Choirs on the Coast: Impact of COVID-19 on Musical Pedagogy and Festivals

Abstract

Coastal landscapes inspire their own genre of folk songs and musical instruments intrinsic to the traditions of the local boat people and fisherfolk, often coexisting with a strand of popular music embedded within the modalities of coastal tourism. In post-colonial coastal cities, these strands are part of a larger musical space carved out by the legacies of colonial cultural transmission and subsequent assimilation into aspirational European cosmopolitan tropes. I examine the shifting engagement of Western classical choirs in the context of two coastal cities: Goa in India and Colombo (with a focus on Negombo) in Sri Lanka. Combining in-depth interviews with two choral conductors alongside the predicament of musical production in the digital space, I argue that choral music impinges on a notion of personal intimacy that combines a collective sense of creativity and community, organically linked to Catholic landscapes animated by a ‘Catholic affect’.

Keywords:

• Catholic landscapes
• choirs
• coast
• COVID-19
• Goa
• Sri Lanka

Correction Statement

This article has been corrected with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.

Acknowledgements

I am immensely grateful to the two anonymous reviewers for their close reading of this paper and their meticulous and helpful suggestions. I am also thankful to the editors of this Special Section for their invaluable insights.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. Bernardo Brown, ‘Indifference with Sri Lankan Migrants’, Ethnology 50, no. 1 (2011): 43–58.

2. R.L. Stirrat, Power and Religiosity in a Post-Colonial Setting: Sinhala Catholics in Contemporary Sri Lanka (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992).

3. Jane Durges, Ritual and Recovery in Post-Conflict Sri Lanka (New York: Routledge, 2013).

4. Zoom interview with Harin Amirthanathan, July 17, 2021.

5. Tessa Bartholomeusz, ‘Catholics, Buddhists, and the Church of England: The 1883 Sri Lankan Riots’, Buddhist Christian Studies 15 (1995): 89–103.

6. People of mixed Portuguese and Sri Lankan descent.

7. Affect has been explained by Brian Massumi as an embodied knowledge that has precognitive intensity, and this is the interpretation of affect I adhere to in this article: Brian Massumi, Parables for the Virtual: Movement, Affect, Sensation (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2002).

8. Zoom interview with Harin Amirthanathan, September 13, 2021.

9. Zoom interview with Harin Amirthanathan, September 13, 2021. Amirthanathan’s music teacher exposed him to the greats of both Western and Indian classical traditions. Ravi Shankar was one of the sitar maestros of Indian classical music whom he mentions in the interview. R-aga (Hindi/Urdu: r-ag, Tamil: r-agam) is a concept of melodic organisation in Indian classical music. It operates between the levels of scale and melody as these terms are explained in Western music: see Walter Kaufmann, The Ragas of North India (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1968); Walter Kaufmann, The Ragas of South India: A Catalogue of Scalar Material (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1976).

10. Zoom interview with Harin Amirthanathan, September 13, 2021.

11. Soprano: C4–A5, Mezzo Soprano: A3–F5, Alto: F3–D5, Tenor: B2–G4, Bass: E2–C4: see ‘Vocal Ranges According to the New Harvard Dictionary of Music’, Yale University Library, accessed May 31, 2022, https://web.library.yale.edu/cataloging/music/vocal-ranges.

12. Brian Larkin, ‘The Politics and Poetics of Infrastructure’, Annual Review of Anthropology 42 (2013): 327–43.

13. S.L. Star, ‘The Ethnography of Infrastructure’, American Behavioral Science 43, no. 3 (1999): 377–91; 380.

14. ‘Goa Government Extends COVID-19 Curfew Again till September 6’, The New Indian Express, August 30, 2021, accessed October 13, 2022, https://www.newindianexpress.com/nation/2021/aug/30/goa-government-extends-COVID-19-curfew-again-till-september-6-2351759.html.

15. Aradhon and Invox are choirs/collectives started by Omar De Loiola Pereira, who is based in Margao, Goa. The members are from different parts of Goa.

16. Zoom interview with Omar De Loiola Pereira, May 7, 2021.

17. Ibid.

18. Ibid.

19. Ibid.

20. Ibid.

21. Adam Kaul, ‘Music on the Edge: Busking at the Cliffs of Moher and the Commodification of a Musical Landscape’, Tourist Studies 14, no. 1 (2014): 30–47.

22. Steven Feld, Jazz Cosmopolitanism in Accra: Five Musical Years in Ghana (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2012).

