An Exploration into North Indian Classical Music: Raga, Alif Laila, and Improvisation.

This thesis explores three themes: North Indian classical music, the individual Alif Laila, and the philosophical connection each has to improvisation. The process that was followed to analyze the interactions between raga in the North Indian classical tradition and one well-known musician's path within that tradition bridges theory with individual insight. Alif Laila is the individual at the center of the study. As a prominent professional sitarist living in the Washington, D.C. region, her input is analyzed placing focus on individuality within the life of a traditionally trained musician living and teaching in a Western context. Her expression in traditional sharing of musical knowledge from teacher to student, in raga performance and in musical philosophy expand upon the new generation of teacher/performers who translate their craft in order to continue their tradition of North Indian classical music. Improvisation, both as a social and musical design, extends the scholarly research and personalized ethnography to complete the thesis

Confusion in the Karnatic Capital: Fusion in Chennai, India

This dissertation examines how a contested musical practice makes the problems of modernity in India audible. In particular, I look at the relationship between South Indian "fusion" musicians and India's recent economic and cultural growth attributed to the economic reforms of 1991. Fusion is the local name for a musical practice that combines South Indian classical music with elements from rock, jazz, and world music. During thirteen months of ethnographic fieldwork carried out in the South Indian city of Chennai between 2006-8, I attended countless concerts, interviewed dozens of people involved with musical production, and performed with musicians. I observed how musicians and audiences perpetuated the idea that fusion was contested and I documented the local debates that often expressed a deep uncertainty and ambiguity about the legitimacy of fusion. What can a contested musical practice reveal about the recent economic and cultural changes in contemporary urban India? Fusion is contested because its multiple and contradicting histories, definitions, and opinions make it a unique musical problem in Chennai. This problem is further complicated when the explicit intension of fusion as musical mixing is also understood as an example of persistent debates of cultural mixing that are so crucial to India's colonial history and postcolonial present. In this dissertation, I show how fusion triggers debates that provide a unique constellation of irresolvable tensions that help situate contemporary, urban, South Indian musicians within the changing relations between India and the West. The contestation about fusion has led to a lacuna of critical scholarship that this dissertation remedies. I argue that rather than being a reason to overlook fusion, fusion's contestation loads it with meaning and makes it a rich, unexamined site of expressive culture. It provides a unique domain to understand how musicians in Chennai represent the always-changing relations of India and the West through their discourse about music and musical sound

Teoria multikulttuurisista teksteistä : Erik Bergmanin musiikki multikulttuurisen Euroopan ilmiönä

