the western classical music is coming!

http://www.hindu.com/2008/10/07/stories/2008100757342000.htm

http://afp.google.com/article/ALeqM5jx1O7zx12Nr8EyAk0DZaCtgPHRDA

I was very interested to read the articles on Zubin Mehta's dream of having a school for teaching Western classical music in India.

I'm for this idea, but what saddens me the most  is the last line in the second article: "Mehta added that there was no direct competition with Indian classical
music, which exponents say is currently suffering from a dearth of
younger players and singers"

I was very fortunate during my university days to have had the opportunity to study Indian classical music with the late Gerry Farrell and, whilst I was really terrible,(though I can still remember the Indian equivalent of our solvege - Sa Re Ga Ma Pa Dha Ni Sa) it did give me a wonderful appreciation of the music and style (not least how unbelievable advanced and difficult it was) and informed my own music making in a unique fashion. The same can be said for my longer forays into Javanese and Balinese Gamelan music which, given that I was a percussionist at the time, I was more succesul at.

The education of Indian classical musicians is simply mind boggling to me. Here we are struggling with learning the key signatures and scales of our diatonic system, and very rarely in our careers will leave the music stand, whereas Indian musicians who train (at least in Hindustani traditions) in gharanas (a social organisation linking musicians and dancers to lineage and particular styles by way of apprenticeships) where they will learn to sing practically their entire repertoire (from memory) before they even touch an instrument. In the case of the tabla players, hearing this demonstrated is unbelievable:

Take a brief detour to http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qr-UnLy4QTY to see the wonderful Zakir Hussein giving a demonstration.

Simply put: music is hard. It needs a great deal of time, commitment, love, endless enthusiasm and curiosity. It is important to continue our musicial traditions and equally important to appreciate those of others. Music is music afterall.  Thus in the same way that I'm very enthusiastic about the UK having musical centres such as SOAS and City University (amongst others) where you can explore other musical cultures as well as our own, i think there is a case for having similar centres for western music in other parts of the world. This is already happening at spectacular pace in China - though i sincerely hope it is not at the expense of their own musical traditions and identity.  Western classical music is the youngest of all of them, a nipper at 300 years old. Superior it is not, but it is still music which can, and should be shared.

for some semi related further reading, you could do worse than check out Edward Said's 'Orientalism', which exlpores in great depth (from an eastern point of view) the western attitudes towards the East, taking in artistic, literary and political topics. But lets not forget that the world is round, and none of us are in the centre.

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