Musicking Bodies

Musicking Bodies
Author: Matthew Rahaim
Publisher: Wesleyan University Press
Total Pages: 208
Release: 2013-05-20
Genre: Music
ISBN: 0819573272

Indian vocalists trace intricate shapes with their hands while improvising melody. Although every vocalist has an idiosyncratic gestural style, students inherit ways of shaping melodic space from their teachers, and the motion of the hand and voice are always intimately connected. Though observers of Indian classical music have long commented on these gestures, Musicking Bodies is the first extended study of what singers actually do with their hands and voices. Matthew Rahaim draws on years of vocal training, ethnography, and close analysis to demonstrate the ways in which hand gesture is used alongside vocalization to manifest melody as dynamic, three-dimensional shapes. The gestures that are improvised alongside vocal improvisation embody a special kind of melodic knowledge passed down tacitly through lineages of teachers and students who not only sound similar, but who also engage with music kinesthetically according to similar aesthetic and ethical ideals. Musicking Bodies builds on the insights of phenomenology, Indian and Western music theory, and cultural studies to illuminate not only the performance of gesture, but its implications for the transmission of culture, the conception of melody, and the very nature of the musicking body.

Cassette Culture

Cassette Culture
Author: Peter Manuel
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Total Pages: 322
Release: 1993-05
Genre: Music
ISBN: 0226504018

In Cassette Culture, Peter Manuel tells how a new mass medium—the portable cassette player—caused a major upheaval in popular culture in the world's second-largest country. The advent of cassette technology in the 1980s transformed India's popular music industry from the virtual monopoly of a single multinational LP manufacturer to a free-for-all among hundreds of local cassette producers. The result was a revolution in the quantity, quality, and variety of Indian popular music and its patterns of dissemination and consumption. Manuel shows that the cassette revolution, however, has brought new contradictions and problems to Indian culture. While inexpensive cassettes revitalized local subcultures and community values throughout the subcontinent, they were also a vehicle for regional and political factionalism, new forms of commercial vulgarity, and, disturbingly, the most provocative sorts of hate-mongering and religious chauvinism. Cassette Culture is the first scholarly account of Indian popular music and the first case study of a technological revolution now occurring throughout the world. It will be an essential resource for anyone interested in modern India, communications theory, world popular music, or contemporary global culture.

Lineage of Loss

Lineage of Loss
Author: Max Katz
Publisher: Wesleyan University Press
Total Pages: 224
Release: 2017-11-07
Genre: Music
ISBN: 081957760X

In the middle of the nineteenth century a new family of hereditary musicians emerged in the royal court of Lucknow and subsequently rose to the heights of renown throughout North India. Today this musical lineage, or ghar n, lives on in the music and memories of only a small handful of descendants and players of the family instrument, the sarod. Drawing on six years of ethnographic and archival research, and fifteen years of musical apprenticeship, Max Katz explores the oral history and written record of the Lucknow ghar n ,tracing its displacement, loss of prestige, and erasure from the collective memory. In doing so he illuminates a hidden history of ideological and social struggle in North Indian music culture, intervenes in ongoing debates over the anti-Muslim agenda of Hindustani music's reform movement, and reanimates a lost vision in which Muslim scholar-artists defined the music of the nation. An interdisciplinary, postmodern counter-history, Lineage of Loss offers a new and unsettling narrative of Hindustani music's encounter with modernity.

