Music, Modernity, and Publicness in India by Unknown

Author:Unknown
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: OUP India
Published: 2020-02-14T00:00:00+00:00

Revisiting Musical Notation

At the outset, let us note one of the several ways in which the film song appeared in print. Between the late 1950s and 70s, certainly, it was not unusual to find the presence of notations of songs (their swarlipi) and their lyrics in print. Swarlipi and film song lyrics appeared in magazines like Madhuri (Filmfare’s sister magazine in Hindi), Film Sangeet (Film Music), and Sangeet (music), which dealt with several genres of music.12 The presence and circulation of song lyrics/text and their musical notation is not unusual in print, beginning from the mid-nineteenth century. Stuart Blackburn (2006) and Francesca Orsini (2009) have successfully demonstrated, in their work on nineteenth century Tamil and Hindi/Urdu print cultures, respectively, the place of oral cultures in print.13 Blackburn has argued that the mainstay of printed texts in the early period of printing were those of texts already in circulation orally. Orsini has argued that the boom in commercial publishing during the period ‘…rode on top of existing oral and performative traditions…’ especially those that were a part of competitive popular singing. She further suggests that the pleasure of these printed song-texts rested upon seriality and recognition, rather than novelty.

This relationship between seriality and recognition on one hand and music and print cultures on the other found itself reiterated through song booklets, the chaupatiya (literally, four leaves), and magazine pages with musical notation and film song lyrics. Most song booklets would contain photographs of the stars in the film or publicity stills from the film, although the practice of using publicity stills in the song booklets began much later. Song booklets being sold outside cinema halls and railway stations were a common enough sight in the 1950s and 60s in most cities of India, especially in the North. The song booklets would also continue with the practice that existed for the barahmasa texts, that is, the same text would often be carried in multiple scripts, that is, in the devanagari (Hindi), farsi (Urdu), Gujarati, Bangla, etc. scripts. Sometimes, the lyrics would also be printed in the roman script to be read in English. However, such instances were very few. One may infer then that the pleasures afforded by the film song did not limit themselves to those who were able to follow the lyrics in only the devanagari script but was also afforded to those across linguistic registers. It also allows us to note one of the ways in which the film song moved across regional, linguistic, and elite/popular boundaries (magazines and cheap song booklets) to forge a larger audience. The chaupatiya and the song booklet did not quite belong to the same middle-class, ‘respectable’ print public that the film magazines tried to present themselves as part of, however.14

Along with lyrics, notations of the film song appeared in Film Sangeet volumes, and cheaply printed books usually called banjo or harmonium or tabla guides. While we shall return to these volumes a little later, let us note a page that was repeated, as a regular feature, in the Madhuri of the 1960s.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.