Abstracts

Note: The names of the Plenary Speakers are listed in alphabetical order.

DR. ADITI DEO

Gaadi Bula Rahi Hai (The Train is Calling Out): Considering Old Hindi Film Songs as Embodied Knowledge among Urban Elderly Adults in India

Abstract

This paper draws upon ethnographic research in the city of Ahmedabad, India, with urban elderly adults who sing ‘puraane gaane’ or old Hindi film songs, and participate in Karaoke groups (clubs) centered on this repertoire. It focuses on their engagement with popular music from their youth as one mode through which they negotiate the multiple personal and social shifts associated with ageing. For these elderly adults, the repertoire offers the pleasure of listening, and animates music-centered sociability. Many find a sense of purpose in Karaoke singing, using it as an opportunity to actively redefine their identities in old age. Some discuss the songs and the experiences of growing up with them as sources of wisdom and philosophy. Addressing the themes of the conference, in this paper, I unpack the varied registers in which old Hindi film songs function as a cultural resource that urban Indian elderly adults draw upon to manage their everyday lives and reconcile with their life trajectories. 

PROF. ADRIAN MCNEIL

Embodied Pedagogies and the Transmission of Musical Knowledge in an Age of AI

Abstract

Technology has been integral to the pedagogy of Hindustani Raga Music for more than a century. It began with the mass production of text-based notations and sound recordings, and has since evolved through the digitisation of sound, media players, audio applications, streaming services, online learning and beyond — each innovation offering increasingly powerful tools for learning. One after the other these developments have further reconfigured the experience of time and space in the learning music. Yet, until now, technology has served largely as an adjunct to the orality of traditional transmission and to institutionalised, curriculum-based modes of learning.

The advent of AI — now in its generative and agentic forms — raises more fundamental questions about the future of Hindustani music. Should AI be understood as a continuation of how technology has been absorbed into musical practice, or does it represent a rupture? To what extent will it reshape the aesthetic and stylistic contours of the tradition? And can AI-assisted pedagogy meaningfully be understood through the lens of "embodiment," or do we need new critical paradigms to examine the directions ahead? This paper explores these questions through the experiences of the sarod tradition.

PROF. ANDREW ALTER

Garhwali Drums, Bols, and Bājās: Organising Repertoire around Embodied Practice

Abastract

Many Garhwali ḍhol-damauṅ players are able to discuss and illustrate the rhythms and pieces they play by reciting bols to help identify and remember particular repertoire items. These repertoire items are often referred to simply as bājās. Bols themselves, however, don’t always neatly fit specific drum stroke techniques, though they do aurally match patterns of accentual emphasis, rhythms, and some strokes. This presentation will examine drum practice and the recitation of bols in Garhwal to explore the relationship between syllabic ‘vocalisation,’ broader ritual contexts, and cosmological explanation. The uses and explanations of syllabic recitation suggest that drum practice is wholistically conceived. Consequently, bols do not comprise a clearly articulated theoretical system of drumming. Rather, they are the vocalisation of an embodied practice that includes music, sonic theology, and tantric practices. 

PROF.  CHATS DEVROOP

The Body Remembers: Embodied Musical Transmission and Diasporic Knowledge in Apartheid South Africa

Abstract

This paper draws on the author's recently published book Raag Mala: Indian Voices in Apartheid South Africa (1900-1990)to explore how Indian film music performance became a site of embodied cultural transmission and alternative epistemology within South Africa's marginalised Indian diaspora. Centring on the Rajendra Orchestra (1956-1990), a seminal Indian music ensemble founded by the author's father Morris Ramnunan in Pietermaritzburg, the paper examines how musical knowledge was preserved, adapted, and transmitted across generations under conditions of apartheid-imposed cultural isolation from the Indian subcontinent.  Employing an autoethnographic methodology that positions the researcher as both scholar and inheritor of this musical lineage, the paper argues that the Rajendra Orchestra functioned as a site of embodied epistemology - where cultural knowledge was inscribed not through formal pedagogy but through bodily practice, imitation, communal rehearsal, and intergenerational apprenticeship. The metaphor of Raag Mala (garland of ragas) serves as the conceptual framework, illustrating how fragmented musical memories were woven together through oral histories, artifacts, and embodied recollection.  The paper further examines how this embodied transmission constituted a form of cultural resistance, creating what the author terms a "diasporic epistemology” - a way of knowing rooted in somatic memory and performance practice rather than text or institutional instruction. By interrogating the tensions between the researcher's subjective positionality and scholarly objectivity, the paper contributes to broader conversations about decolonising musicological knowledge and centring embodied, communal forms of cultural transmission as legitimate epistemic frameworks.

