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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 07 February 2025
The zeal for ‘modality’ in French modernist composition drew sustenance from the Indo-European hypothesis (or ‘Aryan myth’) of a linguistic-turned-‘racial’ patrimony linking India, Greece, and Europe, prevalent in Francophone intellectual, including musicological, discourse. Against this backdrop, the central case study traces how the Karnatic melakarta system of rāga classification travelled from Southern India, via British imperial networks, to French universities and conservatoires, whereupon it found widespread interest among composers and pedagogues including Roussel, Emmanuel, Tournemire, and Dupré. Yet the melakartas’ enduring imprint upon French music is found not simply in the use of individual scales, but in the premise of a fecund ‘modal republic’, inspired by the system’s generative logic and resonant in the rationalized modalism of the 1920s and ’30s, including Messiaen’s ‘modes of limited transposition’. The article concludes by proffering a novel conceptualization of the entanglements between Karnatic and French scale systems (and epistemologies of music) in the early twentieth century.
This research was supported by the Gates Cambridge Trust. Sections of this paper were presented at the conference, ‘Editing, Performing and Re-Composing the Musical Past: French Neoclassicism (1870–)’, Royal Birmingham Conservatoire, September 2018; at the annual meeting of the American Musicological Society in Boston, November 2019; and at the Royal Northern College of Music’s colloquium series, October 2021. I thank Nicholas Cook, Christopher Dingle, Katharine Ellis, Barbara Kelly, Jacob Olley, Tadhg Sauvey, and several anonymous readers for their feedback and support.
1 Segalen, Victor, letter to Claude Debussy , 17 April 1904, in Segalen et Debussy: Textes recueillis, ed. by Joly-Segalen, Annie and Schaeffner, André (Éditions du Rocher, 1961), p. 59.Google Scholar
2 Ibid., pp. 59–60.
3 See Roy Howat, ‘Debussy et Les Musiques de l’Inde’, Cahiers Debussy, 12–13 (1988), pp. 141–52.
4 Leßmann, Benedikt, ‘“L’Anachronisme le plus musical”: L’Accompagnement du plain-chant et l’idée de modalité libre en France dans l’entre-deux-guerres’, Revue de musicologie, 105.2 (2019), pp. 357–395 Google Scholar (p. 359). For an overview of ‘modality’ in France, see Henri Gonnard, La Musique modale en France de Berlioz à Debussy (Champion, 2000). I use the term ‘modalism’ to acknowledge the constructed nature of ‘modality’, complete with ideological baggage (see Powers, Harold S., ‘La Modalité, une construction intellectuelle de la culture européenne’, Analyse musicale, 38 (2001), pp. 5–15)Google Scholar.
5 Poliakov, Léon, Le Mythe aryen (Calmann-Lévy, 1971).Google Scholar
6 For a related appeal, see Revuluri, Sindhumathi, ‘Orientalism and Musical Knowledge: Lessons from Edward Said’, Journal of the Royal Musical Association, 141.1 (2016), pp. 205–09CrossRefGoogle Scholar, doi:10.1017/S0269040300013396.
7 See, e.g., Schwab, Raymond, La Renaissance orientale (Payot, 1950); Jean Biès, Littérature française et pensée hindoue: des origines à 1950 (Klincksieck, 1974)Google Scholar; Le Blanc, Claudine, Les Livres de l’Inde: une littérature étrangère en France au XIXe siècle (Presses Sorbonne Nouvelle, 2014).Google Scholar
8 The topic of Indian music ‘in the French imagination’ has also been probed by Jann Pasler in a trilogy of articles from the late 1990s: ‘Reinterpreting Indian Music: Delage, Maurice and Roussel’, Albert, in Music-Cultures in Contact: Convergences and Collisions, ed. by Kartomi, Margaret J. and Blum, Stephen (Gordon & Breach, 1994) pp. 122–57Google Scholar; ‘India and its Music in the French Imagination before 1913’, Journal of the Indian Musicological Society, 27 (1996), pp. 27–51; and ‘Race, Orientalism, and Distinction in the Wake of the “Yellow Peril”’, in Western Music and Its Others: Difference, Representation, and Appropriation in Music, ed. by Georgina Born and David Hesmondhalgh (University of California Press, 2000), pp. 86–118. While Pasler’s teleology inclines toward the ultramodern valorization of musical alterity, exemplified in works like Maurice Delage’s Quatre poèmes hindous (1912), I offer a contrasting narrative via which Indian music, mediated by comparative philology the Indo-European hypothesis, became viewed through the lens of ancestrality and ‘selfhood’ — no longer marked as ‘Indian’ but rather assimilated as ‘French’.
9 On histoire croisée, see Michael Werner and Bénédicte Zimmermann, ‘Beyond Comparison: Histoire Croisée and the Challenge of Reflexivity,’ History and Theory, 45.1 (2006), pp. 30–50, doi:10.1111/j.1468-2303.2006.00347.x; on relational musicology, see e.g., Georgina Born, ‘For a Relational Musicology: Music and Interdisciplinarity, Beyond the Practice Turn’, Journal of the Royal Musical Association, 135.2 (2010), pp. 205–43, doi:10.1080/02690403.2010.506265, and Nicholas Cook, ‘Anatomy of the Encounter: Intercultural Analysis as Relational Musicology’, in Critical Musicological Reflections: Essays in Honour of Derek B. Scott, ed. by Stan Hawkins (Ashgate, 2012), pp. 193–208.
10 For intellectual histories more comprehensive than may be recapitulated here, tracing Indo-Europeanism from linguistic hypothesis through Nazi Aryanism, see, for example: Poliakov, Le Mythe aryen; Maurice Olender, Les Langues du Paradis. Aryens et Sémites: un couple providentiel (Seuil, 1989); Arvidsson, Stefan, Aryan Idols: Indo‐European Mythology as Ideology and Science, trans. by Wichmann, Sonia (University of Chicago Press, 2006)Google Scholar; Beneš, Tuška, In Babel’s Shadow: Language, Philology, and the Nation in Nineteenth-Century Germany (Wayne State University Press, 2008)Google Scholar; Rabault-Feuerhahn, Pascale, L’Archive des origines: Sanskrit, philologie, anthropologie dans l’Allemagne du XIXe siècle (Les Éditions du Cerf, 2008)Google Scholar; Ahmed, Siraj, Archaeology of Babel (Stanford University Press, 2017)Google Scholar. For a thorough critique of Indo-Europeanist scholarship from its inception to the present day, see Jean-Paul Demoule, Mais où sont passés les Indo-Européens? (Seuil, 2014).
