This Is An Indispensable And Enriching Reference Work For The Connoisseur, Practising Musician, Interested Amateur, Impresario Teacher And Student.

This Is An Indispensable And Enriching Reference Work For The Connoisseur, Practising Musician, Interested Amateur, Impresario Teacher And Student.

This is a completely revised and updated edition of The [Oxford] Illustrated Companion to South Indian Classical Music, which includes the latest available information on the subject. Acclaimed as the most authoritative reference work on South Indian classical music, the Companion:* provides an overview of the historical and cultural contexts of the music, its instruments, composers, leading practitioners, and schools* contains more than 120 line drawings and photographs of all the instruments discussed, as well as of major composers; includes a special colour plates section* includes detailed biographical notes on musicians and composers* contains Guide to Pronunciation and Transliteration, Select bibliography and Further Reading, Glossary-cum-Index* includes Alphabetical Index of Ragas and Scales, Index of NamesAn indispensable and enriching reference work for the connoisseur, practicing musician, interested amateur, impresario, teacher, and student, the Companion will be of interest to anybody keen to learn about Indian culture.

This book looks at the life and music of Veena Dhanammal (1866–1938), considered the embodiment of ‘classicism’ in Karnatik music. It locates her art within the cultural, social and intellectual milieu she inhabited, allowing readers to track the changing musical landscape of southern India, as a process of urbanisation — beginning in the late nineteenth century — resulted in Karnatik music’s movement from a ritual and courtly location to a modern, secular form of entertainment in the city space.

The Other Classical Musics will help both students and general readers to appreciate musical traditions mostly unfamiliar to them.

The essays in New Mansions for Music: Performance, Pedagogy and Criticism look at one of the most ancient and rigorous classical musical traditions of India, the Karnatik music system, and the kind of changes it underwent once it was relocated from traditional spaces of temples and salons to the public domain. Nineteenth-century Madras led the way in the transformation that Karnatik music underwent as it encountered the forces of modernization and standardization. This study also contributes to our understanding of the experience of modernity in India through the prism of music. The role of Madras city as patron and custodian of the performing arts, especially classical music offers an invaluable perspective on the larger processes of modernization in India. As the title suggests, the areas of classical music, which were most influenced by these developments were pedagogy or modes of musical transmission, performance conventions and criticism or music appreciation. Once the urban elite demanded the widening of the teaching of classical music, traditional modes of music instruction underwent a major change involving a breakdown of the gurushishya parampara or the tradition wherein the teacher imparted knowledge to a chosen few. Caste and kinship were important determining factors for the selection of these shishyas or students, but in modern institutions like the universities these boundaries had to be demolished. Simultaneously, the public staging of music brought the performer into a new relationship with his audience, especially as the art form became subject to validation and criticism by the newly emerging music critic. In an immensely readable book peppered with anecdotes and conversations with leading musicians and critics of the day, as well as humorous visual representations, part caricature, part satirical, the author describes a rapidly changing society and its new look in early twentieth century Madras.

The garamut is a log idiophone that is found in many of the coastal and island areas of Papua New Guinea. The instrument’s primary use is as a speech surrogate and in some regions the garamut is also used in large ensembles to play complex music for dancing. In Baluan Island, within the Manus Province, this style of garamut playing is comparatively highly developed. This book follows the author’s processes and methods in learning to play the music of the garamut, to the level at which he became accepted as a garamut player by the people of Baluan. Lewis argues that analysis is essential in learning to play the rapid tempi and complex rhythms of Baluan garamut music, in a cultural context where there is no formal teaching process for the music. The transcription and analysis of the Baluan garamut repertoire is the centrepiece of this study, reflecting the cognitive structures of the learning process, and revealing the inner workings of the music’s complexity as well as a striking beauty of form and structure. The book concludes with reflections on the process of a ‘cultural outsider’ becoming a garamut player in Baluan and on the role of musical analysis in that process, on the ethnomusicologist’s role in transmission of the music, and on the nature of continuity and change in a musical society such as Baluan.