Intimate strangers : cross-cultural exchanges between Indian and Western musicians, 1800-1950
Abstract/Contents
- Abstract
- In my dissertation, I examine the ways in which musical practices in two different geographical spaces, Europe and South Asia, changed as a result of cross-cultural encounters with each other's musical traditions from the nineteenth century onwards. I combine a relational approach—one that highlights the interconnectedness of such exchanges—with insights provided by adaptation theory, which enables such practices to be located "thickly" in their cultural, historical, and social contexts, and reveals parallels between Indian and European strategies for incorporating non-autochthonous elements. Starting with Abbé Vogler and Carl Maria von Weber, pioneers with regard to European engagements with non-European musical traditions, and ending with the South Asian musicians Qazi Nazrul Islam and Baba Allauddin Khan (the guru and mentor of Pandit Ravi Shankar, the internationally-acclaimed sitar maestro), I examine some key figures from Europe and India, notably Rabindranath Tagore, John Foulds, Maurice Delage, and Albert Roussel, and assess their contributions to the development of their own musical traditions through their engagement with and incorporation of foreign musical elements. By doing so, my dissertation also seeks to examine how music contributed to the development of local cosmopolitanisms in South Asia and Europe, and to determine the long-term impact of such exchanges. It focuses on the challenges faced by musicians, both European and South Asian, in incorporating elements from outside their own traditions. These include the examination of the difficulties involved in transmitting music across cultures when sound recordings could not be made; the interpretive obstacles posed by non-autochthonous music to composers, performers, and audiences of the receiving culture; and the limits to incorporating different techniques of performance, whether vocal or instrumental. Analyses of cross-cultural exchanges also call for the judicious use of an approach that Mantle Hood has termed "bi-musical." The methodology adopted in this dissertation pays especial attention to all these aspects in the project of reassessing the cross-cultural exchanges that took place between Indian and European musicians in the colonial era. The dissertation, thus, draws attention to the challenges and constraints within which numerous agential choices and adaptive decisions that go into the making of august musical traditions, often erroneously assumed to be pure and whole, but which are, actually, profoundly shaped by productive contacts with non-autochthonous traditions. Without at all ignoring the question of power relations, this dissertation also seeks to highlight the necessity of examining the material and semiotic dimensions of cross-cultural exchanges, through the study of the contributions of some of the most important European and Indian musicians from the nineteenth to the mid-twentieth centuries.
Description
| Type of resource | text |
|---|---|
| Form | electronic resource; remote; computer; online resource |
| Extent | 1 online resource. |
| Place | California |
| Place | [Stanford, California] |
| Publisher | [Stanford University] |
| Copyright date | 2020; ©2020 |
| Publication date | 2020; 2020 |
| Issuance | monographic |
| Language | English |
Creators/Contributors
| Author | Sen, Suddhaseel |
|---|---|
| Degree supervisor | Grey, Thomas C |
| Thesis advisor | Grey, Thomas C |
| Thesis advisor | Hinton, Stephen |
| Thesis advisor | Schultz, Anna C |
| Degree committee member | Hinton, Stephen |
| Degree committee member | Schultz, Anna C |
| Associated with | Stanford University, Department of Music. |
Subjects
| Genre | Theses |
|---|---|
| Genre | Text |
Bibliographic information
| Statement of responsibility | Suddhaseel Sen. |
|---|---|
| Note | Submitted to the Department of Music. |
| Thesis | Thesis Ph.D. Stanford University 2020. |
| Location | electronic resource |
Access conditions
- Copyright
- © 2020 by Suddhaseel Sen
- License
- This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Non Commercial No Derivatives 3.0 Unported license (CC BY-NC-ND).
Also listed in
Loading usage metrics...