Music History
My interest in music history grows out of a lifelong engagement with India’s musical traditions and the intellectual culture of Santiniketan. I explore how music evolves through the interaction of local traditions and global influences, and how patronage, institutions, and historical change shape artistic innovation. By linking music to broader processes such as education, urbanization, technology, and globalization, I study it not only as an art form but also as a social and historical phenomenon.
This paper, published in Contributions to Indian Sociology (1998), argues that the uneasy history of North Indian classical music since about 1900 was not caused by the breakdown of hereditary “family” traditions. Rather, it stemmed from the transition from patronage to markets, a shock shared with many skilled crafts, where competition weakened incentives to preserve and transmit high-quality tacit knowledge.
This paper, published in the Journal of Asian Studies (2019), argues that the modernization of Indian classical music was driven not only by hereditary musical lineages or nationalist elites, but also by innovative urban networks and associational cultures that transformed instruments, styles, and artistic communities.