Monday, April 11, 2011

Some popular music from Pakistan

See Jhoom (Ali Zafar) – Music Review
Though I always enjoyed music, it is mostly confined to film songs in Telugu and hindi ( a language which I do not understand but am planning to learn) and popular music that I randomly come across. Carnatic music has been a no-go area even though I sometimes I heard my mother practicing; I remember her rendering of film songs better particularly those from Rattan. Recently I read a couple of books on South Indian Classical music By Amanda Weidman and Lakshmi Subramaniam
Singing the Classical, Voicing the Modern:The Postcolonial Politics of Music in South India and
From the Tanjore Court to the Madras Music Academy: A Social History of Music in South India.

There is a fascinating overview of some of these books in From Threatened by Modernity to Reinvented by Modernity: The History of the History of Indian Classical Music 1980 – 2006 by Garrett Fileld. Excerpts:
"This paper has shown how Weidman and Subramanian’s conclusions differed from those of Neuman and Higgins. While Neuman and Higgins argued Indian classical music was threatened by modernity the latter argued that it was created in modernity and argued that the Brahman middle class undertook the project to modernize, spiritualize, standardize and disseminate their brand of Indian classical music because music was emblematic of the very nation for which they sought independence.
......
It is clear that the works of Anderson and Chatterjee have significantly influenced the shift in historicism of Indian classical music in the modern period. Yet, as mentioned above, confining an investigation into this paradigm shift to only texts reduces change to the words of scholars. It ignores the historical context in which they wrote. Thus, I propose scholars write histories of modern scholarly patronage. Studying the ideological climate at American Universities where Neuman and Higgins studied and worked, compared with Weidman and Subramanian’s milieu, would be a first step."
But I am nowhere near understanding why I do not like Carnatic music ( I did like a couple of pieces by Mangalampalli balamuralikrishna).

2 comments:

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