This dissertation is a study of musical cultural mixtures, essentially focusing on mixtures in contemporary European art music and compositions of the Finnish-Swedish composer Erik Bergman as a complex case of cultural mixtures and mixing processes. The study suggests a theoretical framework and analytical tools for interpreting and deconstructing mixtures defined as multicultural texts. In the second part of the project, the suggested tools are applied to analyse the music of Erik Bergman, whose work is considered to be a particular example of the multicultural texts, in which the initial cultural components have blended into fusion on the level of sound. The project creates various perspectives to study the subject of musical mixtures described as virtual models of cultural communication, where different cultural identities, discourses, and aesthetics are presented simultaneously. Having as its goal the identifying and highlighting of different aspects of mixtures and strategies of their modelling, the multidisciplinary project, with a primary background in musicology and semiotics, combines diverse theories and concepts, involving different branches of semiotics (from Yuri Lotman s cultural semiotics to the intertextual studies and interpretative semiotics of Umberto Eco), as well as the concept of virtual reality, temporal theories, studies of cultural identity, the theory of topics, and studies of cultural forms of sound and their conceptualisation. The research work results in the creation of a comprehensive theory that proposes background, terminology, and several tools and strategies for studying mixtures, while tracing cultural information and its transformation inside them. The theory takes into account processes of virtual cultural modelling, the role of the author and the reader, and addresses an extensive category of the multicultural texts taken as personal creations. This novel understanding of musical mixtures leads to an analysis of mixtures on the level of sound essence and sound strategies. The research also creates a new perspective on Erik Bergman s music, an author with extraordinary cultural experiences and many cultural identities speaking through his authorial voice. The analytical part of the project demonstrates how diverse strategies of modelling, cultural compositional techniques, and sound strategies work to compose (and decompose) a multicultural text.Väitöskirja on tutkielma musiikillis-kulttuurisista sekoittumista pääkohteenaan sekoittumat ( mixtures ) modernissa eurooppalaisessa taidemusiikissa ja suomenruotsalaisen säveltäjän Erik Bergmanin sävellyksissä kulttuuristen sekoittumien ja sekoittumisprosessien kompleksisena esimerkkitapauksena. Tutkielma esittelee teoreettisen viitekehyksen ja menetelmät näiden sekoittumien musiikilliselle analyysille ja tulkinnalle. Väitöskirjan toisessa osassa edellä mainittuja menetelmiä sovelletaan Erik Bergmanin musiikin analyysiin. Hänen tuotantoaan tarkastellaan musiikillisten sekoittumien erityislaatuisena esimerkkinä, jossa alkujaan kulttuuriset komponentit sulautuvat yhteen äänen tasolla. Tutkielman kontekstissa musiikilliset sekoittumat määritellään multikulttuurisiksi teksteiksi. Näitä voidaan kuvailla kulttuurisen kommunikaation virtuaalisina malleina, joissa erilaiset kulttuuriset identiteetit, diskurssit ja estetiikat esiintyvät samanaikaisesti. Tavoitteenaan identifioida ja tuoda esiin näiden sekoittumien erilaisia aspekteja ja niiden mallintamisen strategioita tämä monitieteellinen projekti, pääasiallisena taustanaan musiikkitiede ja semiotiikka, luo erilaisia perspektiivejä musiikillisten sekoittumien tutkimiseen. Siten se yhdistää useita teorioita ja käsitteitä semiotiikan erilaiset alat mukaan lukien (Juri Lotmanin kulttuurisemiotiikasta Umberto Econ intertekstuaalisiin tutkielmiin ja tulkitsevaan semiotiikkaan). Tutkielma kytkee myös toisiinsa virtuaalisen todellisuuden käsitteen, ajallisuutta koskevat teoriat, tutkimukset kulttuurisesta identiteetistä, toposteorian ja äänen kulttuuriset ilmenemismuodot ja niiden käsitteellistämisen. Väitöskirjan tulos on monipuolinen teoria, joka esittelee taustan ja terminologian sekä erilaiset menetelmät ja strategiat sekoittumien ja niiden sisältämän kulttuurisen informaation ja transformaation tutkimiselle. Teoria käsittää myös virtuaalisen kulttuurisen mallintamisen prosessit, tekijän ja lukijan roolin sekä laaja-alaisen kategorian multikulttuurisista teksteistä yksilöllisinä luomuksina. Tämä uusi näkökulma musiikillisiin sekoittumiin johtaa niiden analyysiin äänen olemuksen ja strategioiden tasolla. Tutkimus avaa myös uusia näköaloja Erik Bergmanin musiikkiin ja niihin erityislaatuisiin kulttuurisiin kokemuksiin ja moniin kulttuurisiin identiteetteihin, jotka puhuvat hänen tekijän äänellään. Tutkimusprojektin analyyttinen osa osoittaa, kuinka mallintamisen erilaiset strategiat, säveltämisen kulttuuriset tekniikat ja äänistrategiat osallistuvat multikulttuuristen tekstien rakentumiseen (ja hajottamiseen)