11 The William Jones origin story of comparative philology is self-consciously omnipresent in the historiography, though the scope of Jones’s originality is debated. Marcus Zuerius van Boxhorn had posited an ‘Indo-Scythic’ proto-language in 1647, and Leibniz proposed something like an Indo-European language group in 1710. In Mais où sont passes les Indo-Européens?, Demoule acknowledges Jones’s ‘discovery’ as a ‘canonical’ postulate of the historiography of Indo-Europeanism (p. 15), but considers it ‘hagiographic reconstruction’ (p. 39). Nonetheless, it was Jones’s formulation that took hold across Europe.
12 Kaiwar, Vasant, ‘The Aryan Model of History and the Oriental Renaissance: The Politics of Identity in an Age of Revolutions, Colonialism, and Nationalism’, in Antinomies of Modernity: Essays on Race, Orient, Nation, ed. by Kaiwar, Vasant and Mazumdar, Sucheta (Duke University Press, 2003), pp. 13–61 Google Scholar (p. 23); Kaiwar builds on the framework of Martin Bernal, Black Athena: The Afroasiatic Roots of Classical Civilization, 3 vols (Free Association Books, 1987), in particular the first volume.
13 Olender, Les Langues du Paradis, pp. 24–33.
14 For recent studies of French musical Hellenism during the period under consideration, see, for example: Christophe Corbier, Poésie, musique et danse: Maurice Emmanuel et l’hellénisme (Éditions Classiques Garnier, 2010); Jon Solomon, ‘The Reception of Ancient Greek Music in the Late Nineteenth Century’, International Journal of the Classical Tradition, 17.4 (2010), pp. 497–525, doi:10.1007/s12138-010-0216-1; Dorf, Samuel N., Performing Antiquity: Ancient Greek Music and Dance from Paris to Delphi, 1890–1930 (Oxford University Press, 2019).CrossRefGoogle Scholar
15 Rabault-Feuerhahn, L’Archive des origines, II; Ahmed, Archaeology of Babel, p. 39. For Kaiwar, Indo-Europeanism underlies the ‘paradoxes and antinomies that accompany the development of modernity’ (‘The Aryan Model’, p. 14).
16 The relationship between Indo-Europeanism and imperialism was especially fraught in the British case, given inherent tensions between British imperial violence and notions of ethnic kinship between colonizers and colonized. On Aryanism and imperialism in the British context, see Thomas R. Trautmann, Aryans and British India (University of California Press, 1997), and Tony Ballantyne, Orientalism and Race: Aryanism in the British Empire (Palgrave Macmillan, 2002); in the French context, see Jyoti Mohan, ‘The Glory of Ancient India Stems from Her Aryan Blood: French Anthropologists “Construct” the Racial History of India for the World’, Modern Asian Studies, 50.5 (2016), pp. 1576–1618, doi:10.1017/S0026749X13000206.
17 Two recent publications — Christopher Hutton’s potted history of the ‘Aryan’ hypothesis and a special issue of the journal Romantisme on ‘l’Idée indo-européenne’ — are symptomatic; while attention to the intellectual trends is rich and nuanced, there is little attempt to link these to cultural production. Hutton, Christopher, ‘Orientalism and Race: Aryans and Semites’, in Orientalism and Literature, ed. by Nash, Geoffrey P. (Cambridge University Press, 2019), pp. 117–32CrossRefGoogle Scholar; L’Idée indo-européenne, ed. by Aurélien Aramini and Arnaud Macé, special issue of Romantisme, 185.3 (2019).
18 See, e.g., Jacques Weber, Les Établissements français en Inde au XIXe siècle (1816-1914), 5 vols (Librairie de l’Inde, 1988), and his subsequent publications; and Nicola Frith and Kate Marsh, France’s Lost Empires: Fragmentation, Nostalgia, and La Fracture Coloniale (Rowman & Littlefield, 2011), III.
19 See, e.g., Jackie Assayag, L’Inde fabulueuse. Le charme discret de l’exotisme français (XVIIe–XXe siècles) (Éditions Kimé, 1999). The University of Liverpool hosts an exhaustive database of French books on India, extending from 1531 to the present day; see French Books on India <www.frenchbooksonindia.com> [accessed 8 September 2022].
20 For an exceptional study of the multi-faceted intellectual construction of India in France, see Roland Lardinois, L’Invention de l’Inde. Entre ésotérisme et science (CNRS Éditions, 2007).
21 On Jones and the interrelated colonial, textualist, and Islamophobic legacy he left upon scholarship of Indian music, see Janaki Bakhle, Two Men and Music: Nationalism in the Making of an Indian Classical Tradition (Oxford University Press, 2005), pp. 9–11 and 51–62; and Lakshmi Subramanian, From the Tanjore Court to the Madras Music Academy: A Social History of Music in South India, 2nd edn (Oxford University Press, 2006), pp. 59–60.
22 Jones, William, ‘On the Musical Modes of the Hindus: Written in 1784, and since Much Enlarged’, Asiatick Researches, 3 (1792), pp. 55–87 Google Scholar (p. 65) (emphasis original). Jones’s musicological practice thus exemplifies Siraj Ahmed’s observation that philology ‘identifies tradition with texts alone’ — ‘not on native experience, therefore, but on its destruction’ (Archaeology of Babel, p. 38).
23 Jones, ‘On the Musical Modes’, pp. 65, 60.
24 Ibid., p. 66. Somanātha is understood to represent the Karnatic musical tradition, at a period shortly after the distinction between Karnatic and Hindustani traditions stabilized (see Ellie te Nijenhuis, The Rāgas of Somanātha, 2 vols (E. J. Brill, 1976), i, p. 3).
25 Thomas Christensen, Stories of Tonality in the Age of François-Joseph Fétis (University of Chicago Press, 2019), p. 184. See also, Asimov, Peter, ‘Fétis, Gevaert, and their Indo-European Hypotheses: Echoes of Comparative Philology, Language, and “Race” in Early Belgian Musicology’, Revue belge de musicologie / Belgisch Tijdschrift voor Muziekwetenschap, 77 (2024), pp. 23–48.Google Scholar
26 Christensen, Stories of Tonality, p. 187; François-Joseph Fétis, Histoire générale de la musique depuis les temps les plus anciens jusqu’à nos jours, 5 vols (Didot, 1869), II, p. 185.
27 Ibid., II, p. 204; ‘le système tonal des Aryas de l’Inde. C’est de lui que sont sortis les systèmes musicaux de tous les peuples de race arienne.’
28 Ibid., II, p. 209; ‘C’est encore le même principe qu’on remarque dans la tonalité du plain-chant de nos églises.’
29 Comparative philology’s imprint on Francophone musicology is distinct from early twentieth-century ‘comparative musicology’, with its roots in Germanophone contexts, which has received more attention in Anglophone historiography. For one study of early French musicology’s relationship to philology, see Campos, Rémy, ‘Philologie et Sociologie de la musique au début du XXe siècle: Pierre Aubry et Jules Combarieu’, Revue d’Histoire des Sciences Humaines, 14.1 (2006), pp. 19–47 CrossRefGoogle Scholar, doi:10.3917/rhsh.014.0019; however, Campos does not broach philology’s entanglement with the Indo-European hypothesis.
