The early days of the gramophone industry in India: Historical, social and musical perspectives

Farrell, Gerry

doi:10.1080/09681229308567211

Cited by 65 publications

(24 citation statements)

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“…Most of the music lovers I encountered believe that one's musical education should start at birth and told me how they had grown to love North Indian classical music by listening to it at home as children either on the gramophone or on the radio. Both of these were key features of middle-class family life in the mid-twentieth century (Farrell 1993;Neuman [1980Neuman [ ] 1990. Many had also acquired expertise through the middle-class practice of taking instrument lessons as a child.…”

Section: Expertisementioning

confidence: 99%

Listening to North Indian Classical Music: How Embodied Ways of Listening Perform Imagined Histories and Social Class

Alaghband-Zadeh

2017

Ethnomusicology

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Section: Expertisementioning

confidence: 99%

Listening to North Indian Classical Music: How Embodied Ways of Listening Perform Imagined Histories and Social Class

Alaghband-Zadeh

2017

Ethnomusicology

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“…The mass acceptance of both gramophone records and film music in India became momentous in the 1950s post-colonial period with the intervention of radio, which played a crucial role in popularising film songs beyond cinematic boundaries. Gerry Farrell's (1993) writing on gramophone records illustrates the function of urban middle classes and the ways in which musical activities became fashionable in big cities like Bombay and Calcutta via the availability of records. 7.…”

Section: Music Mutations Memoriesmentioning

confidence: 99%

Travels of musical notes: Memories of Mozart and "Jay ho!"

Mukherjee¹,

Montano²,

Nardi³

2012

IASPM Proceedings

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This paper discusses the composition "Itna na mujhse tu pyaar badhaa" and the networks of memory and flow that are related to it. Created by the Indian composer-musician Salil Chowdhury for the film Chhaya (1961), this song entered the Indian popular domain to become an iconic composition that in a self-conscious way popularised Western-classical notes. While the uses of clarinets, strings and flutes have a longer history in Indian films, Chowdhury's music underscored its influences. In my understanding, the contemporary composition "Jay ho!" (from Slumdog millionaire, 2008), by the Academy Award winner musician-composer A.R. Rahman, rearranges Chowdhury's song on a different musical plane, which is then followed up in the song (and music video) of the Pussycat Dolls. The thrust and the hook of the Pussycat Dolls number seems to be that it has reworked the idea of "Bollywood" music for global listeners. This paper tries to study such displacements, journeys and questions of authorship, as well as the role of technology in reception and the function of the musician within this contested terrain. The primary questions that come up concern the problems of memory and forgetting of certain musical notes, and the origins and passages of these notes. Moreover, the processes through which certain musical patterns enter popular culture to lose their identity and become a part of something that may be totally different are crucial here.

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“…One such image, from the cover of a 1907 catalogue, showed a prosperous couple in their home, showing off the gramophone to their children and their grandfather, while a dark‐skinned, bare‐backed servant sits on the floor 15 . As Gerry Farrell notes, gramophone publicity marketed the technology as a “modernizing” force that could break down generational barriers within the middle class, while keeping divisions between social classes intact (1993:42–43).…”

Section: Listening Inmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…15 15 See Farrell 1993 for a copy of this image and a discussion of the implications of these images. …”

mentioning

confidence: 99%

Sound and the City: Mimicry and Media in South India

Weidman

2010

J Linguistic Anthropol

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Through an analysis of gramophone recordings of mimicry of scenes of public city life made in Tamil in South India between 1904 and 1907 and marketed to a new urban middle class in the colonial city of Madras, this article examines the relationship between emerging class structures and the technologies that are contemporaneous with them. I argue that through these recordings the gramophone is constructed on analogy with the mimicry artist as a faithful recorder of linguistic difference, while the intertwining of realism and parody inherent in mimicry is used here to recruit an omniscient middle‐class listening subject. [sound recording, linguistic difference, class, voice, verbal performance]

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The early days of the gramophone industry in India: Historical, social and musical perspectives

Cited by 65 publications

References 1 publication

Listening to North Indian Classical Music: How Embodied Ways of Listening Perform Imagined Histories and Social Class

Listening to North Indian Classical Music: How Embodied Ways of Listening Perform Imagined Histories and Social Class

Travels of musical notes: Memories of Mozart and "Jay ho!"

Sound and the City: Mimicry and Media in South India

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