The endless search for SA: spiritual ideology in Hindustāni music

This dissertation centres on philosophical attitudes presented by North Indian classical musicians in relation to the concept and experience of rāga improvisation. In Hindustāni music, there is a dynamic tension ideology and pragmatism, devotion and entertainment, fixity and improvisational freedom, and cognition and visceral experience. On one hand, rāga is an embodied methodological template for the creation of music. On the other hand, rāga improvisation is conceptualised as a path to metaphysical experience and as an evocation of an ineffable divine presence. A masterful rendition of rāga is both a re-enactment of a systematic prescribed formula and a spontaneous flow of consciousness. This study presents these apparent dichotomies to highlight ideological concerns, while simultaneously contextualising philosophical idealism in relation to pragmatic realities. A central paradigm is the manner in which pragmatic concerns are elevated in status and given spiritual significance. The dissertation begins with a view into historical and religious context. The discussion continues with a speculative investigation positing co-relations between Hindustāni music and central tenets of Indian philosophy, considering how rāga improvisation may manifest as a philosophy of sound. The study then explores the concept of rāga, a modal and conceptual construct that forms the heart of Indian classical music. The final three sections ground the subject of spiritual ideology within the life experience of Hindustāni musicians: ‘Transmission’ looks at the learning and enculturation process, which encapsulates values intrinsic to the ethos of Hindustāni music culture. ‘Practice’ explores the discipline, science and experience of musical practice, revealing core ideological concerns connecting spirituality to musical experience; and ‘Performance’ examines the live presentation of rāga improvisation, and the relationship between music as ‘entertainment’ and music as ‘devotion’. Both ethnographic and musicological, this research is the culmination of various fieldtrips to India, extensive interviews with Hindustāni musicians, fifteen year’s sitār training, and the study of relevant musicological and philosophical texts

Indigenous entrepreneurship and cross-border trade in Nigeria

The study examines an aspect of indigenous Nigerian entrepreneurship, focusing on the cross-border trade in South-Western Nigeria. An almost total ignorance of how the traders go about their business, coupled with an unwelcoming trading environment, appear to have caused the antipathy of policy planners, and dearth of academic research in the area. The dearth of research is of particular concern here hence the need to "go back to basics", as it were, and focus the research in the first instance, on what the trade is in fact all about. The study focuses therefore on a descriptive analysis of the cross-border trade itself as an indigenous exporting activity, in particular the role of the small businesses who, in numerical terms at least, dominate the trade. It is expected that this will lead to future, more sector and area-specific studies on the subject. The cross-border trade takes place in an environment of illegality, corruption, and an unstable local economy, which makes trading conditions difficult, and would ordinarily seem to prevent traders from exercising their enterprise other than for mere survival on the economic fringes. Policy planners are also quick to argue that the trade is merely a smugglers' arena that contributes nothing to national development and in fact needs to be eliminated in aid of the development process. These reinforce the development literature which envisages only a limited role for indigenous entrepreneurship in economic development. The findings in this study however suggest another interpretation. It is argued that the trading environment as it is in fact provides opportunities which seem to have encouraged the emergence of an entrepreneurial class, and that though largely invisible, greater capital accumulation than is usually thought appears to be taking place, suggesting a more significant role for indigenous entrepreneurs in the development process. Between chapters 1 and 5, a case is presented for why existing trade and development theories have only a limited application to the development process in less developed countries like Nigeria. Chapters 6 and 7 introduce the surveys which indicate the performance and strategy of a sample of producers and traders. Subsequently relying mainly, but not exclusively on anthropologically-oriented material, the study focuses, in chapters 8 and 9, on the actors and activities in three cross-border trade routes, exploring the ways in which the traders relate to one another and to other participants in the trade. Further attention is paid to the ways in which the trade survives, evolves and develops, in spite of considerable environmental difficulties. While the study does not dispute that there are several smugglers and other law-breakers in the cross-border trade traffic, it argues further that considerable legitimate, but unrecorded trade goes on across the borders by several dedicated producers and traders. Certain theoretical implications arising from the study are discussed as areas for further study, while other, more practical recommendations, are suggested to policy planners, which may be beneficial both to them and to the traders in the future developments of the trade