30 Gaston Paris, ‘De l’étude de la poésie populaire en France’, Mélusine, 1878, pp. 2–6 (p. 4); ‘le dessin général et l’arbre généalogique de nos chansons devra un jour ou l’autre être fixé à peu près ainsi, en allant toujours du plus vaste au plus restreint; on ira de l’humanité entière à la race blanche, — aux Aryens, — à chaque groupe de peuples aryens (slave, — germanique, — gréco-romain, — celtique, etc.) — à chaque peuple, — à chaque province, — à chaque canton.’
31 Pierre Aubry, ‘Le Système Musical de l’église Arménienne’, La Tribune de Saint-Gervais, 7.11–12 (1901), pp. 325–32 (pp. 325–28).
32 Henry Woollett, Histoire de la musique depuis l’antiquité jusqu’à nos jours, 4 vols (Eschig, 1909), I, pp. 35, 43; ‘Inde védhique [sic], de l’Inde mystérieuse, berceau du monde’; ‘La musique de l’Inde, la musique d’origine aryenne, ne l’oublions pas nous qui sommes Aryens, devait par la Perse, par la Grèce, se répandre, s’infiltrer peu à peu vers l’Europe’.
33 Katharine Ellis, Interpreting the Musical Past: Early Music in Nineteenth-Century France (Oxford University Press, 2005), p. 157. Not everyone agreed that the Indo-European hypothesis had anything to offer musicology; regarding debates and resistance to the hypothesis in the Francophone context, see Asimov, ‘Fétis, Gevaert, and their Indo-European Hypotheses’, pp. 33–42.
34 Locke, Ralph, Musical Exoticism: Images and Reflections (Cambridge University Press, 2009), ch. 9.Google Scholar
35 Irving, David R. M., ‘Rethinking Early Modern “Western Art Music”: A Global History Manifesto’, IMS Musicological Brainfood, 3.1 (2019), p. 8.Google Scholar
36 Pasler has listed several of the examples discussed in this paragraph (‘India and its Music’, p. 47), although today digitized library catalogues make it easier to find many more cases. For operatic examples, see also, Assayag, L’Inde fabuleuse, chapter 1.
37 Charles-Édouard Lefebvre, Djelma, opéra en trois actes, libretto by Charles Lomon (Durand, 1894), p. 124; ‘Les premières mesures de cette phrase sont imitées d’un chant hindou ancien’.
38 Alphonse Duvernoy, Bacchus: Ballet en trois actes et cinq tableaux, libretto by Georges Hartmann and J. Hansen (Heugel, 1902), pp. 4, 58–63.
39 Hahn, Reynaldo, Le Dieu Bleu, libretto by Jean Cocteau and Frédéric de Madrazo (Heugel, 1911), p. 10; Claude Debussy, La Boîte à joujoux: Ballet pour enfants, libretto by André Hellé (Durand, 1913), p. 7; the full text of Debussy’s footnote, perhaps tongue-in-cheek, reads, ‘Vieux chant hindou qui sert, de nos jours encore, à apprivoiser les éléphants. Il est construit sur la gamme de “5h du matin” et, obligatoirement, en 5/4’.
40 Louis-Albert Bourgault-Ducoudray, Trente mélodies populaires de Basse-Bretagne (Henry Lemoine, 1885), pp. 14–16; ‘des caractères identiques se retrouvent dans la musique primitive de tous les peuples qui composent le groupe indo-européen, c’est-à-dire de race âryenne.’ On Bourgault-Ducoudray and Indo-Europeanism, see Pasler, Jann, ‘Race and Nation: Musical Acclimatisation and the Chansons Populaires in Third Republic France’, in Western Music and Race, ed. by Brown, Julie (Cambridge University Press, 2007), pp. 147–67Google Scholar (pp. 154–56); Inga Mai Groote, ‘Griechische Bretonen? Hintergründe und Funktionen der Modalität bei Louis-Albert Bourgault-Ducoudray’, Musiktheorie, 29.1 (2014), pp. 5–16; Panos Vlagopoulos, ‘“The Patrimony of Our Race”: Louis-Albert Bourgault-Ducoudray and the Emergence of the Discourse on Greek National Music’, Journal of Modern Greek Studies, 34.1 (2016), pp. 49–77, doi:10.1353/mgs.2016.0010.
41 Bourgault-Ducoudray, Trente mélodies populaires de Basse-Bretagne, p. 16; ‘si […] ces modes vénérables proviennent d’un héritage commun à tous les Aryens, on ne voit pas pourquoi nous n’exploiterions pas un domaine qui fait partie du patrimoine de notre race et qui est en vérité bien à nous.’
42 Bourgault-Ducoudray’s theories are in fact directly applied to Indian music in Philippe Stern, ‘La Musique indoue – Les Ragas’, La Revue musicale, 3.7 (1923), pp. 46–66, esp. pp. 64–66.
43 For details of Izéÿl’s plot and its internationally popular reception, see Samuel Thévoz, ‘The Yogi, the Prince, and the Courtesan’, in The Assimilation of Yogic Religions through Pop Culture, ed. by Paul G. Hackett (Lexington, 2017), pp. 7–34.
44 Bourgault-Ducoudray condoned such slight course corrections when justified by the ‘character’ — if not the letter — of a ‘mode’ (and what could be more ‘characteristically modal’ than a lowered leading-tone?); see Trente mélodies populaires de Grèce et d’Orient (Henry Lemoine, 1876), p. 8.
45 Louis-Albert Bourgault-Ducoudray, ‘Des airs que j’ai rapportés de Grèce’. Lettres de Bourgault-Ducoudray à Émile-Louis Burnouf, ed. by Peter Asimov, in Dictéco – Dictionnaire des écrits de compositeurs, 2021 <https://dicteco.huma-num.fr/fr/document/55909>, [accessed 26 June 2024] p. 132; ‘Gabriel Pierné a fait un emploi des plus remarquables des modes antiques dans sa musique d’Izéïl [sic] […] J’avais raison de prôner ces moyens nouveaux et les habiles s’en sont servi.’ It is plausible that Pierné conscientiously applied Bourgault-Ducoudray’s theories: not only may he have attended Bourgault-Ducoudray’s history lectures as a student at the Conservatoire, but the two were also family friends.
46 Another deployment of Indian ‘modes’ marked by quasi-archaeological paratextual labels is Héliogabale (1909), by Déodat de Séverac. Séverac’s ‘modes’ correspond to those in Fétis’s Histoire générale, and are used in conjunction with an arguably Indo-Europeanist representation of paganism at the dawn of the Roman Empire.
