Friday, March 22, 2024 – 3:30pm, Fulton Recital Hall, Goodspeed Hall, 4th Floor
Katherine Schofield, Senior Lecturer, Department of Music, King’s College London
Katherine Schofield will be presenting the conclusions of her new book, Music and Musicians in Late Mughal India: Histories of the Ephemeral, 1748–1858, which has just been published by Cambridge University Press. Based on a vast, virtually unstudied archive of Indian writings alongside visual sources, this book presents the first history of music and musicians in late Mughal India c.1748–1858 and takes the lives of nine musicians as entry points into six prominent types of writing on music in Persian, Brajbhasha, Urdu and English, moving from Delhi to Lucknow, Hyderabad, Jaipur and among the British. It shows how a key Mughal cultural field responded to the political, economic and social upheaval of the transition to British rule, while addressing a central philosophical question: can we ever recapture the ephemeral experience of music once the performance is over? These rich, diverse sources shine new light on the wider historical processes of this pivotal transitional period, and provide a new history of music, musicians and their audiences during the precise period in which North Indian classical music coalesced in its modern form.
Katherine Schofield is a historian of music & listening in Mughal India and the paracolonial Indian Ocean c. 1590–1860, and Head of the Department of Music at King’s College London. Through stories about musicians and their patrons drawn from Persian, Urdu & visual sources, she writes about sovereignty & selfhood, affection & desire, sympathy & loss, and power, worldly & strange. Katherine was the Principal Investigator of the first European Research Council Starting Grant for music in the UK (2011–16), and a British Academy Mid-Career Fellow in 2018. She is the co-editor of two volumes of essays: Monsoon Feelings: A History of Emotions in the Rain (with Imke Rajamani and Margrit Pernau, 2018), andTellings and Texts: Music, Literature and Performance in North India (with Francesca Orsini, 2015); and her latest book, Music and Musicians in Late Mughal India: Histories of the Ephemeral, 1748–1858, has just been published by Cambridge University Press (2023). Katherine is a Fellow of the Royal Asiatic Society and the Royal Historical Society.
Co-sponsored by Ethnoise! Workshop