ABSTRACT
A Devoted Amateur And Connoisseur, Who Spent His Life Listening To music and promoting the cause of a modern institutional approach to music education in Madras, P. S. Iyer, was referring to the newly established Academy of Karnatik Music in which he was personally involved. The newly refined modern concert format facilitated the display of music as an object with textual explication, sharply different from the emotive and non-verbal forms of experiencing music in the context of ritual and religious practice. The incorporation of music into the system of modern education became, for a brief while, a pet obsession with the Madras elites for whom scientific instruction held out immense prospects of defending the authentic version of the classical music tradition as it had historically evolved in Tamilnadu, especially since the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The articulation of a full-fledged sabha culture was part of the larger social transformation that Madras underwent from about the latter decades of the nineteenth century.