47 Joanny Grosset, ‘Contribution à l’étude de la musique hindoue’, in Mélanges de philologie indo-européenne, by Paul Regnaud, J. Grosset, and J.-M. Grandjean, Bibliothèque de la faculté de lettres de Lyon, 6 (Ernest Leroux, 1888), pp. 1–91; Bharata Muni, Bhāratīya-nāṭya-çāstram, ed. by Joanny Grosset, Annales de l’université de Lyon, 40 (E. Leroux, 1898).
48 Grosset, ‘Contribution’, p. 3; ‘remonte aux premières manifestations appréciables de la race indo-européenne à laquelle nous appartenons.’
49 Joanny Grosset, ‘Inde: Histoire de la musique depuis l’origine jusqu’à nos jours’, in Encyclopédie de la musique et dictionnaire du conservatoire, ed. by Albert Lavignac, 11 vols (Delagrave, 1913), I, pp. 257–376 (p. 274; ‘Goût de l’Arya pour la musique, la danse et les spectacles’; and p. 284; ‘La nuit des temps voile à jamais les premières manifestations musicales de cette race âryenne’).
50 Ibid., pp. 258–59; ‘brillent encore’; ‘L’Hindou, éminemment conservateur …’; ‘se sont passé le flambeau à moitié éteint de la merveilleuse civilisation de leurs pères’.
51 Martin Clayton, ‘Musical Renaissance and Its Margins in England and India, 1874–1914’, in Music and Orientalism in the British Empire, 1780s to 1940s: Portrayal of the East, ed. by Martin Clayton and Bennett Zon (Ashgate, 2007), pp. 71–93 (p. 74); Katherine Butler Schofield, ‘Reviving the Golden Age Again: “Classicization,” Hindustani Music, and the Mughals’, Ethnomusicology, 54.3 (2010), pp. 484–517 (p. 488), doi:10.5406/ethnomusicology.54.3.0484. On Tagore’s Hindu nationalism, see Gerry Farrell, Indian Music and the West (Oxford University Press, 1997), pp. 65–70; and Charles Capwell, ‘Representing “Hindu” Music to the Colonial and Native Elite of Calcutta’, in Hindustani Music, Thirteenth to Twentieth Centuries, ed. by Joep Bor (Manohar, 2010), pp. 285–311.
52 Grosset, ‘Inde’, p. 259; ‘poursuivre sur place l’étude patiente des débris subsistant encore de l’art ancien …’
53 Grosset was actually in academic dialogue with Day, who cited Grosset’s 1888 study of the Nāṭyaśāstra (see Charles Russell Day, The Music and Musical Instruments of Southern India and the Deccan (Novello, Ewer & Co., 1891), p. 161). On Day, with related discussion of the stakes of musical transcription, see Bennett Zon, Representing Non-Western Music in Nineteenth-Century Britain (University of Rochester Press, 2007), pp. 255–60.
54 After leaving Eton, Day joined the British military and was dispatched to India, where he fought against Mapilla uprisings in Malabar in the 1880s. He died fighting in the Second Boer War in South Africa. On Day’s treatise in the context of British imperialism, broader Hindu nationalist classicization projects, and attendant Islamophobia, see Bakhle, Two Men and Music, pp. 57–62, and Subramanian, From the Tanjore Court, pp. 60–62.
55 Day, The Music and Musical Instruments, p. 3. Day’s Indo-Europeanist investments extend to organology: comparing the ancient Persian ‘quanūn’ [qanun] to the psaltery, he declares, ‘Hence the origin of the complicated pianoforte of the present day can thus be traced to the Aryans. And so with many others’ (p. 102).
56 If this contention is fundamentally discreditable on the basis of its essentialist premises, it may also be historically discredited on the basis of centuries of extensive land- and sea-based exchanges between Southern India and Northern Indian, Arabian, and East African regions, for example.
57 Grosset, ‘Inde’, p. 267; ‘L’Inde méridionale eut moins à souffrir des commotions qui bouleversèrent le reste de la péninsule, et resta plus longtemps que les régions du Nord et du Dékhan sous la domination purement hindoue’; ‘C’est dans cette région que devait se perpétuer plus tard la pure tradition de l’art hindou, par l’étude ininterrompue et la conservation des monuments sanscrits’.
58 See, for example, Amanda J. Weidman, Singing the Classical, Voicing the Modern: The Postcolonial Politics of Music in South India (Duke University Press, 2006), pp. 166–67; on the contested distinction between Indo-European and Dravidian languages by British imperial linguists, see p. 313 n. 22, and Thomas R. Trautmann, Languages and Nations: The Dravidian Proof in Colonial Madras (University of California Press, 2006).
59 For a range of thorough introductions to the scheme in English, see, for example, P. Sambamoorthy, The Melakarta Janya-Raga Scheme with an Explanatory Chart and Two Appendices (Indian Music Publishing House, 1929); R. Rangaramanuja Ayyangar, History of South Indian (Carnatic) Music, from Vedic Times to the Present ([n. p., 1972), ch. 17; Harold S. Powers, ‘The Background of the South Indian Raga-System’ (unpublished doctoral dissertation, Princeton University, 1958), pp. 17–22; or Ludwig Pesch, The Oxford Illustrated Companion to South Indian Classical Music (Oxford University Press, 2009), pp. 161–81. See also Weidman’s response to the question, ‘what does such a system exclude?’ (Singing the Classical, p. 235).
60 Powers further backdates the spark of a heptatonic taxonomy to Rāmāmātya’s Svaramelakalānidhi (1550) (‘The Background’, p. 27); while Pesch cites research by K. C. D. Brahaspati demonstrating the historical influence of the maqām system, via Sufi musician Amīr Khusrau, on Veṅkaṭamakhin — a compelling hypothesis which would have been inadmissible to those invested in essentialist or Hindu nationalist narratives of Karnatic music (The Oxford Illustrated Companion, p. 170).
61 Quoted in Ayyangar, History, p. 187; see also, Powers, ‘The Background’, p. 45. This is not atypical of Indian music theory; as Lewis Rowell notes: ‘It was the job of theory to provide the widest selection of possibilities, but it remained for practice to select the most pleasing of these arrangements’ (Music and Musical Thought in Early India (University of Chicago Press, 1992), p. 154).
62 Sambamoorthy, The Melakarta Janya-Raga Scheme, p. 11; Pesch, The Oxford Illustrated Companion, p. 171.
63 Govinda, The Saṃgraha-Cūdā-Maṇi of Govinda and the Bāhattara-Meḷa-Kartā of Veṅkaṭa-Kavi, ed. by S. Subrahmaṇya Śāstrī (Adyar Library, 1938), pp. 46–48. On the ‘kaṭapayādi’ mnemonic system, see Sambamoorthy, The Melakarta Janya-Raga Scheme, pp. 14–16; or Pesch, The Oxford Illustrated Companion, pp. 177–78.
64 Weidman, Singing the Classical, pp. 234–36, 319 n. 34. According to Lakshmi Subramanian, Indian debates over the melakartas in the early twentieth century frequently ‘emphasized the isolation of the Deccan from Muslim influence’, in efforts to preserve the melakartas’ Hindu pedigree (From the Tanjore Court, p. 88).
