Since several of our “main” bloggers are off enjoying the fruits of summer (Ciao! you know who you are…), we thought we would keep things moving here in the Bunker with another guest blogger, Nilanjana Bhattacharjya. Nilanjana is an ethnomusicologist who teaches at Colorado College. She is also an avid Twitterer, for those of you for whom that means anything. And for the academics in the house, Nilanjana has an essay in a recent collection called Global Bollywood: Travels of Hindi Song and Dance, which she co-wrote with another friend of mine, on the inner workings of the commercial Indian film music industry as it operates within India, as well as how it is repackaged as it “travels” in the diaspora. Despite the focus on film and music, Nilanjana has lots of interests, including an interest in subcontinental politics — so expect a diverse array of posts.
Ethnomusicologist? That’s a great word. Gotta be a great career.
Welcome, Nilanjana. Great to have an ethnomusicologist on Sepia:)
Well Nilanjana, maybe you can start with a blog which describes your parent’s reaction to your choosing to be an ethnomusicologist 🙂
phillygrrl and Kabir, thanks for the warm welcome! Detroit Indian (the one and only?), I have a good story for you, but let me figure out how to tell it in a way that doesn’t get me in further trouble.
Nilanjana – Welcome !!
I heard a great NPR piece about Asian children being better at music specifically because their languages were ‘tonal’ in nature (ie, Cantonese and Mandarin using small differences in pitch and tone for words which may look the same on paper but mean different things depending on how they’re pronounced). So, when they tested musically gifted American kids against musically gifted Asian kids on identifying pitches and tones, the Asians kids blew away the numbers.
Found this very interesting and your job title reminded me of this – is this the type of stuff you would be involved in or does that sound very layman-ish ?
Hi again GurMando, your understanding isn’t very laymanish at all, but it describes only one type of work that some of us do. And given that I focus on popular music, what I do is fairly different. I personally do things like listen to music, go to concerts, talk to musicians, watch them in the studio and in rehearsal, talk to fans, read the paper, read my colleagues’ work, watch lots of bad movies, and on a good day, write, but I also know a music theorist who’s been recording renditions of Knock Knock jokes to understand how different people understand pitch– and the interval of a major 3rd. A broader definition that works for most of us is that we look at music and culture. And there’s room for almost everybody!
yes.. bookmarked thoughts..