Faculty Member, Music
Visiting Assistant Professor of Asian Studies and Music / Mellon Post-Doctoral Fellow
Thesis Title: Gesture , Melody, and the Paramparic Body in Hindustani Vocal Music
Bonnie Wade
Benjamin Brinner
Eve Sweetser
About
Like most ethnomusicologists, my research touches a range of fields, such as gesture studies, anthropology, performance studies, linguistics, cognitive science, history, religion, acoustics, and phenomenology. I am particularly interested in music as a point of dialogue between scientific and humanistic disciplines: in Jon Barlow's words, a meta-discipline. I am strongly committed to teaching and scholarship in the liberal arts tradition.
The research projects that most interest me at the moment have been informed by the decade of Hindustani vocal training that I've received in India. I'm fascinated by the tension between explicit, note-based methods of Indian musical analysis and the implicit, embodied musical knowledge of Indian classical musicians that underlies both performance and stylistic identity.
My dissertation, "Gesture in Hindustani Vocal Music," was an investigation of the ways in which hand gesture is used alongside vocalization to manifest melody both as note sequences and as dynamic, three-dimensional shapes. The dissertation also explored the gestural dialects of two teaching lineages in particular, and the construction of what I am calling “paramparic bodies,” after anthropologist Katharine Young’s account of “family bodies.” I see these lineage-based gesture dialects as ways of conceiving melody in space that are transmitted tacitly through face-to-face instruction. Interviews with singers have revealed that gesture reflects an important engagement between melody and the moving body. The role of gesture in performance and pedagogy has implications for the standardization of Hindustani music performance, the performance of identity within a lineage, and the putative “orality” of Hindustani music traditions.
Other research interests of mine are the folklore of origin narratives that link race, place, and genre; music and religion; and the uses of theories of tuning and temperament as a means of imagining ethnic boundaries.
As a former biology teacher (and microhistory nut), I am also interested in critically investigating the connections between science and comparative musicology in the 19th and 20th centuries. My work on this topic began with “That Ban(e) of Indian Music: Nation, Intonation, and the Harmonium,” which focuses on the discursive processes that resulted in the ban of the harmonium from All-India Radio. In particular, it focuses on the cultural work done by British and Indian acousticians and musicologists to fix an “Indian Scale” that would differentiate India ethnically, sonically, and arithmetically from the West. My first article on evolution and music history, “What Else Do We Say When We Say ‘Music Evolves?” is primarily concerned with uncovering and untangling the implicit application of two distinct but often-confused evolutionary models to music history. As I build more on these projects, I find myself reaching beyond India’s borders and into various scientific and occult disciplines such as acoustics, evolutionary biology, music theory, and theosophy, disciplines that worked to enforce musical and racial order in the twentieth century.
I love teaching. I was inspired to be a teacher and scholar in the first place by my own generous teachers: Jon Barlow, Howard Bernstein, Bonnie Wade, Don Willson, Ben Brinner, Eve Sweetser, and Vikas Kashalkar.
Contact Information
http://www.ocf.berkeley.edu/~mrahaim
skype: mrahaim
