The Variety of Music in a North Indian Village: Reassessing Cantometrics

Abstract

relationship between music and culture generally. The major conclusions of the paper are these: the characterization of Indian folk music in Folk Song Style and Culture exaggerates the importance of the 'bardic' solo style and de-emphasizes the importance of the widespread group styles and the many caste-free institutions present in India which these styles seem to reflect. The author's theoretical framework neither admits nor explains the heterogeneity of song styles in India or in other parts of the world. My field researchI disclosed that, at least in Eastern Uttar Pradesh and Western Bihar if not throughout India, the corpus of music is quite diverse. Some genres are performed primarily by specialists and some by non-specialists. The style characteristics which Lomax deems in Indian folk music I found to be much more common among genres performed by specialists. The non-specialist genres, however, are performed equally or more frequently, and inasmuch as both of these gross types are abundant throughout India, it seems inappropriate to characterize Indian folk music as of one or the other type. The data and interpretation presented here also undermine the hypothesized causal relationship between productive arrangements and song style. Lomax's characterization of Indian folk music and his arguments for their correlation with certain cultural features is summarized below. Descriptions of the genres of music whose performances I have observed and tape recorded follow. These are buttressed where pertinent with other anthropologists' findings, and juxtaposed to the predominant traits identified in Folk Song Style and Culture. After noting difficulties with some of the cantometric parameters, a discussion of the implications of the data with reference to the social structure of India is presented. An examination of the basic assumptions of Lomax's theory, based on the data presented here, concludes the article. 49