From Bernstein to Bhatkhande: (Indian and Other) Music as the Universal Language
Exciting dialogues are taking place these days, between scholars and practitioners of a variety of world music idioms. Such cross-idiomatic projects also raise the possibility that the old cliché about music being the “universal language” is becoming relevant again, after several decades of cultural...
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| Format: | Article |
| Language: | English |
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Analytical Approaches to World Music
2023-06-01
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| Series: | Analytical Approaches to World Music |
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| Online Access: | https://journal.iftawm.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/08/Mukherji_AAWM_Vol_11_1.pdf |
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| Summary: | Exciting dialogues are taking place these days, between scholars and practitioners of a variety of world music idioms. Such cross-idiomatic projects also raise the possibility that the old cliché about music being the “universal language” is becoming relevant again, after several decades of cultural-relativist denial. The present essay therefore proposes one approach for how we might revisit this cliché too, and attempt once more to “clarify it,” as Leonard Bernstein once said. In particular, the essay argues that comparing proposals about musical structure in Western music theory with related ones in non-Western sources might suggest greater overlaps in how scholars all over the world have explored and found common ground in the world’s musical languages. In this light, exploring connections especially between Heinrich Schenker’s ideas and those of the Indian theorist Vishnu Narayan Bhatkhande, as the essay illustrates, might benefit projects working at the crossroads of musical idioms such as Western and Indian music. |
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| ISSN: | 2158-5296 |