"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. Sankaran's memoir is interwoven with passages from Daniel M. Neuman's work on music in North India, which inspired Sankaran's project, and interviews with Sankaran by Matthew Allen"--

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.

AIM In spite of a reasonably extensive literature in English' and Indian vernaculars, there are extremely few books on Indian music that can be considered of a scientific standard. I found, when I took up an interest in Indian music in 1967, that even protracted reading of the studies in English was not conducive to an understanding of the principles of performance. Most of my study and research have been devoted to the gradual refinement of this very understanding. In the course of time it also became obvious that different scholars and different musicians held divergent views on many basic concepts of Indian music. Therefore, one of my tasks was to assess the degree of variability in Indian music. As a corollary I wanted to know how this variability could manifest itself as change in a relatively short and well-documented period. It is often assumed that traditional cultures, as e. g. in India, are rather inert and that the art forms hardly ever change. This study proves the contrary: Indian music has a strong vitality. If we examine the different treatises through the centuries this vitality would appear to be a basic characteristic. I felt that at least an effort to discover the roots of such change would be valuable as a contribution to the study of art history and possibly to the sociology of culture.

The first edition of this book, The Study of Ethnomusicology: Twenty-Nine Issues and Concepts, has become a classic in the field. This revised edition, written twenty-two years after the original, continues the tradition of providing engagingly written analysis that offers the most comprehensive discussion of the field available anywhere. This book looks at the field of ethnomusicology--defined as the study of the world's musics from a comparative perspective, and the study of all music from an anthropological perspective--as a field of research. Nettl selects thirty-one concepts and issues that have been the subjects of continuing debate by ethnomusicologists, and he adds four entirely new chapters and thoroughly updates the text to reflect new developments and concerns in the field. Each chapter looks at its subject historically and goes on to make its points with case studies, many taken from Nettl's own field experience. Drawing extensively on his field research in the Middle East, Western urban settings, and North American Indian societies, as well as on a critical survey of the available literature, Nettl advances our understanding of both the diversity and universality of the world's music. This revised edition's four new chapters deal with the doing and writing of musical ethnography, the scholarly study of instruments, aspects of women's music and women in music, and the ethnomusicologist's study of his or her own culture.