SHRI CHITRAVINA RAVIKIRAN

Music, Music Therapy, and Musopathy: A Continuum of Sound-Based Healing 

Abstract

Music has accompanied human healing across civilizations, evolving from ritual performance to clinically guided music therapy. While conventional music therapy leverages emotional and psychological responses to culturally familiar sound, it remains largely experiential and culturally contingent. Musopathy advances this continuum by introducing a rigorous, de-culturalized, science-based framework that employs precisely engineered tonal structures to produce measurable physiological effects. Through mechanisms including mechanotransduction, vagus nerve stimulation via Tonation Breathing Techniques (TBT), and aural-neural engagement through MANET protocols, Musopathy targets autonomic regulation, neuroplasticity, and mind-body homeostasis. This presentation traces the conceptual lineage from music to music therapy to Musopathy, positioning the latter as an emerging health science discipline with global clinical applicability.

PROF.  DARD NEUMAN

Oral Scholasticism in Hindustani Music: Reasoning in Speech, Demonstration, and Performance 

Abstract

This paper examines oral scholasticism in Hindustani music: a mode of disciplined musical reasoning conducted through speech, demonstration, and performance rather than through formal theory or written treatises. I place the early twentieth-century All-India Music Conference (AIMC) minutes in dialogic relation with mid-twentieth-century sound archives—interviews, concert recordings, and studio sessions—in which descendants of AIMC musicians offer fragmentary remarks and musical demonstrations that, through transcription, explanation, and juxtaposition, can be read as rigorously structured modes of musical reasoning rather than as anecdote or commentary. Through four case studies—Sadiq Ali Khan, Vilayat Khan, Bade Ghulam Ali Khan, and Abdul Wahid Khan—I analyze how relational schemas of musical reasoning emerge through concepts such as andolan, aṅg, chāl, and merukhand, alongside broader epistemic vocabularies such as śāstra, ʿilm, and ʿamal, without resolving into a unified theoretical system or civilizational logic. Drawing on close aural analysis supported by the Interactive Digital Transcription and Analysis Platform (IDTAP), the paper argues for recognizing oral scholasticism as a rigorous epistemic practice—grounded in motion, contrast, and pathway—that neither resolves into formal theory nor requires its validation. In this sense, it reflects a historically specific form of pluralist secularity in Hindustani culture, drawing simultaneously on Sanskritic, Persianate, and vernacular intellectual vocabularies without subordinating musical reasoning to any single civilizational framework.

DR. LAKSHMI SREERAM

Improvisation: Concept, Performance and a Theory

Abstract

Carnatic and Hindustani Music are widely acknowledged as incorporating a significant component of improvisation. My paper seeks to sharpen the idea of improvisation in this context, to analyse both its conceptual and performative aspects. I engage with questions raised by Nettl in his influential essay, especially the suggestion that composition and improvisation are a continuum. I also turn to language theories and seek to apply the category of ākānkśā to offer a seed of a theory of improvisation in Indian Classical Music.

PROF.  MARC DUBY

Einstein’s violin: enacting embodied relationships in musical performance

Abstract

The main focus of this discussion concerns the relationship between performers and their chosen instruments. Common sense might well understand performance as the performer (a living body) interacting in real time with a material object beyond itself (the musical instrument).  However, this apparently self-evident view, in separating performer from instrument, neglects the full-bodied, moving, and transformational aspects of performance that an embodied interpretation brings. It may be useful, I will argue, to interpret performance as grounded in action within a constantly changing field of relations between energy and matter: so, necessarily embodied all the way down, where human skills engage with material objects in mutually transformative fashion. Professional bassist and rated academic researcher in music, Marc Duby was born in Cape Town, South Africa. His was the first local postgraduate degree in Jazz Performance, supervised by Professor Darius Brubeck and awarded with distinction. He completed a doctorate in music in 2007.     He has supervised close to thirty postgraduate students and published extensively, culminating in a first book for Cambridge Elements published in 2025. In addition to presenting papers at scholarly conferences, Duby has performed live in the UK, USA, France, India, Mexico, and Thailand. His transdisciplinary research interests encompass enactive cognition, phenomenology, and systems theory, especially as applied to musical performance.

