ABSTRACT

This chapter refers to general histories and historical treatment of Indian music and its development, but with an emphasis on Karnatik music. Histories of Indian musical practices acquired a new flavour with the emergence of European interest in Indian culture. The emergence of important shifts in European musicology pioneered in Germany shaped the history of music in the subsequent century— especially in the latter decades of the nineteenth century. A new engagement with comparative musicology supported by emerging technologies of reproduction through the phonograph fostered an ethnological interest in the music and musical instruments of non-European peoples with the result that scholarship tended to bifurcate into the textual and the anthropological. The 1970s saw some important studies on south Indian music by R. Rangaramanuja Ayyangar who wrote both reminiscences and also a historical account of Karnatik music based largely on anecdotes and personal reflections.