Event overview
Katherine Butler Schofield (King's College) will give a talk on 'Music in Colonial Transition: Indian Perspectives on the "Hindustani Airs" Episode'
A cultural historian and ethnomusicologist, Katherine Butler Schofield is Lecturer in Music at King’s College London.
She is currently the Principal Investigator of a €1.18M European Research Council grant, “Musical Transitions to European Colonialism in the Eastern Indian Ocean” (2011-14), which aims to produce a history of transitions from pre-colonial to colonial musical fields in India and the Malay peninsula c.1750-1900.
Katherine is also an Affiliate of the King's India Institute.
All welcome, not just for graduates!
Music in Colonial Transition: Indian Perspectives on the "Hindustani Airs" Episode
The late eighteenth-century composition of “Hindustani airs” – North Indian songs transcribed by Europeans from live performances, set to keyboard accompaniments, and performed in European soirees – constitutes a remarkable episode in the history of colonial musical encounters. The European sources for this episode have, of course, been comprehensively examined by Gerry Farrell, Ian Woodfield, and Nicholas Cook. But the other perspective on this encounter, that of the North Indian singers whose repertoire was transformed into “Hindustani airs”, has not before been studied to any great extent. Fortuitiously, there are several contemporaneous sources in Persian and Urdu on which to draw that reflect North Indian views of European transcription enterprises and other involvements in local music making, including biographies, music treatises, poetry, and songs. These suggest that, rather than the "Hindustani airs" episode being solely an act of appropriation by politically dominant outsiders that generated no reciprocity in the local music culture, North Indian musicians in fact used the encounter with European music making to transform their own musical discourse and practice. In this paper I aim to present some new ways of considering the transition between North indian and British regimes of musical knowledge that take into account hybridity, multiplicity, affinity, and local agency in the colonial encounter.
Dates & times
| Date | Time | Add to calendar |
|---|---|---|
| 6 Mar 2012 | 5:00pm - 7:00pm |
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