Mountainous Sound Spaces: Listening to History and Music in the Uttarakhand Himalayas

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About The Book

This book presents a number of stories about the musical practice in specific regions in the Central Himalayas. The author describes people and the sounds they produce and attempts to imagine those sounds in ways that reflect histories, conventional attitudes, geographical spaces and mythical worlds. As the people and geographies of the Himalayas are diverse, the region also flaunts equally diverse traditions and cultural practices - a major part of which is music. This includes urban environments inhabited by cosmopolitan populations in contrast to rural settlements. High alpine geographies stand in contrast to the flat terai below the foothills. It would be unjust to create the impression of a unified space in which cultural practices conform to broad patterns across the entire space. The book, therefore, presents individual stories of histories, instruments, epics, drumming and commodification, each located in the mountains and juxtaposed in a manner that allows common themes between and among them to be emphasized. Practical examples of the way music is used in religious festivals and in situations of live entertainment helps the reader to understand how music is an essential part of creating history, myth and belief. In contrast, the commodification of music that results from contemporary modes of recording and production provides an illustration of how music is changing in response to new patterns of consumption.

About the Author

Andrew Alter teaches in the Department of Media, Music, Communication and Cultural Studies at Macquarie University, Sydney, Australia. He has contributed to a diverse range of sub-disciplines including popular music studies, ethnomusicology, composition, theory, harmony, conducting and performance studies. Andrew's research interests cover three broad areas of investigation: South Asian music cultures, contemporary Australian transcultural musical expression and Southeast Asian music cultures. In South Asia, he has examined connections between musical practice and Hindu rituals in the Himalayas as well as contemporary music at local and national levels. As an ethnomusicologist, he has published widely in the discipline's leading journals and reference tools. Andrew's performance interests span an eclectic mix of world music and experimental genres and include diverse musical practice on piano and cello as well as within vocal ensembles and Indonesian gamelan.

Preface

This book is intended, not only for an academic readership, but also for those who simply want to discover something about the musical practices of musicians in the Himalayan region of Uttarakhand. Consequently. I have included some descriptive material that is widely available elsewhere. This is for the benefit of those who are less familiar with musicology and for those who may not have travelled to Uttarakhand before. Writing for two different audiences inevitably requires compromise regarding the tone of the language and the technically specific terminology that must be used. I hope these compromises do not alienate either readership. As with any book, it is limited in scope to those practitioners whom I have met and to those experiences that I have had. Nonetheless, I hope these stories will encourage the reader to reflect on the way sound and music are influenced by the geography in which they are made.

Some segments of this book have appeared in earlier journal publications. They are presented here either with significant modifications that take an account of recent field research, or with adaptations that create better coherence within the narrative of this book. They appear with permission of the editors.

Chapter 1 is a significantly revised version of an article published in the journal Asian Music in 1997/98. All the musical examples are new and are presented in a manner that is more inclined towards the South Asian context. The ideas in this earlier paper have been significantly expanded to provide more detailed citations as well as more coherent musical examples. In addition, further information related to military history and contemporary media has been included. Chapter 5 is an article originally published in 2012 in the European Bulletin of Himalayan Research titled 'Flutes, Sprites and Mountainous Geographies'. Chapter 7 is an article that was originally published in the Yearbook for Traditional Music in 2009. Both Chapters 5 and 7 have been modified in ways to remain consistent with the style of this book.

Introduction

A Himalayan Sound Space

The The Himalayas are usually assumed to encompass a space in which the vertical dimension is emphatic. They 'tower'; they 'thrust'; they 'perch.' Climbers go to the Himalayas to move upwards and reach the peak. Tibet - 'the roof of the world' -lies somewhere high above the vantage point of the viewer from the plains. British surveyors like George Everest and Andrew Waugh could see the highest of these mountains sticking up in the distance, a natural border to their newly colonized subcontinent. Well before the British, the Pandavas-heroes of the Mahābhārata-were exiled for thirteen years into the mountains. Later, they ended their days moving upwards again towards that inaccessible high ground of eternal snow. Here, Shiva - carrying a drum - meditated in his mountain abode at Kailash.

Verticality pervades our human visual imagination of a Himalayan space. However, their sonic space is equally integral to the mountains- one that is less considered. It remains invisible and exists in dimensions that are different to the three visible dimensions. Mountains are characterized by mystic silence, yet their spatial dimension and magnitude seem to echo sounds of those who live amidst, or travel through them.

This book presents a number of stories about musical practice in specific regions in the central Himalayas. My words are descriptive of people and the sounds that define them. Those sounds are imagined in ways reflective of histories, conventional attitudes, geographical spaces and mythical worlds. The Himalayas being characterized by diversity of people and geographies are featured by different Himalayan spaces, for instance, urban environments with cosmopolitan populations different to rural settlements; high alpine geographies unlike the flat terai below the foothills; different countries, languages and religions.