Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Amanda J. Weidman is Assistant Professor of Anthropology at Bryn Mawr College.

Von der hinteren Coverseite

"Amanda J. Weidman brilliantly turns the tables on ideologies of voice in challenging us to envision music as constituting technologies for "producing" voices. Ethnomusicology, anthropology, postcolonial studies, and critical histories of technology all take a step forward as a genealogy of Indian 'classical' music engenders new insights into colonialism, nationalism, gender, traditionality, and modernity."--Charles L. Briggs, Professor of Anthropology, University of California, Berkeley

Auszug. © Genehmigter Nachdruck. Alle Rechte vorbehalten.

Singing the Classical, Voicing the Modern

Duke University Press

Contents

List of Illustrations......................................................................viiAcknowledgments............................................................................ixNote on Transliteration and Spelling.......................................................xviiIntroduction...............................................................................11. Gone Native?: Travels of the Violin in South India......................................252. From the Palace to the Street: Staging "Classical" Music................................593. Gender and the Politics of Voice........................................................1114. Can the Subaltern Sing?: Music, Language, and the Politics of Voice.....................1505. A Writing Lesson: Musicology and the Birth of the Composer..............................1926. Fantastic Fidelities....................................................................245Afterword: Modernity and the Voice.........................................................286Notes......................................................................................291Works Cited................................................................................325Index......................................................................................343

Chapter One

TRAVELS OF THE VIOLIN IN SOUTH INDIA

No other instrument is so powerful as the Violin. -T. K. Jayarama Iyer (1965)

Unlike the golden age of India, which Orientalist accounts place in the precolonial era, the golden age of Karnatic music occurred, according to conventional accounts, at the peak of colonialism, the early to mid-nineteenth century. The so-called trinity of composers-Thyagaraja (1767-1847), Syama Sastri (1762-1827), and Muthuswamy Dikshitar (1776-1835)-who are said to have revolutionized the sound and practice of Karnatic music were all active during this period. Even more extraordinary is the fact that while they were composing their masterpieces, a new instrument was changing the sound, practice, and repertoire of Karnatic music: the European violin. Brought to South India circa 1800 by British and French colonial officials and visitors to the princely courts, the violin was taken up and, shortly after its arrival, adapted by South Indian musicians, who gradually altered its tuning, playing position, and technique.

This is no secret: although Karnatic music is unanimously described as a vocal music, the violin is one of its most visible and audible elements, found on almost every concert stage playing solo or doubling the vocalist's line. In twentieth-century South India, the violin not only became a vehicle for conveying Karnatic music to modernity but also came to be seen as essential to preserving Karnatic music's authenticity. These notions of modernity and authenticity, so crucially intertwined in the redefinition of Karnatic music as "classical," are played out in the central role that the violin has had in constructing the voice of Karnatic classical music. This chapter traces the career of the violin in South India from its arrival around 1800 to the present. How did a colonial instrument "gone native" come to be heard as the source of an authentic Karnatic voice?

In its early days in South India the violin was an instrument for Scottish jigs and reels, French dancing songs, and English marching tunes, rather than an instrument of Western classical music. In the beginning of the twentieth century, however, attitudes toward the violin changed, the old "fiddle" image was rejected in favor of a classicized "violin" whose counter-part was the classical violin of the West. The newly classicized violin was central to a discourse about modernity: the violin was seen as the vehicle for bringing Karnatic music into the modern age since it could reproduce the voice with more accuracy than the old-fashioned veena, with more sensitivity than the "mechanical" harmonium, and with a kind of social impunity the sarangi had never had. The defining aspect of the violin was its double character; it was Indian in its ability to reproduce the Karnatic voice, yet Western in its origins and form. These double capacities made the violin the ideal instrument for twentieth-century musical experiments: violin-and-piano, violin-and-Bach, violin-and-computer, and multi-violin concerts that enact and rearticulate the relationship between Karnatic music and the West.

Articulations

Descriptions of Indian music by European scholars in the nineteenth century and early twentieth century were primarily concerned with comparing Indian music with the music of the West. Such studies inevitably placed Indian music in a cultural half-state, as though waiting to be awakened. Though Indian music was relentlessly compared to the music of the West, the separation, usually opposition, between the two was scrupulously maintained. Indian music had to take its place in a historico-musicological tree of natural connections, but it was also to stand on equal footing with Western music as one of the great musics of the world. In contrast to such a vision, the violin and its passage to India represented the possibility that instead of separation and opposition, there could be mixing and influence. Western scholars of comparative organology in the late nineteenth century showed little interest in the violin's increasing popularity in India precisely because it threatened to undermine the neat family trees they were determined to draw to illustrate the relationship between Indian music and European music.

In his Researches into the Early History of the Violin Family Carl Engel's genealogy of the European violin depended on "an acquaintance with the musical instruments of foreign nations in different stages of civilization, extant at the present day" (1883, 3). With the European violin as the pinnacle, or endpoint, of "civilization," the "rude fiddles" in evidence around the world were to be taken as stages of development whose natural connections to each other could be traced. Following the evolutionary theory of the time, such "natural" connections were assumed to be based on function, not form. Engel hinted that ancient migrations were the cause of diffusion of fiddle types but considered present-day migrations unimportant, as admitting of possibly unnatural connections that gave rise to inauthentic imitations of the violin. "Shapes resembling the f-holes are occasionally to be met with on Asiatic instruments.... [T]he two sound-holes are sometimes merely painted upon them, without their being pierced into the sound board. What can be the origin and object of this fancy?" (19). Engel likewise mentioned the use of the European violin in India at length but then dismissed it as inconsequential.

Nay, it is well known that in some of the seaport towns of Hindustan the European violin has actually been introduced although it does not appear to have obtained much popular favour. The rajas seem not to appreciate its really commendable qualities, to judge from the fact of their having ordered violins to be manufactured of silver instead of wood.... We have seen that the Hindus are not entirely unacquainted with the European violin.... There is now in Calcutta a Musical Academy, founded in the year 1871...