The new cultural histories of music/of India

TY - CHAP

T1 - The new cultural histories of music/of India

AU - Schofield, Katherine Butler

N1 - Paper published as part of the conference proceedings of the Cultural Musicology conference, Amsterdam, January 2014

PY - 2014/1

Y1 - 2014/1

N2 - In the last decade or so, cultural history has become a pressing new interest in Indian history and Western musicology. In Indian history, a new attentiveness to the shaping capacities of language, literature, visual and material culture and ritual has led to increasingly rich understandings of polity, society and mentalité in early modern and colonial India. But while this new movement has resulted in exemplary new cultural histories of Indian music in the late colonial period, the sound worlds of early modern India have so far remained peripheral to the new cultural histories project. In musicology, the OUP New Cultural History of Music Series has begun to capitalise on a wealth of histories of Europe and North America that focus on music and sound as mediators of wider worlds. Many cultural historians of Western art music have found a new source of inspiration in ethnomusicology. Yet ethnomusicologists, by and large, continue to use history as the servant of ethnography, and the few that stray earlier than the period of recorded sound seem fearful of making the kinds of claims about music’s transformative power that they routinely do of contemporary musical worlds. What is needed are ethnomusicological approaches to global pasts that would allow music to resound as a major topic of cultural history beyond Europe and America. Based on key findings of the European Research Council project “Musical Transitions to European Colonialism in the Eastern Indian Ocean”, this paper considers what such a methodology might offer the new cultural histories, both of music, and of India.

AB - In the last decade or so, cultural history has become a pressing new interest in Indian history and Western musicology. In Indian history, a new attentiveness to the shaping capacities of language, literature, visual and material culture and ritual has led to increasingly rich understandings of polity, society and mentalité in early modern and colonial India. But while this new movement has resulted in exemplary new cultural histories of Indian music in the late colonial period, the sound worlds of early modern India have so far remained peripheral to the new cultural histories project. In musicology, the OUP New Cultural History of Music Series has begun to capitalise on a wealth of histories of Europe and North America that focus on music and sound as mediators of wider worlds. Many cultural historians of Western art music have found a new source of inspiration in ethnomusicology. Yet ethnomusicologists, by and large, continue to use history as the servant of ethnography, and the few that stray earlier than the period of recorded sound seem fearful of making the kinds of claims about music’s transformative power that they routinely do of contemporary musical worlds. What is needed are ethnomusicological approaches to global pasts that would allow music to resound as a major topic of cultural history beyond Europe and America. Based on key findings of the European Research Council project “Musical Transitions to European Colonialism in the Eastern Indian Ocean”, this paper considers what such a methodology might offer the new cultural histories, both of music, and of India.

M3 - Conference paper

BT - Cultural musicology izine

ER -