New Mansions for Music: Performance, Pedagogy and Criticism

182 Pages·2018·1.113 MB·English

by  Lakshmi Subramanian

New Mansions for Music
Taylor & Francis
Taylor & Francis Group
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New Mansions for Music
Performance, Pedagogy
and Criticism
by
Lakshmi Subramanian
Firstpublished2018
byRoutledge
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Contents
Preface and Acknowledgements ix
Introduction 1
1. The Katcheri: A Living Laboratory or
Enchanted Space? 32
2. Articulating an Aesthetic: The Emergence of
the Music Critic in Modern South India 62
3. From the Gurukula to the University: Initiatives
in Music Education 106
4. The Lighter Side of Entertainment 139
5. On the History of Music: A Bibliographical Essay 157
Glossary 164
Index 168
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Preface and Acknowledgements
THIS BOOK GREW OUT OF THREE SEMINAR PAPERS THAT I WROTE BETWEEN
2006–07. The idea of knitting them together as a single narrative
was very largely my editor’s who convinced me that there was a
book waiting to be written. I was initially hesitant having finished a
book on music in south India just then, and apprehended the
possibility of sounding repetitive. However, the hesitancy vanished
when I actually set out to examine the subject of music and its
troubled engagement with modernity, this time not as the biography
of an institution but as snapshots of the principal actors who
constituted the changing world of performance. Going back to my
material I realized that the story had immense potential and that
our entrapment in the world of textual representation meant that
the focus was never on the practitioner but on the critic and the self-
appointed connoisseur who chose to represent the artist not from
the point of view of his dilemma but that of his own anxiety and
self-reflexivity. To this day I regret that I failed to engage with my
own music teacher who was, in so many ways, a remarkable individual
and a realized musician. Growing up in modern India as a middle
class girl, wrapped up in the excitement of youth and self-absorption,
and only partially, even absentmindedly, interested in the music
lessons, I learnt to love the form but failed to give it and its
practitioner the attention they deserved. I do not claim that I have
the means to recuperate the musician in history nor that I have done
so in these pages. All that I have tried to do is to see how the emerging
functions of criticism, pedagogy and performance positioned the
musician in a changing public space and how the exercise in most