"Questions of Voice: On the Subject of “Classical” Music in South India" by Amanda Jane Weidman

Amanda Jane Weidman

Deposited 2002

Abstract
This dissertation traces, through ethnographic and historical sources, the emergence of a discourse about “classical” music in South India in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The adoption of the English term “classical,” and the “revival” of Karnatic, or South Indian, music in the early twentieth century, were not simply a reinscription of pre-colonial notions of high and low culture; rather, they engendered new definitions and practices of music and musicality. The individual chapters of this dissertation describe the status of Karnatic music, as South India's “classical” music, within discourses about nationhood, language, caste, and modernity. They take as their focal point the voice, which is claimed to be at the center of Karnatic music: its locus of musicality and authenticity. The dissertation begins by exploring the history of the Karnatic voice through the career of the violin, a colonial instrument introduced into South India circa 1800, which is used to accompany and imitate the voice. It discusses how this voice came to be staged through the form of the concert and particular conventions of performance. It then follows claims to voice and orality in discourse about two figures central to the construct of classical music in South India: the composer and the guru. Finally, it considers the emergence of language as a crucial metaphor for describing music in the twentieth century, and the ways voice complicates such a metaphor. Beyond the South Indian context, this dissertation is concerned with issues crucial to the anthropology of music: ideologies of voice, the emergence of the idea of “meaning” in music, the history of listening, and the stakes involved in distinguishing between the “musical” and the “extra-musical.”