The ethnic core of unionique music: Ravi Shankar’s Concerto No 1 for Sitar & Orchestra and Anoushka Shankar’s Land of Gold album

Abstract

Statement of the problem. This article focuses attention on the vivid examples of interaction among fundamentally different spheres of music playing: ethnic, academic, jazz and modern pop music. The growing number of examples of combining music with various types of thinking and rules of organizing musical materials, observed during the past 70 years, posed a question to music theoreticians and historians concerning the genre-based definition of these fundamentally new types of music. Presently, none of the existing genre-based definitions of the aforementioned musical compositions has a concrete wholesome description; they contain numerous contradictions, tautologies and interchangeable terms. To solve these problems, we have introduced a separate category, unionique music, which includes music works created as a result of organic combination of elements from a broad range of music spheres: from the music of Western European academic tradition to electronic music. This article offers an analysis of Ravi Shankar’s Concerto No 1 for Sitar & Orchestra and Anoushka Shankar’s Land of Gold album. A characteristic feature of these works is the basic ethnic component, while in other aspects, they have essential differences. Analysis of recent research and publications. An important place in this article is occupied by the world music genre, because it contains a vividly expressive ethnic component. Therefore, this article uses research works devoted to the world music genre by P. Bohlman, R. Middleton, M. Hart, I. Fedorova, and the studies of history and theory of Indian musical culture. The main goal of the study is to identify, based on the analysis of Ravi Shankar’s Concerto No 1 for Sitar & Orchestra and Anoushka Shankar’s Land of Gold album, the factors that place these compositions into the unionique music category. Methodology: the historical, analytical and comparative methods were used to achieve the goal set forth in this article. Results and conclusions. Our analysis has revealed that Anoushka Shankar’s Land of Gold album and Ravi Shankar’s Concerto No 1 for Sitar & Orchestra are the works that have no analogues, and based on all features, they fall into the unionique music category. The author of this article has come to a conclusion that a new paradigm of musical thinking has occurred in the 21st century, featuring the use of a broad range of expressive means in the works of music to create compositions at a fundamentally different level. The importance of perceiving all spheres of music playing as equal parts of a wholesome picture of the musical world as well as the understanding the rules of every sphere of music was stressed upon. The fact that interaction among music domains has a substantial potential for the creation of various interesting compositions that enrich the musical culture was established.