AMIIR · Toward a Situated Analysis of Musical Improvisation: A Case Study of South Indian Ritual Music

Toward a Situated Analysis of Musical Improvisation: A Case Study of South Indian Ritual Music

Musical improvisation has been essentially described and explained in secular contexts and through the lens of musicians’ preparation. As a result, authors have primarily directed their attention to the description of the materials that musicians effectively require for improvising, such as knowledge base, repertoires, models, and referents. Such approaches have laid solid foundations for new methodologies and to some extent demystified the mystery surrounding musical improvisation. However, they have not been effective in explaining how musicians’ knowledge is reenacted during performance, in particular through relational and contextual adjustments. This tension between preparation and accomplishment has not been directly addressed previously in South Asian studies. Nevertheless, a short overview of the literature published on musical improvisation since the end of the 1990s suggests that research has been subsequently expanded and renegotiated. The focus, indeed, has moved from the description of the knowledge required by musicians for improvising to the analysis of this knowledge in the course of performance. In this perspective, the ethnography behind the analysis has become more visible. As in jazz studies, scholars working on Indian music have started to question performers in a more comprehensive way about their own practices, involving them in the analytical process and making their voice heard. Additionally, specialists of North Indian classical music have started to integrate into their works advances of other disciplines, such as music psychology, cognitive anthropology, performance studies, and gesture studies. In the project AMIIR the question of musical improvisation has been explored in a situated and ecological perspective. The phenomenon of improvisation has been tackled in a religious setting, focusing on the tradition of the periya melam, an outdoor ensemble of shawm (nagasvaram) and drum (tavil) players, which provides music for daily rituals and calendrical festivals in high-caste Hindu temple complexes of Tamil Nadu. More specifically, it has explored the interplay between musical knowledge and ritual/religious practices in which this knowledge is embedded. Situating the analysis and the debate on improvisation at the intersection of music, performance and ritual, has been particularly productive. We have been able to show, for instance, that improvisation, or more generally musical performance, can be described in terms of complex schemas comprising both musical and contextual elements or, more likely, independent schemas combined in the process of performance. We demonstrated that musical improvisation has to be analysed in a more systematic way and within a larger framework of action so as to progress from the description of models to the analysis of these models in the course of performance. We also showed that a context-sensitive approach could help us 1/ to understand better the role of music in a religion context 2/ to understand music and ritual as two fundamental and interrelated human activities 3/ to overcome the dualism between structure and action that still challenge ethnomusicology and human sciences. In addition, we have been able to successfully experiment a new software (Tony) for the analysis of South Indian raga music. The work in progress and the results of this project have been presented through papers in international conferences (in Astana, London, Oxford, and Paris) and articles in international peer-reviewed journals (notably in Analytical Approaches to World Music).

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