Development of Modern Art Criticism in India after Independence

Development of Modern Art Criticism in India after Independence
Author: Dr. Sangeeta
Publisher: Notion Press
Total Pages: 292
Release: 2017-10-06
Genre: Art
ISBN: 1947697315

Any artistic creation, be it a painting or sculpture, initiates a reaction within us, invoking within us a desire to analyse or evaluate it. The criticism of art definitely has its presence. But the question is—in what form and of what relevance is it? Art criticism is exclusively presented in the written form—it does not consist of descriptions of pictures, interpretations, or re-creations; but of something new and autonomous, related to the piece of art in some way. Criticism always gives us novel ideas for modern art, which in turn, enriches the Indian heritage. Art has been part of our life since ancient times. Traditionally, Indian art writing was mainly composed of commentaries on courtly art conventions and on the poetic texts that inspired paintings and sculptures. Since the 20th century, there has been a breakdown of established conceptions of meaning in the all streams of arts and several rapid changes in artistic style. This book will help readers understand the journey of modern art criticism since Indian independence. It formulates as precisely as possible, the basic principles and norms that will enrich artistically sensitive laymen and critics alike.

The Radical Impulse

The Radical Impulse
Author: Sumangala Damodaran
Publisher:
Total Pages: 0
Release: 2017
Genre: Music
ISBN: 9789382381921

The period from the mid-1930s to the end of the 1950s in India saw the cultural expression of a wide range of political sentiments and positions around imperialism, fascism, nationalism, and social transformation. It was a period that covered a crucial transitional phase: from colonialism to a postcolonial context. This transitional period in India coincided with a vibrant radical ethos in many other parts of the world where, among numerous political issues, the aesthetics-politics relationship came to be articulated and debated in unprecedented ways. No history of this period can be written without giving an account of the departures, inventions, and reinventions made by the Indian People's Theatre Association (IPTA) in the fields of drama, music, and dance. Yet music, a very important part of the IPTA's creations as well as the connecting link between the various artistic forms, has not been studied as part of the history of the IPTA movement. This book attempts to fill this gap in knowledge about the vast musical repertoire of the IPTA. It is about the IPTA tradition's music in a national as well as specifically regional contexts (Bengali, Malayalam, Telugu, Assamese, and Hindu/Urdu in particular), situated within the overall cultural and political context of the transitional period in India, and in the context of a radical impulse emergent in many parts of the world from the beginning of the twentieth century. The book is the culmination of an archiving-cum-documentation project of music in the IPTA tradition undertaken by the author. It can also be read as a songbook, including lyrics and musical scores, revivifying the songs and music of a radical impulse in South Asia.

'Photos of the Gods'

'Photos of the Gods'
Author: Christopher Pinney
Publisher: Reaktion Books
Total Pages: 254
Release: 2004
Genre: Art
ISBN: 9781861891846

Chris Pinney demonstrates how printed images were pivotal to India's struggle for national and religious independence. He also provides a history of printing in India.

The Art of Sukumar Bose

The Art of Sukumar Bose
Author: Venka Purushothaman
Publisher: Institute of Southeast Asian Studies
Total Pages: 131
Release: 2013-11-06
Genre: Art
ISBN: 9814517844

To commemorate the centenary of artist Sukumar Bose (1912–1986), this book attempts to take an incisive look at the artist, his works and the context of his art production in South and Southeast Asia. Bose’s art varied from the traditional to the decorative and ornamental, with a hint of the Oriental flavour. His work demonstrated traces of the Bengal School styles of Abanindranath Tagore and AR Chugtai. Be it figurative, landscape or abstract, Bose’s art synthesized the decorative elements of Indo-Persian miniatures with Chinese and Japanese techniques. In this context, his vision and passion were inspired by traditional art forms, including Ajanta, Rajput and Mughal miniatures. His incisive observations of life, people and cultures, during colonial and postcolonial India and his later sojourn into Southeast Asia, emerge as both a contested yet seamless narrative of history and hope in his art. This book is the first of its kind to document and give a critical overview of Sukumar Bose.

Contesting the Nation

Contesting the Nation
Author: David Ludden
Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
Total Pages: 372
Release: 1996-04
Genre: History
ISBN: 9780812215854

Animated by a sense of urgency that was heightened by the massive violence following the destruction of the Babri mosque in Ayodhya on December 6, 1992, Contesting the Nation explores Hindu majoritarian politics over the last century and its dramatic reformulation during the decline of the Congress Party in the 1980s.