The Production of Aura in the Gramophone Age of the “Live” Performance

Abstract

�� ��� Th is essay examines the impact of mass media on the cultivation, consumption, and connoisseurship of Hindustani music in the 20th century. I propose that the gramophone transformed listening habits as it normalized the repetition of listening. Th is, paradoxically, impelled a new phenomenon known as the “live” event, which had the novel quality that it could be experienced only as a single, momentary, and evanescent instant. Consequently, for many connoisseurs in the postcolonial public, the “live” performance took on the status of a momentous event; as something that could not be preserved and therefore as something that was uniquely singular and passing. With a music now understood as resistant to capture and preservation, it became embedded with a uniquely modern aura of singularity. In this new environment, the Hindustani musician assumed a new role as a celebrated national emblem, a decided shift from his/her preindependence role as a denigrated feudal anachronism. In referring to Walter Benjamin’s seminal essay, “Th e Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” I intend only a tangential place in the dialogue that he helped to animate. Th is essay does not therefore address the very important debate about the emancipatory possibilities of mass media, as articulated by Walter Benjamin, or of their repressive eff ects, as articulated by Th eodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer. 2 Nor do I presume to contribute to the exegesis of what Benjamin meant by his notion of aura, which I take here to mean a premodern ethos attached to an artwork that faded in the modern era of mass reproduction. 3 What I would like instead to describe are the unique circumstances of postcolonial India whereby a modern aura could develop, even if a premodern aura withered. Th is characterization of a contemporary aura would contravene more commonly held views among musicians, musicologists, and connoisseurs concerning the “shattering of tradition” as the central crisis of Hindustani music; a crisis that is set against the assumption of a golden age that existed either in the ancient “classical” or “feudal” past. 4 What we will instead see are the rather unique circumstances where the postindependence “present” could come to stand as a high point for this “classical” tradition even against the more commonplace statements of its decline and decay.