Marathi Kirtan Before and After “The Classical”

Abstract: This essay examines the shifting boundaries of “the classical” in Indian music through a historical study of Marathi naradiya kirtan, a devotional song–narrative genre that both sounded classical and resisted classicization. Situating kirtan within colonial and nationalist discourses of music classification, the essay traces how concepts of the classical were simultaneously constructed in Europe and India through Orientalist encounter, caste hierarchy, and cultural reform. Drawing on the Marathi biography of nineteenth-century kirtankar Govindbuva Hoshing, the article foregrounds the role of Brahmin performers who selectively absorbed Hindustani musical practices (raga, tala, and improvisation) while rejecting Hindustani music’s Islamicate associations and secular performance contexts. In doing so, the article reframes classicization as a boundary-making process rather than a stable set of sonic attributes.

Through close reading of Hoshing’s 1925 biography and analysis of naradiya kirtan’s performance practices, the article demonstrates how kirtan occupied a liminal position between court music, devotional ritual, and emerging nationalist imaginaries. Written after Hindustani music had been firmly established as “classical,” the biography retroactively recasts nineteenth-century musical fluidity as evidence of Brahmin moral and spiritual supremacy, subordinating classical music to Hindu devotional authority. The article argues that naradiya kirtan’s refusal of classicization allowed it to retain caste prestige, ritual centrality, and moral legitimacy, even as it appropriated the sonic resources of classical music. Ultimately, the essay shows how sound, caste, religion, and geography were reconfigured through colonial modernity, producing enduring distinctions between the classical and the devotional that continue to shape Indian musical life and nationalist discourse.

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Spontaneous Composition and Charles Mingus’s “Scenes in the City”

Abstract: This essay examines Charles Mingus’s concept of “spontaneous composition” through a close analysis of Scenes in the City (1957/1959), a hybrid work combining spoken narration and jazz performance. Situating the piece within the cultural landscape of late-1950s New York, the essay traces Mingus’s engagement with overlapping musical and literary scenes, including the jazz poetry boom associated with the Beat Generation and contemporaneous debates about composition within experimental music circles. Against a backdrop of racialized genre hierarchies and primitivist discourse in jazz criticism, Mingus’s approach to composition (grounded in orality, improvisation, and extended form) emerges as both an aesthetic and political intervention. By rejecting “pencil composition” while maintaining tight formal control, Mingus challenged prevailing assumptions about authorship, notation, and musical seriousness.

Through comparative listening and structural analysis of Scenes in the City and its earlier iteration A Colloquial Dream, the essay demonstrates how Mingus’s extended form creates responsive musical environments in which narration and improvisation unfold collaboratively. Rather than treating music as accompaniment to text, Mingus integrates the narrator into the ensemble, using sectional flexibility, cueing, and dynamic contrast to negotiate the temporal and semantic demands of spoken language. The essay argues that Scenes in the City represents a rare success within the jazz–poetry experiments of the period and serves as a key example of Mingus’s broader project of self-historization. Ultimately, the article suggests that attending to Mingus’s spontaneous composition requires listening across boundaries—between improvisation and composition, music and language, and the multiple cultural scenes that shaped jazz in midcentury America.

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Listening to Music History

Abstract: This essay argues that recordings have changed the ways that musicians construct music and the ways that listeners perceive it. Because of the ubiquity of recorded music, the assumptions that we make about “music history” are often at odds with the ways that we experience music’s history through recordings. Using the perspectives inspired by recordings and their distribution, this essay provides alternative methods for thinking about, organizing, or “listening to” music history.

Connections: Ideas about how to connect his article to others in our collection, with links out to the other articles.

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