The Voice in the Drum: Music, Language, and Emotion in Islamicate South Asia by Richard K. Wolf

Abstract

ETHNOMUSICOLOGY The Voice in the Drum: Music, Language, and Emotion in Islamicate South Asia. By Richard K. Wolf. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2014. [xxiv, 375 p. ISBN 9780252038587 (hardcover), $60; ISBN 9780252096501 (e-book), various.] Music examples, illustrations, appendices, notes, glossary, bibliographic references, index.Ethnomusicologists persistently ask how people's cultural and musical understandings are connected. In this work, Richard K. Wolf explores how music- specifically that of drums-provides a framework for emotion in ritual contexts for Islamic communities in South Asia. The events of the book take place across the subcontinent-in particular in Uttar Pradesh and Delhi (India) and the Panjab and Sindh (Pakistan), although drumming traditions throughout the subcontinent are mentioned-as well as over the course of several decades, showing how discourses across time and regions constitute how people understand, or choose to represent, these traditions and their involvement in them. Rather than being a standard ethnographic treatise, most of this work is written as a novel. This literary form allows Wolf to keep sight of individual people as active, complex agents as he explores the interconnections of emotion, music, movement, language (and text), ritual, and religion across the subcontinent. However, this work also demonstrates that, as literary forms, ethnography and the novel have significant differences that are not easily compatible.The first four chapters are written in a split voice. The first part of each chapter is written from the point of view of Muharram Ali, the novel's protagonist. As an aspiring journalist, Ali tasks himself with writing a series on musical activities that take place during the Islamic holy month of Muharram. He looks not only at the musical connections between geographically distant drumming repertoires in India and Pakistan, but also asks questions about how participants link their musical experience to their faith, how drumming elicits emotion in a ritual context, and how sung poetic forms might structure drum patterns. The connection between text and drum patterns-thus the presence of voice in the drum-becomes one of Ali's major lines of inquiry. As can be expected, he encounters a wide-ranging set of answers from professional and hereditary musicians, participating community members, religious practitioners, and self-appointed experts. As he widens his research, not only must he make sense of multiple (and sometimes contradictory) points of view, but he must also confront his own biases and naivete. The novel form allows Wolf to provide a detailed description and commentary on the process of ethnographic research itself and the conditions in which it transpires.In the second part of each of these first four chapters, Wolf contextualizes Ali's observations and experiences through literature reviews and his own ethnographic experience, and lays out theoretical lines of inquiry that align with the themes Ali explores. Wolf shows how repeating beat cycles are not the only way to organize drum patterns; rather, many vernacular patterns are based on prosody, i.e. patterns of sounds found in poetic texts. Wolf uses the connection between drum patterns and prosody to problematize the rhythm/ melody dichotomy, showing how drum patterns can sound like texts and be melodic (p. 9). Examining the sociocultural positions of musicians in South Asia and the role of emotion in Muslim ritual observances allows Wolf to examine how participants' agency is structured. The first part of the book culminates with chapter five, which is an extensive description of Ali's experience of Muharram celebrations in Multan, Pakistan. This description links Wolf's theoretical explorations of emotion, agency, and music to a live, ritual celebration.Chapters 6 through 10 are written in Ali's voice alone. While chapters 8 and 9 examine Muharram celebrations in Hyderabad, Pakistan, chapters 6 and 7 branch beyond Muharram to look at drumming, emotion, and texts within Sufi 'urses (saint death anniversary celebrations) in and around Lahore, Pakistan. …