Storytime in India by Helen Priscilla Myers

Author:Helen Priscilla Myers
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
Publisher: Indiana University Press
Published: 2019-06-15T00:00:00+00:00

The tune for this song is so similar to tune number one from Trinidad that it is tempting to say they are the same. Well, they are—but not quite. Most of the phrases here are sung in the lower part of Gangajali’s tessitura. Phrase B moves to the upper part of the octave, lending spirit and liveliness to the presentation.

Similar tunes here and there. When are two songs “the same” songs? When they share what is basically the same text? When they share the same melody? When they share neither text nor tune, but the essential story of the song is the same?

Do songs of a particular genre all have the same tunes? In our book here, we have found that they do not. For example, each tilak melody is different than the others and so on—for sagun, gali, matikor, chumawan, and more. Scholars have argued these points for over a century, beginning with the notion of Sir George Grierson (1886), eminent linguist, that songs in one genre all had the same tunes. Scholars following on after, lacking his linguistic expertise, have both maintained and disclaimed this particular idea about tunes. In the late 1980s and early 1990s, Wadley and also Marcus found tunes within a genre to be the same, or—and I am guessing here—at least similar. In 1967, an Indian ethnomusicologist, Trilochan Pande, found that Bhojpuri sohars all had the same tunes, even if the words had to be run together or elongated to suit this particular tune. In 1964, the linguist John Gumperz found that the tunes (which he called ragas) were few and that they generally corresponded to specific genres. This entire discussion has been followed up in 2000 by the anthropologist Edward O. Henry, who discussed the above scholars and more and went on to analyze many tunes and texts that he had collected in the Bhojpuri region.

I believe that this discussion among scholars will continue as the years pass, as tunes are forgotten and exciting new filmi tunes are incorporated into the rural repertory. Some singers, such as Gangajali, compose their own tunes, further enriching any sort of scholarly analysis.

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.