Hostname: page-component-586b7cd67f-l7hp2 Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-28T23:31:37.589Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

His Master's Voice? Exploring Qawwali and ‘Gramophone Culture’ in South Asia 1

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  17 November 2008

Regula Burckhardt Qureshi
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Extract

‘No modern communications medium is more intrusive in modern Indian life than recorded and electronically amplified sound’ (Babb 1995, p. 10). In South Asia, even the most exclusive student of unmediated music-making cannot avoid a mediated public soundscape that may well transmit the music being studied over loudspeakers, radios, televisions, and cassette players. This is certainly the case for qawwali, a musical genre which is firmly embedded in Sufi practice, but is also widely recorded and media-disseminated for as long as the life of the Indian record industry itself. Acknowledging this musical reality after years of live study has prompted me first to situate the study of recorded qawwali vis-à-vis my own scholarly conventions and vis-à-vis the pioneering work on sound recording done in the very region of my own study. The aim is to address the problematic of an ethnographic approach to recorded qawwali, and to present preliminary findings, including some culturally meaningful examples from the repertoire.

Type
Articles
Information
Popular Music , Volume 18 , Issue 1 , January 1999 , pp. 63 - 98
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1999

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Ahmed, Aziz. 1963. ‘The Sufi and the Sultan in Pre-Mughal Muslim India’, Der Islam, 38 pp. 142–53Google Scholar
Ahmed, Zahir. 1968. ‘Liner Notes’, Qawwalis by Old Masters, Pearu Qawwal and Kaloo Qawwal, EMI 3AEX-5191Google Scholar
Appadurai, Arjun and Breckenridge, Carol. 1990. ‘Public culture in Late 20th century India’, Items (SSRC), 44(4), pp. 77–80Google Scholar
Arnold, Alison. 1988. ‘Popular film song in India: a case of mass-market musical eclecticism’, Popular Music, 7(2), pp. 177–88Google Scholar
Attali, Jacques. 1985. Noise: The Political Economy of Music, trans. by Massumi, B. (Minneapolis)Google Scholar
Babb, Lawrence. 1995. ‘Introduction’, in Media and the Transformation of Religion in South Asia, eds Babb, L. and Wadley, S. (Philadelphia) pp. 1–18Google Scholar
Barnouw, Erik and Krishnaswamy, S. 1980. Indian Film, 2nd ed. (New York)Google Scholar
Bhyrappa, S.L. and Ranade, Ashok. (eds.) 1988. Gangubai Hangal (Hubli, India)Google Scholar
Chandvankar, Suresh. 1995. ‘Programme on “Records of Pandit Ravi Shankar”’, The Record News, 19, pp. 7–9Google Scholar
Dhond, M.V. n.d. The Evolution of Khyal. (New Delhi)Google Scholar
Donakowski, Conrad L. 1977. A Muse for the Masses: Ritual and Music in an Age of Democratic Revolution, 1770–1870. (Chicago)Google Scholar
Enayatullah, Anwar, of Karachi, formerly Hyderabad, India. 1976. ‘How Good are the New Trends in Qawwali?’, Karachi Morning News, 15 02Google Scholar
Erlmann, Veit 1991. Nightsong: Performance, Power, and Practice in South Africa (Chicago)Google Scholar
Farrell, Gerry. 1993. ‘The early days of the gramophone industry in India: historical, social and musical perspectives,’ British Journal of Ethnomusicology, 2, pp. 31–53CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Gronow, Pekka. 1981. ‘The record industry comes to the Orient’, Ethnomusicology, 25(2), pp. 251–84CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Gronow, Pekka. 1983. ‘The record industry; the growth of a mass medium’, Popular Music, 3, pp. 53–75Google Scholar
Guilbault, Jocelyne. 1990. ‘Authority' revisited: the “Other” in anthropology and popular music studies’, Ethnomusicology, 34(3)Google Scholar
Guilbault, Jocelyne. 1993 Zouk: World Music in the West Indies. (Chicago)Google Scholar
Hall, S. 1977. ‘Culture, the Media and the “Ideological Effect”’, in Mass Communication and Society, eds Curran, J. et al. (London)Google Scholar
Hamm, Charles. 1991. ‘The constant companion of man: separate development, radio bantu and music’, Popular Music, 10(2), pp. 147–73Google Scholar
Hebdige, Dick. 1979. Subculture: the meaning of style (New York)Google Scholar
Hennion, Antoine (1983). ‘The production of success: an anti-musicology of the pop song’, Popular Music, 3, pp. 159–95Google Scholar
Henry, Edward O. 1988. Chant the Names of God: Musical Culture in Bhojpuri-speaking India (San Diego)Google Scholar
Hyderabadi, Akmal. 1982. Qawwali Amir Khusrau se Shakila Bano tak (Delhi)Google Scholar
Imam, Hakim Mohammad Karam. 1959–1960. ‘Ma'danu'l-Musiqi’, transl. in part by Govind Vidyarthia', under the title ‘Melody through the Centuries’, Sangeet Natak Akademi Bulletin, 11(12), pp. 6–14, 13–26, 30, 49Google Scholar
