Listening Out for Musical Homing: Critical Approximations of Hindustani Instrumental Music

Abstract

Examining three entangled notions of ‘home’, this paper opens up and expands ‘the scope and critical sensibility’ [Soja, E. W. (1996). Thirdspace, journeys to Los Angeles and other real-and-imagined places. Oxford: Blackwell] of frequently accepted accounts of Hindustani instrumental music. In this critical ‘approximation’ (Soja, 1996) of assumed innate relations between conceptions of home and abstracted elements of acoustic events perceived as Hindustani instrumental music, the paper borrows insights from cultural, post-colonial and spatial theory. Listening away from formalised, closed and essentialist assumptions about Hindustani instrumental music, the paper explores processes through which components of acoustic events come to be perceived, rejected or legitimated in terms of a specific home during encounters with the music in western Europe. On a meta-level, the argument of the paper also reads as a plea for a re-negotiation of the boundaries of musicological knowledge production, emphasising the potential that a radically open listening has to offer.

Keywords:

• Hindustani Classical Instrumental Music
• Epistemology
• Thirdspace
• Maihar Gharānā
• Post-Colonial Theory

Acknowledgements

Thanks to Férdia Stone-Davis, the editor of this special issue, who gave many suggestions that were both formative to the content as well as the linguistic elegance of this paper. Mistakes and less than elegant phrasings, however, fully remain my responsibility.

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

[1] 1947.

[2] For detailed historical studies exploring these complex and multifarious processes, see Lubach (2006) and Neuman (2004).

[3] This paper is based on thoughts formed during 12 months of fieldwork in western Europe, the USA and India for my doctoral dissertation The sangeet Atlantic; dynamics of knowledge, power and musico-logica in Hindustani instrumental music. However, the data presented in this paper focus on the western European musicking context.

[4] Sa, Re, Ga, Ma, Pa, Dha, Ni are names used in the sargam system to distinguish pitches sung or played in relation to each other. These pitches are flexible and relative; both the relations between the pitches as well as the frequency of the Sa, which is usually considered the most stable tonal place within the rāga, differ between instruments, individual players or vocalists, rāgas and individual rāga approaches.

[5] Maihar gharānā and Imdadkhani gharānā are the names of two instrumental gharānās of Hindustani music that are usually considered to have distinct musical styles.

[6] The Automated Transcription for Indian Music (AUTRIM) Project by NCPA and UvA: according to the project website, the ‘aim of this project is to freely put at the disposal of students, teachers and researchers of music a new tool, that enables us to take a zoomed-in look-and-listen of North Indian music (Hindustani sangit)’. While this announcement seems to suggest a closed off epistemology of Hindustani classical music, the analysed and visually re-presented characteristics of this Hindustani sangit are limited to micro- and macro-melodic structure and melodic phrasings characteristic for particular rāgas and tāla. Furthermore, the visual representation suggests a linear concept of musical development, which might be argued as contradicting the cyclic notion of tāla. Details of the project were retrieved from https://autrimncpa.wordpress.com.