65 Day, The Music and Musical Instruments, p. 30 (emphasis original). Day apparently referred to sources in the Telugu script (p. 30); he cites neither Veṅkaṭamakhin nor Govindācārya among his Sanskrit sources (pp. 165–68).
66 Day, The Music and Musical Instruments, pp. 47–56.
67 Ibid., p. 40.
68 Grosset, ‘Inde’, pp. 324–66.
69 Ibid., p. 329.
70 Day, The Music and Musical Instruments, p. xi.
71 See, e.g., Grosset, ‘Inde’, pp. 257–58.
72 Regnaud in Bharata Muni, Bhāratīya-nāṭya-çāstram, p. x; ‘une parenté originelle qui remonte jusqu’à la période lointaine et primitive dite d’unité indo-européenne’.
73 Arthur Henry Fox Strangways would also embrace this model in his Music of Hindostan (Oxford University Press, 1914): ‘Neither is there any suggestion that Greece borrowed from India, or vice versa; their musical systems, like their languages, were no doubt part of their common Aryan inheritance — with enough likeness and unlikeness to make the comparison convincing’ (p. 122).
74 Grosset, ‘Inde’, p. 258: ‘La littérature de toute les époques s’est enrichie d’emprunts; prenant son bien où elle le trouvait, elle a su profiter habilement de recherches patientes qui l’ont souvent conduite à une imitation en quelque sorte créatrice, à une adaptation intelligente des immortelles productions des civilisations éteintes. Les arts plastiques n’ont pas moins gagné à la soudaine résurrection d’un passé longtemps oublié. Pourquoi n’en serait-il pas de même, à certains égards, de la musique?’
75 There is a parallel history to tell of British composers — including Gustav Holst, Maud MacCarthy, and John Foulds — who composed with the melakartas during a similar period, although the intellectual and relational contexts contrast considerably with the French case. See Ghuman, Nalini, Resonances of the Raj: India in the English Musical Imagination, 1897–1947 (Oxford University Press, 2014)CrossRefGoogle Scholar, and Sen, Suddhaseel, ‘ Orientalism and beyond: Tagore, Foulds, and cross-cultural exchanges between Indian and Western musicians’, in Studies on a Global History of Music: A Balzan Musicology Project, ed. by Reinhard Strohm (Routledge, 2018), pp. 274–307.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
76 Maurice Emmanuel, ‘Leçon d’ouverture au Conservatoire, le 9 décembre 1909’, L’Actualité musicale: annexe de la Revue musicale S.I.M., 1910, pp. 24–30 (p. 25); ‘Je reprendrai pour mon compte l’apologie de la musique ethnique, de la musique “de race”.’
77 Ibid., p. 25; Maurice Emmanuel, ‘Grèce’, in Encyclopédie de la musique et dictionnaire du conservatoire, pp. 377–540 (p. 380).
78 Woollett, Histoire, I, p. 27; ‘créer de toutes pièces une musique neuve et originale en inventant quelque gamme bizarre et en écrivant la mélodie et l’harmonie exclusivement avec les notes de cette gamme.’
79 Ibid., I, pp. 53–58.
80 Grosset, ‘Inde’, p. 371.
81 Quoted in Messing, Scott, Neoclassicism in Music: From the Genesis of the Concept Through the Schoenberg/Stravinsky Polemic (UMI Research Press, 1988), p. 12.Google Scholar
82 Roussel, ‘Carnet d’esquisses d’Albert Roussel’, 1909, Brussels, Royal Library of Belgium (hereafter, B-Br), Mus. MS-1562. Roussel’s travels with the French Navy in 1889–90 do not appear to have included India.
83 Manfred Kelkel, ‘Roussel et l’exotisme musical’, in Albert Roussel: musique et esthétique, ed. by Manfred Kelkel (Vrin, 1989), pp. 71–83 (pp. 78–79).
84 Kelkel’s reading of these two works is notable for its attention to their contrasts, although he still reads Padmâvatî in opposition to Roussel’s ‘classicism’.
85 Quoted in Pasler, ‘Race, Orientalism, and Distinction’, p. 94.
86 The two sources are Padmavat by Malik Muhammad Jayasi (c. 1540) and Gora Badal ri Katha by Jatmal Nahar (1623), which were both examined by Théodore Pavie in La Légende de Padmanî, reine de Tchitor (Imprimerie Impériale, 1856). On the many retellings of this legend, see Sreenivasan, Ramya, The Many Lives of a Rajput Queen: Heroic Pasts in India, c. 1500–1900 (University of Washington Press, 2007).Google Scholar For the version in Roussel’s journal, see Albert Roussel, Lettres et écrits, ed. by Nicole Labelle (Flammarion, 1987), pp. 183–84.
87 Hugh Macdonald, ‘Padmâvatî: Œuvre Lyrique ou chorégraphique’, in Albert Roussel: musique et esthétique, pp. 92–103 (p. 92). On Padmâvatî and the revival of opéra-ballet, see Caddy, Davinia, The Ballets Russes and Beyond: Music and Dance in Belle-Époque Paris (Cambridge University Press, 2012), pp. 201–05.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
88 Prior to Roussel, Holst had borrowed several of these scales directly from Day for his Choral Hymns from the Rig Veda, op. 26 (1908–12); see Nalini Ghuman, Resonances of the Raj, pp. 130–37.
89 Louis Laloy, ‘La Musique chez soi’, Comœdia, 12 February 1914, p. 2; ‘volumineux traité sur la musique indienne, avec exemples, figures et tableaux’.
90 Roussel’s diaries show that he met Woollett on at least one occasion in 1914 (4 April) (Bibliothèque nationale de France (hereafter F-Pn), RES VMF MS-120). On Séverac and Héliogabale, see above, note 46.
91 Arthur Hoérée, ‘Lettres d’Albert Roussel à Louis Laloy’, Cahiers Albert Roussel, 2 (1979), pp. 72–74 (p. 73); ‘Il peut venir après la guerre un tas d’Hindous en France et il convient de faire attention à tous ces détails!’
92 Henry Malherbe, Le Temps, 6 June 1923, p. 3; ‘Une pure raison ordonne chaque partie de l’ouvrage’.
93 Boulanger wrote of Gora’s aria, ‘This first melody is constructed on a scale we find employed only in the Greek system; it is employed in the Greek system, but generally comes from the Aryan …’ (Nadia Boulanger: Thoughts on Music, ed. by Jeanice Brooks and Kimberly Francis, Eastman Studies in Music (University of Rochester Press, 2020), p. 371).