23. The Monte Festival was first held in 2002 at the Chapel of Our Lady of the Mount after the building was restored by Fundação Oriente. Performances, including Western, Indian and other classical and folk traditions, are held inside the old heritage chapel and in its courtyard. It has the backdrop of the scenic Chorão and Divar islands, and the Mandovi river. The year 2021 witnessed its nineteenth edition.

24. Chryselle D’Silva Dias, ‘Songs of the Heart: A New Stage for Fado and Mand in Goa’, Livemint.com, January 18, 2020, accessed May 31, 2022, https://www.livemint.com/mint-lounge/features/songs-of-the-heart-a-new-stage-for-fado-and-mand-in-goa-11579277700681.html. The fado is the iconic music genre of Portugal, introduced to Goa by the colonisers. A fado performance usually has one vocalist accompanied by the guitarra portuguesa and the viola de fado (fado guitar). The mandó is a Goan musical form with group dancing and songs sung in Konkani, accompanied by the violin and ghumot.

25. The ghumot is part of the religious and folk music of both Hindus and Christians in Goa. A ghumot is an instrument that belongs to the membranophone category, which is an earthen vessel. Earlier, monitor lizard skin was used, but now it has been replaced by goat skin.

26. Zoom interview with Omar De Loiola Pereira, May 7, 2021.

27. Rebecca Bryant, ‘Nostalgia and Discovery of Loss: Essentialising the Turkish Cypriot Past’, in Anthropology and Nostalgia, ed. Olivia Angé and David Berliner (New York: Berghahn Books, 2015): 155–77.

28. Muriel E. Swijghuisen Reigersberg, ‘Choral Singing and the Construction of Australian Aboriginal Identities: An Applied Ethnomusicological Study in Hopevale, Northern Queensland, Australia’ (unpublished PhD thesis, University of Surrey, 2008), 44–45, 52.

29. Andrée Grau, ‘John Blacking and the Development of Dance Anthropology in the United Kingdom’, Dance Research Journal 25, no. 2 (1993): 21–31; 25. In Blacking’s terms, a dialectical approach is a process which attempts to create an exchange between analysts and informants so that two kinds of technical knowledge and experience are confronted, and informants can share in the intellectual process of analysis.

30. Jim Sykes, ‘Culture as Freedom: Musical “Liberation” in Batticaloa, Sri Lanka’, Ethnomusicology 57, no. 3 (2013): 485–517.

31. S.J. Paul Caspersz, ‘Christians in a Buddhist Majority’, in The Sri Lanka Reader: History, Culture, Politics, ed. John Clifford Holt (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011): 560–67.

32. Maria Aurora Couto, Goa: A Daughter’s Story (New Delhi: Penguin Books, 2004).

33. On the ghumat and the mhadalem, see the Wikipedia entries on ‘Ghumot’, accessed October 13, 2021, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ghumot; and ‘Mhadalem’, accessed October 13, 2021, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mhadalem.

34. Robert S. Newman, ‘The Struggle for a Goan Identity’, in The Transforming of Goa, ed. Norman Dantas (Mapusa, Goa: The Other India Press, 1999): 17–45.

35. Alexander Henn, Hindu-Catholic Encounters in Goa: Religion, Colonialism, and Modernity (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2014).

36. Gregory D. Booth, Behind the Curtain: Making Music in Mumbai’s Film Studios (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008); see also Mario Cabral e Sá, Wind of Fire: The Music and Musicians of Goa (New Delhi: Promilla & Co. Publishers, 1997); Naresh Fernandes, Taj Mahal Foxtrot: The Story of Bombay’s Jazz Age (New Delhi: Roli Books, 2012).

37. Kyoto Matsukawa, ‘Konkani and “Goan Identity” in Post-Colonial Goa, India’, Journal of the Japanese Association for South Asian Studies 14 (2002): 121–44.

38. Steven Feld, ‘Aesthetics and Synesthesia in Kaluli Ceremonial Dance’, UCLA Journal of Dance Ethnology 14 (1990): 1–16; 4–5.

39. Aaron Allen, ‘Ecomusicology: Ecocriticism and Musicology’, Journal of the American Musicological Society 64, no. 2 (2011): 391–94.

40. Bruno Latour, ‘Will Non-Humans Be Saved? An Argument in Ecotheology’, Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute (N.S.) 15 (2009): 459–79.