Description
Book SynopsisTrade ReviewScholarship has established that arts exist through complex networks with historical time; aesthetic forms have distinctive rhythmic-temporal lives; and devotional meditations are based on diurnal, mythical and other time-based imaginings. Yet, The Politics of Musical Time brings these dimensions together in a most original manner, throwing sharp analytical light on synchronic and diachronic relations between musical and social temporalities in Bengal. It does so by analyzing the materiality of sonic time as a highly nuanced expansion of relations between affect and economy, meaning and rhythm, the past and the contemporary, devotion and context, and aesthetics and everyday life. It is a unique and significant contribution to studies of South Asian religions, aesthetics, and historical and contemporary time.
-- Sukanya Sarbadhikary, author of The Place of Devotion: Siting and Experiencing Divinity in Bengal-Vaishnavism
Table of ContentsAccessing Audiovisual Materials
Acknowledgments
Notes on Spelling and Transliteration
Notes on Representing Musical Sound
Notes on Dating Systems
Introduction: Kīrtan's Influence Derives from Time
Part I: Genealogies of Kīrtan
1. Temporality and Devotional Performance in Bengal
2. The Seeds of Kīrtan: Histories and Imaginaries of Devotional Song in Early Modern Bengal
3. Devotional Song Arrives in the City: Histories of Patronage and Images of the Devout Musician in the Colonial Period
4. Institutional Pasts and Professional Futures: Temporalities of Instruction and Performance in Contemporary West Bengal
Part II: The Devotional Aesthetics of Musical Expansion
5. Word-Pictures: Expansions of Mood and Meaning in Kīrtan Song Texts
6. Sonic Synchronies of Tāl Theory
7. The Divine Play of the Tax Collector: Musical Expansion, Embodied Response, and Didactic Storytelling in a Līlā Kīrtan
Part III: The Shrinking Markets for Expanding Songs
8. The Marketplace of Music Festivals: Modern Social Time and Musical Labor
9. Media Markets: Visualization and the Abstraction of Musical Time
10. Conclusion: Kīrtan Online
Glossary
Bibliography
Index