94 Arthur Hoérée, ‘La Technique de Piano d’Albert Roussel’, La Revue musicale, 10.6 (1929), pp. 84–103 (p. 88); ‘la plus féconde au point de vue modal’; and Paul Landormy, ‘Albert Roussel (1869–1937)’, trans. by Manton Monroe Marble, The Musical Quarterly, 24.4 (1938), pp. 512–27, doi:10.1093/mq/XXIV.4.512.
95 Richard Langham Smith, ‘Padmâvatî’, Grove Music Online (2002), doi:10.1093/gmo/9781561592630.article.O003313; Jean-Marc Moura, La Littérature des lointains. Histoire de l’exotisme européen au XXe siècle (Honoré Champion, 1998), p. 390 n. 17; Hervé Lacombe, The Keys to French Opera in the Nineteenth Century, trans. by Edward Schneider (University of California Press, 2001), p. 205; Assayag, L’Inde fabuleuse, p. 61 (‘une authentique Inde musicale qui n’était plus une simple couleur musicale […]’).
96 For a more detailed analysis of Padmâvatî in terms of Grosset’s scales, see Kelkel, ‘Roussel et l’exotisme’, pp. 80–81. The nomenclature varies slightly depending on source and language: for example, where Govinda writes ‘Kāmavardhani’ in Sanskrit, Day (following Telugu sources) and Grosset (following Day) write ‘Kâmavârdini’ for the fifty-first melakarta. I will therefore use the numerical designations, consistent throughout the sources.
97 The sympathetic identification would be further enhanced by the fact that the four extracts of Padmâvatî published as offprints were arias sung by the opera’s Hindu characters (three of them ‘modal’), allowing French amateurs and publics to embody the melakartas themselves.
98 I borrow the image of Russian dolls from Katharine Ellis, ‘Patrimoine in French Music: Layers and Crosscurrents from the Romantics to the 1920s’, in Historical Interplay in French Music and Culture, 1860–1960, ed. by Deborah Mawer (Routledge, 2018), pp. 15–37 (p. 20).
99 Roussel, Lettres et écrits, p. 266; ‘je souhaite que chaque race conserve dans sa musique les caractères ethniques qui lui donnent son aspect particulier et son originalité.’
100 ‘Padmâvatî, épreuves d’imprimerie, annotations d’Albert Roussel’, pp. 51, 91, 123; B-Br, Mus. 5.938. As to Roussel’s potential sources: none of the sketches in his travel notebook match Nâkamtî’s or Padmâvatî’s arias. Apparently the ‘Chant Arabe’ was overheard by Roussel in Touggourt, Algeria; Nadia Boulanger, ‘L’Œuvre théâtrale d’Albert Roussel’, La Revue musicale, 10.6 (1929), pp. 104–12 (p. 111).
101 Hugh Macdonald contends that Padmâvatî would have become more enduringly popular had it premiered in 1914, as intended — when tastes for exoticism (and ballet) remained at a pinnacle — rather than in 1923 (‘Padmâvatî’, p. 95). Relatedly, Roussel abandoned another planned ‘opéra oriental’ during the War years, Le Roi Tobol (Roussel, Lettres et écrits, pp. 55, 296).
102 See dossier of press clippings at F-Pn, 8-RSUPP-1949.
103 Roussel, Lettres et écrits, p. 210: ‘Ces quatre années ne furent pas perdues pour moi. Je les employai à réfléchir sur mon art. J’avais, comme tant d’autres, été entraîné par les modes nouveaux de la création musicale. L’impressionnisme m’avait séduit; ma musique s’attachait trop peut-être, aux moyens extérieurs, aux procédés pittoresques qui — j’en ai jugé ainsi plus tard — lui enlevaient une part de sa vérité spécifique.’
104 Another parallel might be drawn between Roussel’s rhetorical practice and that of Stravinsky, who denied his quotations of folk melodies in Le Sacre du printemps, appealing to a notion of ‘unconscious “folk” memory’ (quoted in Richard Taruskin, ‘Russian Folk Melodies in “The Rite of Spring”’, Journal of the American Musicological Society, 33.3 (1980), pp. 501–43 (p. 503), doi:10.2307/831304) which might be likened to Roussel’s ideas of ‘ethnic character’.
105 Quoted in Kelkel, ‘Roussel et l’exotisme’, p. 80; on Roussel’s own modal analyses of his works, with reproduced excerpts, see Kawka, Daniel, ‘Une auto-analyse inédite d’Albert Roussel’, Revue internationale de musique française, 19 (1986), pp. 83–91.Google Scholar
106 Boulanger, ‘L’Œuvre théâtrale’, p. 297; ‘Modifications des tétracordes altérant la gamme et formant de nouvelles harmonies.’
107 Roussel, Lettres et écrits, pp. 139–40.
108 Maurice Emmanuel, ‘Le Corps de l’harmonie d’après Aristote’, Revue des études grecques, 32 (1919), pp. 179–89 (p. 189); ‘une manifestation des instincts profonds de la race aryenne’.
109 Ibid., p. 184; ‘Il régit encore les 72 échelles modales de l’Inde contemporaine. La vieille langue musicale s’y est perpétuée aussi fidèlement que les rites religieux, dont elle semble d’ailleurs, faire partie intégrante’.
110 Ibid., p. 187; ‘Toutes les échelles modales helléniques, dans les deux genres diatonique et chromatique, se retrouvent dans le tableau des modes hindous’.
111 Ibid., p. 188; ‘l’Harmonie hindoue de la forme[…]a été pratiquée par les Grecs, il y a plus de deux mille ans’.
112 Ibid., p. 189; ‘Les Aryens de l’Inde semblent avoir pris à tâche d’inventorier et de développer, de nos jours même, les forces latentes de antiques séchelles [sic].’
113 Ibid., p. 184; ‘mine modale d’une inépuisable richesse’.
114 Ibid., p. 189; ‘L’aède hindou qui fait vibrer encore les Harmonies par lesquelles Eschyle et Sophocle secouaient les spectateurs de leurs drames, possède des ressources dont nos artistes […] ont le grand tort de se priver’.
115 For a fuller analysis of the sonatina, see Eleanor Carlson, ‘Maurice Emmanuel and the Six Sonatines for Piano’ (unpublished doctoral dissertation, Boston University, 1974), pp. 64–78; however, analysis in terms of melakartas raises occasional ambiguities depending on whether one interprets the ‘modes’ in relation to a fixed ‘tonic’, C (as they are given by Grosset), or transposed in relation to a local key area.
116 Maurice Emmanuel, Sonatine IV sur des modes hindous (Durand, 1920), ‘Note’; ‘Les Hindous, qui possèdent 72 modes mélodiques, ne pratiquent point nos accords. Les pièces qui suivent sont donc une utilisation harmonique, libre, de diverses échelles empruntées à ce très riche fond.’
117 For two illuminating discussions of Emmanuel’s conflicted identity between ‘scholar’ and ‘artist’, see Christophe Corbier’s introduction to Maurice Emmanuel, Lettres choisies: 1880–1938, ed. by Christophe Corbier (Vrin, 2017), pp. 26–36; and Dorf, Performing Antiquity, ch. 4.
