonial era which was brought up to the present day through many artistic, cultural and political controversies, and obstacles. This work focuses on discovering the insights of the harmonium art of Vinay Mishra. Hence, his academic background, musical training, musical career, his playing style as a soloist, general techniques and techniques of accompaniment, sense of machinery, perspectives on raga Taal, and thoroughly the tuning methods were studied in-depth through personal conversations and literature resources where it was observed that modern Hindustani harmonium artists favor a typical natural tuning method over the 12 equal temperaments of the common keyboard instruments. According to him, the stable sound of the harmonium was the reason to be vocal music- friendly in classical and light vocal music accompaniment which was only interrupted by the equal temperament earlier and was later overcome by the artists and harmonium makers. The idea was also raised that apart from gaining the basic command of an instrument, a Hindustani instrumentalist may learn and practice all other aspects of Hindustani music from the teachers of other forms too. Vinay Mishra’s thoughts of machinery, musical forms, compositions, applying Hindustani vocal, and plucking string instrumental ornamentations on the Harmonium were also reviewed.

The Xenophilia of a Japanese Ethnomusicologist

This autobiographical, sociological, and musicological essay, written for a symposium on xenophilia, concerns how the love of a foreign culture can lead to a better understanding and renewed love of one’s own. The author, a Japanese musicologist, studied Hindustani music with North Indian masters, both Hindu and Muslim, and concluded that it is the shared concept of a “sound-god” that brings them together on stage in peaceful celebration with audiences from religious communities often at odds. The author’s training in ethnomusicology began in India in 1992, immediately after the violent demolition of the Babri Masjid mosque in Ayodhya by militant Hindus, but even at that time she found no trace of such belligerence in the Hindustani musical world. Years later, while conducting research on the Shinto music rituals of her own culture, she discovered a little-known imperial and aristocratic cult of Myō’onten, a Japanese form of the Hindu goddess of music, Saraswati, who is presently an object of devotion for both Hindu and Muslim musicians in North India. This essay, based on nearly three decades of research in India and Japan, offers some answers to a question raised repeatedly in the Common Knowledge symposium on xenophilia: What is the source of the xenophilic impulse and the power that sustains it?

On the secretive ustād: Pride among musicians and patrons in North India

Why did Muslim masters of Hindustani music or ustāds of the past century sometimes refuse to record, perform or teach? These acts appear to justify a common depiction of ustāds, propagated by their detractors and defenders alike as jealously guarding their hereditary knowledge. A deeper look, however, reveals that ustāds withheld their music for fear that it would be played in lowly places, consumed by ill-mannered audiences or taught to disloyal students. Drawing on the oral history of one aristocratic family’s relationship with their Muslim teachers, I argue that the pride that prevented some ustāds from playing to the masses reflected an elitism learned from their patrons and students among the gentry, many of whom were Hindu. This argument develops two existing narratives: one in which ustāds adopted the manners and pursuits of their patrons, and another in which patrons risked losing prestige by performing. Stories of both ustāds and their patrons shunning the public, read together, not only decouple secretiveness from its association with Muslims, but also reveal discipleship as a transformative space in which musicians and their patrons learned from one another, cultivating shared attitudes, morals and dispositions.

“A Christy Minstrel, a Harlequin, or an Ancient Persian”?: Opera, Hindustani Classical Music, and the Origins of the Popular South Asian “Musical”

The story of South Asian colonial modernity and music offers up a multidirectional and polymorphous conceptual terrain featuring, among many agents, Hindustani royalty, touring minstrel and burlesque troupes, Jesuit missionaries and orientalists, and not least, social reformists. Nevertheless, scholarship on the history of Hindustani music consistently traces its development through classicization against the rise of Hindu nationalism while overlooking other palpable clues in the colonial past. This article argues for a substantial reevaluation of colonial South Asian music by positing an alternative and hitherto invisible auditory stimulus in colonial Asia's aural landscape: opera. Janaki Bakhle contends that “as a musical form, opera put down even fewer roots than did orchestral, instrumental Western classical music,” even though she subsequently states that “Western orchestration did become part of modern ceremonial activities, and it moved into film music even as it was played by ersatz marching bands.” Bakhle further argues that Hindustani music underwent processes of sanitization and systematization within a Hindu nation-making project, a view that has been complicated by historians such as Tejaswini Niranjana. Niranjana describes how scholarship that focuses exclusively on the codification or nationalization of Hindustani music through the interpellation of a Hindu public neglects “sedimented forms of musical persistence.” Not dissimilarly, Richard David Williams highlights how the singular emphasis on the movement of Hindustani music reform risks reducing the heterogeneous and complex musicological traditions in the colonial period to the output of a single, monolithic, middle-class “new elite.” Previous scholarship, he argues, concentrates on “one player in a larger ‘economy’ of musical consumption.” Following these calls for more textured perspectives on South Asian musical cultures, I suggest a somewhat heretical thesis: that opera functioned as a common mediating stimulus for both the colonial reinscription of Hindustani music as classical as well as the emergence of popular pan-Asian musical genres such as “Bollywood” music.

Review of The Musician and His Art: Essays on Hindustānī Music by Deepak S. Raja

This is the Review of “The Musician and His Art: Essays on Hindustānī Music by Deepak S. Raja with a Foreword by Daniel Neuman, New Delhi: D.K. Print World.” This review was initiated through a request made by the author, which I was glad to accept.

Music, Exchange, and the Production of Value: A Case Study of Hindustani Music

This chapter uses Hindustani music as a case study, developing anthropology’s theoretical work on value and exchange toward the analysis of music. It focuses on the action-based theory of value devised by Nancy Munn (1986) and later developed by David Graeber (2001). Rather than something residing “in the music,” value is viewed as entirely social, and ephemeral, generated by acts and the codification of acts into distinctive patterned aesthetic forms. The chapter refines the analysis through Annette Weiner’s concept of “inalienable possessions,” that is, things which are not necessarily costly or of any objective value, but have gained immeasurable and irreplaceable value to particular groups in particular times and places through “keeping while giving,” and which inscribe lineage, heredity, and history. This enables an exploration of how history and transmission operate in value creation in the context of music and performing arts. The chapter also develops theoretical work on exchange to analyze musical performance, where what is “given” or “received” is intangible and highly subjective, making it particularly unpredictable in its value and with potential for immense excess and thereby implications for obligations, attachments, or even devotion. Thus, the chapter explores how the complex web of behaviors, discourse, knowledge, and skills variously continued, adapted, and discontinued from the past, and with new strands woven in, constantly re-create Hindustani music as an inalienable possession for middle-class audiences, for whom basic templates of value are in many ways radically opposed to those of the original patrons and performers.