Joshi, G.N. 1977. ‘The Phonograph in India’, NCPA Journal, 6(3) pp. 5–27Google Scholar
Joshi, G.N. 1984. Down Melody Lane (Hyderabad)Google Scholar
Joshi, G.N. 1988. ‘A concise history of the phonograph industry in India’, Popular Music pp. 147–156CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Kayser, Dietrich. 1976. Schlager – Das Lied als Ware: Untersuchungen zu einer Kategorie der Illusionsindustrie (Stuttgart)Google Scholar
Khan, Nawab Dargah Quli c. 1735 (1949). Purani Dehli ke Halat, transl. from Persian by Nizami, Khwaja Hasan (Delhi)Google Scholar
Kinnear, Michael S. 1985. A Discography of Hindustani and Karnatic Music, Discographies, no. 17 (Westport, T)Google Scholar
Lelyveld, David. 1988. ‘Upon the subdominant: administering music on all-India Radio’, unpublished paperGoogle Scholar
Lelyveld, David. 1994. ‘The fate of Hindustani: colonial knowledge and the project of a national language’, in Orientalism and the Postcolonial Predicament, eds Breckenridge, C. and van der Veer, P. (Delhi)Google Scholar
Luthra, H. R. 1986, Indian Broadcasting (New Delhi)Google Scholar
Manuel, Peter. 1988a. ‘Popular Music in India: 1901–86’, Popular Music, 7(2), pp. 157–76CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Manuel, Peter. 1988b. Popular Musics of the Non-Western World: An Introductory Survey. (New York)Google Scholar
Manuel, Peter. 1991. ‘The cassette industry and popular music in North India’, Popular Music, 10(2), pp. 189–204CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Manuel, Peter. 1993. Cassette Culture: Popular Music and Technology in North India (Chicago)Google Scholar
Marcus, Scott L. 1995a. ‘On cassette rather than live: religious music in India today’, in Media and the Transformations of Religions in South Asia, eds Babb, Lawrence Alan and Wadley, Susan S. (Berkeley) pp. 167–85CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Marcus, Scott L. 1995b. ‘Parody generated texts: the process of composition in Biraha, a North Indian Folk Music Genre’, Asian Music, 26(1). pp. 93–146Google Scholar
Meintjes, Louise. 1990. 'Paul Simon's Graceland: South Africa and the mediation of musical meaning, Ethnomusicology, 34(1), pp. 37–73Google Scholar
Myers, Helen. 1992. ‘Field Technology’, in Ethnomusicology: An Introduction, The Norton/Grove Handbooks in Music, ed. Myers, Helen (New York) pp. 50–87Google Scholar
Nayyar, Adam. 1988. Qawwali (Islamabad)Google Scholar
Qureshi, Regula Burckhardt. 1980 ‘Pakistan’, in The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians (London)Google Scholar
Qureshi, Regula Burckhardt. 1992/1993. ‘Muslim devotional: popular religious music and muslim identity under British, Indian, and Pakistani hegemony’, Asian Music, xxiv(1), pp. 111–121Google Scholar
Qureshi, Regula Burckhardt. 1995a. ‘Recorded sound and religious music: the case of Qawwali’, in Media and the Transformation of Religion in South Asia, eds Babb, L. and Wadley, S. (Philadelphia) pp. 139–66Google Scholar
Qureshi, Regula Burckhardt. 1995b. Sufi Music in India and Pakistan: Sound, Context, and Meaning in Qawwali (Chicago) (First Published Cambridge 1987; with new preface and accompanying CD)Google Scholar
Qureshi, Regula Burckhardt. 1998 ‘Pakistan,’ ed. Finscher, Ludwig, in Die Musik in Geschichte und Gegenwart (new edition), (Kassel)Google Scholar
Rösing, Helmut. 1984. ‘Listening behavior and unmusical preferences in the Age of “Transmitted” Music’, Popular Music, 4, pp. 119–50Google Scholar
Roychaudhry, M.L. 1957. ‘Music in Islam’, Journal of the Asiatic Society of Bengal, 13 pp. 43–102Google Scholar
Ruswa, Mirza Muhammad Hadi. 1963. Umrao Jan Ada (Lahore)Google Scholar
Sakata, Lorraine. 1994. ‘The Sacred and the profane: qawwali represented in the performances of Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan’, The World of Music, 36(3), pp. 86–99Google Scholar
Shepherd, John, Verder, Phil, Vulliamy, Graham and Wishart, Trevor. 1977. Whose Music? A Sociology of Musical Languages (London)Google Scholar
Singer, Milton. 1972. When a Great Tradition Modernizes. Parts I and III (New York)Google Scholar
Sutton, R. Anderson. 1996. ‘Interpreting electronic sound technology in the contemporary Javanese soundscape’, Ethnomusicology, 40(2), pp. 249–68Google Scholar
Wallis, Roger and Malm, Krister. 1984. Big Sounds from Small Peoples: The Music Industry in Small Countries. (New York)Google Scholar
Waterman, Christopher Alan. 1990. Jùjú: A Social History and Ethnography of an African Popular Music (Chigago)Google Scholar
Yampolski, Philip. 1991. ‘Indonesian popular music: Kroncong, Dangdut, and Langgam Jawa’, Liner Notes, Music of Indonesia 2, ed. Yampolski, Philip, (Washington)Google Scholar