118 Emmanuel, Lettres choisies, p. 357; ‘Vous devinez l’horreur que j’en ai moi-même, et de quelle disgrâce on m’accable en me traitant de musicologue et de professeur! […] Je suis un musicien obligé de professer, mais pour qui l’histoire est un répertoire d’oeuvres belles et vivantes, et non un vieux tiroir plein d’objets désuets!’
119 Ibid., p. 389; ‘Et j’ai atteint la soixantaine, avec pour toute réclame, mon étiquette de “savant” dans le dos; musicologue; érudit; helléniste etc.’
120 Ibid., p. 533; ‘Sonatine IV en hypolydisti chromatique; mais pour ne point paraître un érudit en os, je l’ai affublée de l’étiquette “modes hindous”; en effet cette échelle est l’un des 72 modes hindous, théoriques.’
121 Other instances include La Naissance de la Lyre (his Grecian follow-up to Padmâvatî in collaboration with Théodore Reinach, composed in 1922–23, featuring a melakarta in an extended harp passage); Sonata No. 2 for violin and piano (op. 24, 1924); and ‘Réponse d’une épouse sage’ from Deux poèmes chinois (op. 35, 1927), a superposition of orientalisms.
122 Dupré does not acknowledge, if he is aware, that the melakartas themselves are a theoretical abstraction from another improvisatory tradition in the Indian context based on rāgas.
123 Marcel Dupré, Traité d’improvisation à l’orgue (Leduc, 1925), p. 28; ‘sources de la Mélodie’.
124 Ibid., p. 28; ‘les classant dans un ordre aussi naturel que possible, et facile à retenir.’
125 Ibid., p. 31; ‘La plus intéressante et la plus complète des Musiques exotiques est la Musique Hindoue’.
126 Emmanuel, Lettres choisies, p. 414: ‘Je vous enverrai une courte étude faite il y a quelques années (à la demande des Études grecques) sur les modes hindous comparés aux modes helléniques.’
127 Tournemire’s selection of melakartas appears unsystematic and a bit sloppy: of the twenty-eight modes, two pairs are duplicated. Judging by his manuscripts, these duplications were introduced during two unscrupulous retranscriptions — first from Grosset’s table into his notes, then from his notes into the manuscript for the Précis (F-Pn, RES VM DOS-227).
128 Charles Tournemire, Précis d’exécution, de registration et d’improvisation à l’orgue (Max Eschig, 1936), p. 116: ‘Avant que de clore toutes ces réflexions sur l’Art de l’improvisation à l’Orgue, nous allons consigner ici quelques ‘échelles’ antiques sur lesquelles l’improvisateur ingénieux pourra s’appuyer pour édifier, au gré de sa fantaisie, séance tenante: Chorals, Fantaisies, Sonates, etc.’ On the relationship between improvisation and composition in the French organ tradition, with particular reference to Tournemire, see Maw, David, ‘Improvisation as Composition: The Recorded Organ Improvisations of Vierne and Tournemire’, in Distributed Creativity: Collaboration and Improvisation in Contemporary Music, ed. by Clarke, Eric F. and Doffman, Mark (Oxford University Press, 2017), pp. 239–66.Google Scholar
129 For analyses of Tournemire’s use of melakartas in these works, see Timothy Tikker, ‘La Symphonie-Choral pour orgue de Charles Tournemire: Vers une explication de sa forme’, L’Orgue, 278–279 (2007), pp. 89–100; and Mengdi Li, ‘Douze Préludes-Poèmes, Op. 58 by Charles Tournemire: A Stylistic Analysis’ (unpublished doctoral dissertation, University of South Carolina, 2019), ch. 4. The Préludes-poèmes were published only in 1970, without their theological titles; these can be found attached to the score manuscript (F-Pn, MS-18945).
130 Quoted in Pascal Ianco, Charles Tournemire, ou, le mythe de Tristan (Geneva: Papillon, 2001), 74; ‘des sonorités nouvelles, l’emploi de nombreux modes hindous…C’est du grand piano.’
131 Dupré, Traité, p. 31; ‘l’assimilation d’un certain nombre de ces Modes […] essayer ensuite de leur appliquer leur harmonie naturelle, sans sortir des notes du Mode.’
132 See above, note 28.
133 Maurice Emmanuel, ‘La Polymodie’, La Revue musicale, 1928, pp. 197–213 (p. 197); ‘Polytonie envahissante’. See Milhaud, Darius, ‘Polytonalité et atonalité’, La Revue musicale, 4 (1923), pp. 29–44.Google Scholar
134 Emmanuel, ‘La Polymodie’, p. 211; ‘pour que les caractères du mode soient perçus et goûtés’.
135 Ibid., p. 203; ‘l’usage que le peintre peut faire des couleurs de sa palette’.
136 Ibid., pp. 205–06.
137 See Gelbart, Matthew, The Invention of ‘Folk Music’ and ‘Art Music’: Emerging Categories from Ossian to Wagner (Cambridge University Press, 2007), ch. 4.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
138 Emmanuel, ‘La Polymodie’, pp. 203–04. Emmanuel was not alone. Citing the ‘principles exposed by the Karnatic modes’ in Grosset’s chapter, chemist and pianist Georges Urbain proposed in 1924 a classification of ‘all possible melodic modes’, arriving at a total of 461 (Le Tombeau d’Aristoxène. Essai sur la musique (Octave Doin, 1924), pp. 22–31, 65–74). In 1929, poet-mathematician Pius Servien proposed his own system of 462 heptatonic modes (Introduction à une connaissance scientifique des faits musicaux (Blanchard, 1929), pp. 46–47).
139 Emmanuel, ‘La Polymodie’, pp. 204–05.
140 Jolivet had experimented with various modified Greek and synthetic modes throughout the 1930s; he claimed to have realized only after the fact that ‘modes’ he employed in his Piano Concerto (1950) corresponded to melakartas. See Lucie Kayas, André Jolivet (Fayard, 2005), pp. 391–92.
141 One narrative is told in Richard Taruskin, Stravinsky and the Russian Traditions: A Biography of the Works through Mavra, 2 vols (University of California Press, 1996), especially ch. 4. Messiaen effectively substantiates the Russian-centric narrative by citing octatonic examples from Rimsky-Korsakov and Scriabin in Technique de mon langage musical (p. 52). Another, French-centred, history is told by Sylvia Kahan, who suggests that Edmond de Polignac’s independent formulation of octatonicism was perhaps motivated by Bourgault-Ducoudray (In Search of New Scales: Prince Edmond de Polignac, Octatonic Explorer (University of Rochester Press, 2009), pp. 42–45).
