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kala collective:consultancy and services in Indian arts utsavam - music from india 9 February to 2 November 2008, Horniman Museum, London Co-curated by Rolf Killius of the Kala Collective
“This landmark exhibition at the Horniman, and the programme of
events around it, offer a new perspective on Indian culture and
music. I am sure it will inspire people to discover more about
Indian music and provide artistic influence to musicians here in the
UK”. From February 2008 until November 2008 the Horniman Museum is holding a major exhibition showcasing a new collection of relatively unknown musical instruments from rural areas of India. The exhibition, co-curated by Rolf Killius of the Kala Collective provides glimpses of the cultural, musical and linguistic diversity of the sub-continent by exploring the music and musical instruments of communities that are representative of the four main language groups of India (Dravidian, Indo-Aryan, Tibeto-Burman and Austroasiatic).
Utsavam – Music from India displays over 300 instruments and many filmed musical performances of the village-dwelling majority of India’s population, including the Adivasi (indigenous) groups whose music remains relatively unknown.
Represented are the performance arts of the temple musicians and priests of rural Kerala, singer-storytellers in the state of Punjab, musician-farmers of the villages of the Sora groups (who are among the Adivasi of Orissa and Andhra Pradesh), members of fishing and farming communities on the river island of Majuli in Assam, and communities in the mountains of Arunachal Pradesh on the border with China. Each section of the exhibition conveys information about the geographical, social and cultural environment in which the musicians from the different areas of India work. Section themes include, for example, ‘The Hills and Forests’ and ‘The Coastal Plain’. These exhibition themes reflect the contrasting terrains that are sources for the raw materials for instruments. London-based communities of Indian heritage provide a further dimension to Utsavam - Music from India, with a dedicated community space in the exhibition, plus workshops and performances throughout 2008.
About Utsavam - Music from India The year 2000 was the official birth of Traditional Music in India (TMI), when Janet Topp Fargion, the curator of the World and Traditional Music Section within the British Library Sound Archive, and Rolf Killius, set up a research project “to record, document and research folk, devotional and ritual musics of India” (project concept 2000). Part of the project became the collection and documentation of more than 100 musical instruments for the Horniman Museum in London. The Horniman Museum and Rolf Killius developed the idea to commission musical instruments to be made in the areas where music and dance was recorded.
In November 2002 Rolf Killius and his research assistant/camera-woman Jutta Winkler started on the first 17 months tour to selected rural and mostly remote areas in India. Until February 2007 five more tours followed comprising a total research time of 3 ˝ years. During the project it became apparent that the sheer wealth of musical styles and musicians in India, sometimes hardly known outside their villages, makes it very difficult to do a comprehensive project. Very few areas in India, like parts the Western states of Punjab, Rajasthan, and Karnataka, are well-documented and researched. Little work has been done on the remote rural areas or the habitats of the Adivasi (original inhabitants of India), the latter comprising around 7 % of the total population. In many areas music and dance cultures could be regarded as ‘endangered’. The main reasons being the extremely fast changing socio-cultural structure and the traditionally high stratification in Indian society. The TMI project has therefore been concentrating on the oral culture of distinct communities living in some of the more remote rural areas, where music and dance still play an important part in everyday life - and the Horniman Museum’s exhibition, Utsavam – Music from India has been a first major step to make the collected musical instruments and some of the sound and film material available to the public.
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