New Books In Music

In Singing the Classical, Voicing the Modern: The Postcolonial Politics of Music in South India (Duke University Press, 2006) ) Amanda Weidman (scroll down to see her profile) explores how the colonial encounter profoundly shifted the ways South Indian Karnatic music was performed, circulated, and talked about in the twentieth century. The violin became the standard accompanying instrument largely because of the way it could imitate the voice and was seen as modernizing the musical tradition. Karnatic music began to be performed in large concert halls where music reformers expected “pin drop silence” as one would find in European symphony orchestra halls. When musicians published various forms of notation to capture music that had been traditionally passed down orally, new ideas came into being about the composer having sole authorship of a composition. The performers of the music changed as well. Before the early decades of the twentieth century, the only women who could perform South Indian musi