Music and Musical Thought in Early India.

• Author: Kippen, James R.

By Lewis Rowell. Chicago Studies in Ethnomusicology, edited by Philip V. Bohlman and Bruno Nettl. Chicago: The Univeristy of Chicago Press, 1992. Pp. 409; tables, notes, glossary, bibliography, index. $59 (cloth); $23.95 (paper).

For many scholars and teachers of the musical traditions of India, myself included, the ancient history of the subject is something one tends largely to avoid, with the exception of mere passing references to the Vedas and two important treatises, the Natyagastra (?A.D. 200), and the Sangitaratnakara 1240). In general, one's intention is to scurry through to "modern times" (i.e., post-1700), to the inception and development of instruments and musical forms that enjoy wide currency today. The bulk of Indo-(ethno)musicological writing, in fact, deals only with the past one hundred to two hundred years, and is informed largely by the recordings and oral accounts of twentieth-century musicians. In short, for the lack of a comprehensive history and analysis of music and musical thought in early India, the foundations of Indian music are relatively little understood or appreciated. Now I, for one, can no longer claim ignorance as an excuse. Lewis Rowell's masterpiece has redressed the imbalance in historical writing by providing an excellent guide to "the intellectual foundations of India's ancient music culture" (p. ix) up to the mid-thirteenth century.

Rowell betrays an inherently ethnomusicological bias (and a welcome one at that) in attempting to contextualize musical facts and concepts with particular reference to more general ideas in Indian philosophy, cosmology, religion, literature, and science. With the help of many quotations from a number of treatises, some never before translated from the original Sanskrit, Rowell embarks upon a thematic explication of key concepts such as thought, sound, chant, theater, pitch, time, form, song, and style. Each topic is dealt with in a separate chapter, efficiently subdivided into its constituent elements and logically progressive in its manner of discourse. For instance, the seventh chapter, on pitch, opens with a clarification of the often controversial but crucially fundamental terms svara and sruti (which relate to scale degrees and their relative intonation) and progresses through a series of topics relating to scale structures, their rotations, their modal implications (questions of sonance, consonance, dissonance, etc. , methods of manipulating the order of notes, and...