142 For a recent and cogent reading of Messiaen’s inheritance from Emmanuel, with reference to the latter’s Indo-Europeanism, see Panos Vlagopoulos, ‘Le Bras de Vénus et le corps d’Apollon: généalogie de la morale et de l’idéologie musicale de Maurice Emmanuel’, in L’Enseignement de Maurice Emmanuel: Musique, histoire, éducation, ed. by Christophe Corbier and Sylvie Douche, (Delatour, 2020), pp. 131–43.
143 Even having codified his system, Messiaen’s use of the ‘higher’ modes (beyond 2 and 3) remained comparatively rare.
144 Quoted in Stephen Broad, Olivier Messiaen: Journalism 1935–1939 (Ashgate, 2012), p. 81.
145 On the Aryanist reception of Ariane, complicated by Dukas’s Jewish identity, see Anya Suschitzky, ‘Ariane et Barbe-Bleue: Dukas, the Light and the Well’, Cambridge Opera Journal, 9.2 (1997), pp. 133–61 (pp. 149–52), doi:10.1017/S0954586700005231. Dukas was keenly interested in Indian religion and mythology, and had begun an opera set in India (L’Arbre de science) for which the score is now lost.
146 Quoted in Broad, Olivier Messiaen, pp. 130 and 123.
147 Quoted in Hill, Peter and Simeone, Nigel, Messiaen (Yale University Press, 2005), p. 77.Google Scholar
148 , Daniel-Lesur, ‘Du Fond et de la Forme’, La Revue musicale, 186 (September–November 1938), pp. 126–30 (p. 130).Google Scholar
149 Quoted in Hill and Simeone, Messiaen, pp. 112–13 (emphasis original).
150 Jacques Chailley, L’Imbroglio des modes (Leduc, 1960), p. 87.
151 Quoted in Susan Landale, ‘Olivier Messiaen: étude de son langage musical à travers l’œuvre d’orgue’, L’Orgue, 208 (1988), pp. 1–25 (p. 18): ‘la forme s’apparente aux râgas indous [sic], aux séquences et graduels du plain-chant, aux chorals ornés de J.-S. Bach’. Years later, Messiaen doubled down on the assertion that the melody is related to ‘rāgas’ by its ‘character’ (Technique de mon langage musical, I, p. 59).
152 F-Pn, RES VMA MS-1954 (1-2), 4. Messiaen did make a similar claim the following decade in Technique de mon langage musical, p. 52.
153 From the late 1930s, Messiaen borrowed two other elements from Grosset’s article — jātis (defined as melodic contours), and deśītālas (rhythmical patterns) — both of which Grosset transcribed from the thirteenth-century Saṅgītaratnākara. Although these two categories of borrowing sprawl beyond this article’s scope, they may usefully be revisited amid shared discourses and contexts of Indo-Europeanism and philology, combined with recent insights into Messiaen’s ‘borrowing technique’. See Balmer, Yves, Lacôte, Thomas, and Murray, Christopher Brent, Le Modèle et l’invention: Messiaen et la technique de l’emprunt (Symétrie, 2017), especially pp. 354–55.Google Scholar
154 Olivier Messiaen, Traité de rythme, de couleur, et d’ornithologie (1949–1992), 7 vols (Leduc, 1994), I, pp. 247–49; VII, pp. 27–31. Messiaen’s Traité was only published posthumously by Yvonne Loriod, on the basis of his designs and pedagogical materials.
155 The use of the term ‘Hindu’ by Messiaen and scholars of Messiaen today reinscribes, if unwittingly, efforts since Jones to distinguish ‘pure’ tradition from ‘foreign’ Muslim influence.
156 For such histories, see, for example, La Vie musicale sous Vichy, ed. by Myriam Chimènes (Complexe, 2001); Sara Iglesias, Musicologie et Occupation (Maison des sciences de l’homme, 2014); Karine Le Bail, La Musique au pas (CNRS, 2016); Fulcher, Jane F., Renegotiating French Identity: Musical Culture and Creativity in France during Vichy and the German Occupation (Oxford University Press, 2018).CrossRefGoogle Scholar
157 Leslie Sprout, ‘Les Commandes de Vichy, aube d’une ère nouvelle’, in La Vie musicale sous Vichy, pp. 157–78 (pp. 173–76); and Mehlman, Jeffrey, Adventures in the French Trade: Fragments Toward a Life (Stanford University Press, 2010), pp. 27–29.Google Scholar Despite the work’s programmatic content, Bachelet appears not to have attempted engagement with Indian musical sources. On the place of ‘India’ in French Nazism, see Assayag, L’Inde fabuleuse, pp. 149–81.
158 Meanwhile the stakes of the melakarta scheme had also risen in India, becoming a central point of contention in debates over defining a national music tradition, and by 1925, despite their limitations, the melakartas had prevailed over various alternatives as the dominant system used for rāga classification (see Weidman, Singing the Classical, p. 235). Whether Indian advocates for the scheme were aware of their reception in France merits investigation.
159 Georgina Born and David Hesmondhalgh, ‘Introduction: On Difference, Representation, and Appropriation in Music’, in Western Music and Its Others, pp. 1–58 (pp. 45–46) (emphasis original).
160 For another discussion of ‘aestheticization’ as an active and ideological process, see Taylor, Timothy D., Beyond Exoticism: Western Music and the World (Duke University Press, 2007), pp. 99–102.Google Scholar
161 Trautmann, Languages and Nations, ch. 2; Gildas Salmon, ‘Savoirs orientalistes et savoirs brahmaniques : une généalogie indo-européenne de la grammaire comparée’, in L’Idée indo-européenne, ed. by Aramini and Macé, pp. 26–37.
162 Salmon, ‘Savoirs orientalistes’, p. 32.
163 For a penetrating version of this argument with respect to philology broadly, sensitive to the ways in which (especially German) Indologists reshaped the insights of comparative philology for racist ends, see Pollock, Sheldon, ‘Deep Orientalism? Notes on Sanskrit and Power Beyond the Raj’, in Orientalism and the Postcolonial Predicament: Perspectives on South Asia, ed. by Breckenridge, Carol A. and van der Veer, Peter (University of Pennsylvania Press, 1993), pp. 76–133 Google Scholar.
164 See, e.g., Irving, ‘Rethinking Early Modern “Western Art Music”’, pp. 6–10; Martin Clayton makes a related point specifically in relation to the categories of ‘Indian’ and ‘Western’ music (‘Musical Renaissance’, p. 174).
165 For similar appeals to such methodological questions of agency and cross-cultural representation in the postcolonial interpretation of music history (especially with respect to India), see Matthew Pritchard, ‘Cultural Autonomy and the “Indian Exception”: Debating the Aesthetics of Indian Classical Music in Early 20th-Century Calcutta’; and Sen, , ‘ Orientalism and Beyond’; both in Studies on a Global History of Music: A Balzan Musicology Project , ed. by Strohm, Reinhard (Routledge, 2020), pp. 256–73Google Scholar and pp. 274–307 respectively.