Towards a 'Scientific' History of Music: Understanding Music Discourse in Southern India

by Prof Lakshmi Subramanian, CSSS Kolkata

Date: Friday, March 20

Time: 6:30 pm
Venue: LHC 107, IISER Pune, Dr. Homi Bhabha Road, Pashan

About the talk:

This presentation will address two things: one, the challenges that histories of music have involved for the professional discipline of history, and two, the scientific imperative that music histories were guided by in twentieth century India. It will especially focus on the roles assumed by scientists in developing a methodology for teaching and appreciation that was meant to enable an objective understanding of art practice than simply frame it within a template of subjective experience. C. Subrahmanya Ayyar, the brother of C. V. Raman was especially active in this direction and came up with fascinating attempts to look at music in terms of the physics of sound. The presentation will hope to make sense of such an imperative and contextualise it in terms of modernity and the challenges and possibilities it offered the Madras gentry of the 19th and 20th centuries. It will locate this event in the larger debate among publicists of the time about the scientific and artistic facets of Carnatic music, and of the need felt by them to come up with a history that would ground the art form to a textual tradition and thereby elevate its status.

 

About the Speaker:

Lakshmi Subramanian is Professor of History and Dean (Academic Affairs) in the Centre for Studies in Social Sciences, Kolkata. She has written extensively on cultural practices in modern India, and on business and diaspora communities in the Indian Ocean. Her books on the history of music in southern India include Veena Dhanammal: The Making of a Legend, New Mansions for Music: Performance, Pedagogy and Criticism, and From the Tanjore Court to the Madras Music Academy: A Social History of Music in South India.

Music in Representation, Music in Practice

Half-­day Symposium

Date: Saturday March 21

Time: 10:00 am to 1:00 pm

Venue: LHC 301, IISER Pune, Dr. Homi Bhabha Road, Pashan

 

Lakshmi Subramanian, Chair

 

Session I: 10:00 am - 11:20 am  

Justin Scarimbolo (SSLA Pune): Recording Technology and the Construction of Gharana Identity

Saroja Ganapathy (IIT Bombay): Notes from Literature: Representations of Classical Music in Literary Fiction

 

Session II: 11:40 am - 1:00 pm  

Sushruti Santhanam (University of Pune): Crafting Practice: Text, Technique and Technology in Indian Musics

Aditi Deo (IISER Pune): Traditional Vernacular Music in Technological Networks: Questions of Commons, Property and Belonging

 

 

A Journey from Swara to Raaga: The Architecture of Carnatic Music

Music Workshop by Sushruti Santhanam

Date: Saturday March 21

Time: 3:00 to 5:00 pm

Venue: LHC 301, IISER Pune, Dr. Homi Bhabha Road, Pashan

About the workshop:

Indian music is a wide canvas with many impressions imprinted on it from divergent perspectives and over many centuries. It continues to be relevant, vibrant, thriving, and evolving in its cognitive and aesthetic dimensions.
Whether as practitioners of Indian music or as keen listeners, we may all have asked very fundamental questions at some point. Questions such as: how have various genres and styles evolved? What is their connection with human emotion? How do we understand the relationships between musical craft, grammar, emotion and spirituality, all of which Indian musicians claim they engage with?

One of the ways to look at these questions is through the most visible unit of Indian music, the swara, and follow its journey through the intricate mesh of aesthetics and evocation, and its metamorphosis into a genre, in this case, the Carnatic.

The workshop will have an interactive format and will include explanations, music demonstrations and audio clips. The workshop is free and open to all. No prior formal training in Carnatic or any music is required.