DR. RADHA BHASKAR

Dialogic exchange between accompanists and lead performers

Abstract

The dialogic exchange between the accompaniments and the lead artist in a Carnatic concert is essentially a conversation where all participate as a team. It is a dynamic interplay where both parts respond, support, challenge, and shape each other compositionally or through extempore music. We have the lead artist along with a violin and mrudangam as accompaniment with the options of the inclusion of other percussion instruments as well and all engage in different ways in the collaborative conversation and musical creation within a shared grammar. The aesthetics is about a relational artistry—a living conversation where individuality and unity coexist. This gives a co-created holistic musical experience unfolding in real time.

DR. RADHA KAPURIA

Music and Gender in Punjabi Social History: Nineteenth century and beyond

Abstract

This presentation offers a critical framework for examining the interrelations among music, affect, and social history. Drawing upon insights from my monograph—the first comprehensive social history of music in undivided Punjab (1800–1947)—the discussion traces the evolution of musical culture from the Lahore court of Maharaja Ranjit Singh to the royal darbar of Patiala. It introduces new evidence for the centrality of female performers and classical musical traditions in a region conventionally perceived as the land of folk music. By engaging with a diverse array of musicians and dancers—from mirasis (bards) and kalawants (elite musicians) to kanjris (subaltern female performers) and tawaifs (courtesans)—the paper illuminates a complex culture of musical connoisseurship through interdisciplinary perspectives drawn from history, ethnomusicology, and geography. Beyond the aesthetic, I posit music as a lived and affective practice that mediates histories of community, memory, and identity, while also shaping dynamics of place-making, belonging, and cultural consumption both in and beyond Punjab. I conclude by tracing the trajectories of musical traditions across postcolonial contexts, demonstrating how sonic histories, performance practices, and the lifeworlds of musicians became entangled with broader cultural and historical transformations in the wake of the Partition of 1947.

PROF.  RICHARD WIDDESS

Between participation and presentation: religious choral singing as “living philosophies” in a Nepali temple and an English parish church 

Abstract

A distinction between “participatory” and “presentational” musical genres was introduced by ethnomusicologist Edward Henry in his foundational ethnography of village music in the Banaras region (1974, 1988). The same distinction was later elaborated by Thomas Turino in his 2008 book Music as social life: the politics of participation, and the terms participatory and presentational have become common parlance in many areas of musical research. In “participatory” performance, members of a community participate on equal terms for the sake of the activity itself, without reference to any audience. In “presentational” performance, a select group of specially trained and skilled performers present the music to a separate audience who do not participate directly in the performance themselves. Participatory music is sometimes characterised as “amateur” rather than “professional”, and often passes below the radar of cultural politics or musical scholarship. It has been recognised as significant for promoting many benefits, including social integration, cognitive health and wellbeing (e.g., for older members of society), and, in the remote past, as a formative stage in the very origins of human music, language and society. Yet it has also been observed that some forms of music have features of both participatory and presentational performance, suggesting more complex realities. I will re-examine the participatory/presentational categorisation of music with reference to two genres of religious choral music, from Nepal and England. Singers at the temple of Dattatreya in Bhaktapur, drawn from the farmer community of the neighbourhood, meet daily to sing dāphā songs to a variety of Hindu and Buddhist divinities. In the church of Great St Mary’s in Cambridge, adult and children’s choirs sing polyphonic music at weekly Christian services. Both examples seem to occupy a middle ground between participation and presentation. The dynamics of participation and presentation, formed over centuries of history in each case, can only be understood in relation to their religious and social contexts; in the words of our conference concept note, such genres constitute “living philosoph[ies] expressed through vibration, gesture, and social exchange.

