The Multiplicities of Hindustani Music explores the dynamic social and economic world of North Indian raga-based music over the twentieth century and into the present day. By approaching Hindustani music from beyond geographical and social centers, author Anna Morcom challenges the conventional framing of Hindustani music as a singular “classical” tradition, tracing its historical entanglements with popular, devotional, and commercial forms. In doing so, she uncovers new dimension...

Since their beginnings in the 1930s, Hindi films and film songs have dominated Indian public culture in India, and have also made their presence felt strongly in many global contexts. Hindi film songs have been described on the one hand as highly standardized and on the other as highly eclectic. Anna Morcom addresses many of the paradoxes eccentricities and myths of not just Hindi film songs but also of Hindi cinema by analysing film songs in cinematic context. While the presence of songs ...

This book explores the crafts and performing arts of South Asia through a focus on labour and livelihood. It brings to light little-researched angles of social and political economies of culture and the ways in which they have shifted and changed in different historical eras and different political, economic, and social formations up to the present. In particular, through this focus on labour and livelihood, the contributors analyse the extensive parallels and similarities of arts and craf...

With its analytic focus on the cultural production by Tibetans-in-exile, this volume examines contemporary Tibetan fiction, poetry, music, art, cinema, pamphlets, testimony, and memoir. The twelve case studies highlight the themes of Tibetans’ self-representation, politicized national consciousness, religious and cultural heritages, and resistance to the forces of colonization. This book demonstrates how Tibetan cultural narratives adjust to intercultural influences and ongoing social and ...

Film music is as old as cinema itself. Years before synchronized sound became the norm, projected moving images were shown to musical accompaniment, whether performed by a lone piano player or a hundred-piece orchestra. Today film music has become its own industry, indispensable to the marketability of movies around the world. Film Music: A Very Short Introduction is a compact, lucid, and thoroughly engaging overview written by one of the leading authorities on the subject. After ...

In performances by Euro-Americans, Afro-Americans, Native Americans, and Asians, Richard Schechner has examined carefully the details of performative behavior and has developed models of the performance process useful not only to persons in the arts but to anthropologists, play theorists, and others fascinated (but perhaps terrified) by the multichannel realities of the postmodern world.Schechner argues that in failing to see the structure of the whole theatrical process, anthropol...

In these writings, available here in English for the first time, the distinguished Japanese composer Toru Takemitsu reflects on his contemporaries, including John Cage, Olivier Messiaen, and Merce Cunningham; on nature, which has profoundly influenced his composition; on film and painting; on relationships between East and West; on traditional Japanese music; and on his own compositions.

In early 2005, an engineer at the Library of Congress accidentally discovered, in an unmarked box, the recording of Thelonious Monk's and John Coltrane's performance at a 1957 benefit concert at Carnegie Hall. Long considered one of the most important musical meetings in modern jazz, Monk's and Coltrane's work together during a scant few months in 1957 had, until this discovery, been thought to be almost entirely undocumented. In this book, Gabriel Solis provides an historical, cultural, a...

The book focuses on the concept of Indian rhythm, particularly as manifested in North Indian art music, more popularly known as Hindustani music. Indian rhythm and percussive instruments have attracted musicians and music-lovers across cultures and continents. The author has focused his attention on discussing various aspects of the tabla, a twin-drum that has formed an integral part of Hindustani music, and has over the years been incorporated into just about every form of music. While do...

'Bollywood' is the dominant global term to refer to the prolific Hindi language film industry in Bombay (renamed Mumbai in 1995). Characterised by music, dance routines, melodrama, lavish production values and an emphasis on stars and spectacle, Bollywood films have met with box-office success and enthusiastic audiences from India to West Africa to Russia, and throughout the English-speaking world.In Bollywood, anthropologist and film scholar Tejaswini Ganti provides a gui...

Reel World explores what happens to life when everything begins to look and feel like cinema. Drawing on years of fieldwork with Tamil filmmakers, artists, musicians, and craftsmen in the south Indian movie studios of "Kollywood," Anand Pandian examines how ordinary moments become elements of a cinematic world. With inventive, experimental, and sometimes comical zeal, Pandian pursues the sensory richness of cinematic experience and the adventure of a writing true to these sensatio...

May 3, 1913a historic day in the history of Indian Cinema. Indias first indigenous silent film Raja Harishchandra was released at the Coronation Cinema in Mumbai. This lay the foundation of what, in time, would grow to become the largest film-producing industry in the world. Spanning a wide range of decades, genres, and style, the Bollywood film culture in all its glory is a wonderful thing. Of the hundreds of great hits it has given, some have attained an aura of unparalleled respectabili...