Indian Music and the West

the first thoroughly researched work examining the ways the West has engaged Indian music over a period extending back to the eighteenth century. There is much to applaud in Farrell's work ... Farrell's book makes a positive contribution to the ethnomusicology of cultures in contact ... an engaging work that will be of particular interest to South Asianists and to ethnomusicologists who have a particular interest in crosscultural musical interactions.

Klappentext

Indian Music and the West examines perceptions and representations of Indian music in the West over a period of two hundred years, ranging from orientalist studies of Indian history and culture in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, to the adoption of elements from Indian music in Western popular culture in the latter half of the twentieth century. Gerry Farrell charts the place of Indian music within the context of colonialism, the use of Indian imagery in Western popular songs and on the stage, and the early days of the gramophone in India. Farrell also demonstrates how Indian music has been discovered and re-discovered in the West, and how these discoveries have reflected changing cultural, social, and political relations between India and the West. This is the story of the interface between two sophisticated and complex musical systems.

Inhalt
Acknowledgements; Note on Transliteration; Introduction; 1. 'Wild by pleasing when understood.' Europeans and Indian music in the late eighteenth century; 2. 'In short, almost everything Oriental appears to better advantage in European garb.' Indian music, notation, and nationalism in the nineteenth century; 3. 'My naive heart...' Indian music in Western popular song; 4. 'This talking machine is the marvel of the twentieth century.' The gramophone comes to India; 5. 'Pomegranates with fingerboards added.' Three journeys to the West; 6. 'We'll be able to get plastic sitars in our cornflakes soon.' Indian music in popular music and jazz; 7. 'Listen to the story of an Asian man.' World Music and South Asian music in the West; Appendix : Selected discography for chapters 6 and 7; List of Sources and Bibliography; Index