PROF.  SANJOY BANDOPADHYAY

Rāga as Embodied Knowledge: A Practice-Based Epistemology of Hindustani Music 

Abstract

This paper examines the epistemological foundations of rāga performance within Hindustani Rāga Music by addressing a central question: where does musical knowledge reside? While existing musicological discourse privileges textual and theoretical frameworks, this study argues that rāga knowledge is fundamentally embodied, emerging through listening, training, and performance. Conceptually, the study draws on philosophical perspectives of Aristotle, Immanuel Kant, and Gilbert Ryle to frame rāga performance as an embodied epistemic system integrating cognition, perception, and practice. Methodologically, the research adopts a qualitative, practice-based approach grounded in an insider case study of the rāga Anil Madhyam, composed by the author and transmitted through the Guru–Shishya tradition. The study analyzes the lifecycle of rāga knowledge across three stages: formation, embodiment through pedagogical training, and manifestation in performance. Empirical material includes documented renderings by trained disciples across instruments such as sarod and flute, enabling examination of cross-instrumental adaptation and stability of rāga grammar. The rāga’s performance within curated international platforms such as the Darbar Festival and its circulation through digital media including YouTube provide external contexts for observing its communicability beyond its site of origin. The analysis suggests that rāga knowledge develops as a neuro-sensorimotor orientation in which listening, cognition, and bodily practice are integrated, and that performance constitutes its audible realization. The study concludes that rāga knowledge resides within a dynamic continuum linking perception, embodiment, performance, pedagogy, and circulation, thereby extending existing understandings of musical knowledge in Hindustani art music.

Keywords: Rāga epistemology, embodied knowledge, practice-based research, Guru–Shishya tradition, performance studies, Hindustani music, Anil Madhyam.

PROF.  STEFAN FIOL

Towards Ethical Stewardship of the Garhwali Dhol-Damau: Insights from Inter-Caste Learning Contexts 

Abstract

For many centuries, the embodied transmission of dhol-damau drumming knowledge in the Garhwal Himalayas has been stewarded by Auji families who perform for deities and higher-caste patrons during sanskaras, communal rituals and public gatherings. Yet as the dhol-damau have become representative of the commercialized and state-sponsored pahadi heritage industry over the past two decades, “folk arts” institutes are springing up across the region, enabling parts of the dhol-damau repertoire to be transmitted to individuals from non-hereditary backgrounds. This talk explores several such institutes, asking how multi-caste learning environments modify both what and how various aspects of the art form are taught. In place of the adaptive epistemes ofbaja (rhythmic patterns) performance in village-based contexts, institutes offer more predictable and standardized approaches, modeled in part on tala theory. Drawing from origin narratives and ethnographic description, I conclude that ethical stewardship of the dhol-damau tradition is only possible when savarn (perceived upper-caste) communities engage with Auji communities with cultural humility, accountability, and a willingness to reckon with harm conditioning.

DR.  SUMITHRA VASUDEV

Composition as a site for confluence of elements of lakṣya and lakṣaṇa in Karṇāṭaka music 

Abstract

For many centuries, the embodied transmission of dhol-damau drumming knowledge in the Garhwal Himalayas has been stewarded by Auji families who perform for deities and higher-caste patrons during sanskaras, communal rituals and public gatherings. Yet as the dhol-damau have become representative of the commercialized and state-sponsored pahadi heritage industry over the past two decades, “folk arts” institutes are springing up across the region, enabling parts of the dhol-damau repertoire to be transmitted to individuals from non-hereditary backgrounds. This talk explores several such institutes, asking how multi-caste learning environments modify both what and how various aspects of the art form are taught. In place of the adaptive epistemes ofbaja (rhythmic patterns) performance in village-based contexts, institutes offer more predictable and standardized approaches, modeled in part on tala theory. Drawing from origin narratives and ethnographic description, I conclude that ethical stewardship of the dhol-damau tradition is only possible when savarn (perceived upper-caste) communities engage with Auji communities with cultural humility, accountability, and a willingness to reckon with harm conditioning.

SHRI. V. SRIRAM

Carnatic Music, A Story of Transmission Through The Ages

Abstract

Carnatic Music is today portrayed in two ways - a ‘pure, classical’ art that has remained the same over thousands of years, and looked at another way as an exclusive art that has remained with a chosen few, keeping out the others. Both are fallacious views and both seem perspectives from the same prism - that the art was grown in a glass jar. In truth, this South Indian classical art music was the product of a shared development and transmission. And its future too will be shaped by the same. This presentation looks at some key moments in the history of this music and how it shaped its narrative.