fostering cooperation through music
Mit dem Tod von Dr. Pia Srinivasan (15. Mai 1931 – 8. April 2022) verlieren Freunde der indischen Musik eine inspirierende Vertreterin des deutsch-indischen Dialogs.
Zugleich lebt ihr Erbe fort, sei es mit Hilfe ihrer preisgekrönten, weil zugänglichen Aufnahme südindischer klassischer Musik, sei es mit Veröffentlichungen, die sie in Zusammenarbeit mit ihrem Mann Prof. S.A. Srinivasan für ein Fachpublikum erarbeitete.
I cling to the belief that for any culture as old and ancient as ours to have survived over time and in time, there could only be one basic common and acceptable core thought: humaneness. To accept each other’s right to be human with dignity.
Mahasweta Devi in “The Republic of Dreams”, inaugural speech for the Frankfurt Book Fair
A Theatre for All Sittrarangam—the small theatre Madras by Ludwig Pesch with a Foreword by Himanshu Burte
eka.grata publications © Amsterdam 2002 (print version), 2016 (ebook versions)
Digital edition © Ludwig Pesch 2016 based on the 2nd revised edition 2002This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License. To view a copy of this license, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0/.
Beautifully and very imaginatively conceived. India needs theatres of this kind in every village.
Goverdhan Panchal, Emeritus Instructor of Scene Design at the National School of Drama and author of books and articles on traditional Indian theatre
Project website
https://www.natyasala.mimemo.net/Natyasala/Small_theatre.html
Sittrarangam is discussed in the chapter on Indian theatre architecture together with Kalakshetra and Kerala Kalamandalam in:
The Oxford Companion to Indian Theatre edited by Ananda Lal (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2004), pp. 18-19
http://www.worldcat.org/oclc/470139309
This month [December 2020] marks the 250th birth anniversary of Ludwig van Beethoven. In ordinary times, Germany, Austria, and a good part of the world beyond Europe would have been ablaze with celebrations: as the opera composer Giuseppe Verdi, a man whose reputation in some circles would be just as great, remarked: “Before the name of Beethoven, we must all bow in reverence.” However, in India, even without the coronavirus pandemic, there would not have been much of a stir. Beethoven’s name is by no means unknown, and India doubtless has its share of afficionados of Western classical music. […]
Stunningly [a] quote from the Iliad is preceded in Beethoven’s notebook by an excerpt from the Gita that he took to be its central teaching:
“Let not thy life be spent in inaction. Depend upon application, perform thy duty, abandon all thought of the consequence, and make the event equal, whether it terminate in good or evil; for such an equality is called Yog, attention to what is spiritual.”
Beethoven’s contemporary, the composer Franz Schubert, was almost singular in recognizing that the late string quartets were perhaps an expression of the ineffable in human existence and the search of the soul for the transcendent. Listening to the String Quartet No. 14 in C minor (Opus 131) for the last time, just before his own death a year after the passing of Beethoven, Schubert exclaimed, “After this, what is left for us to write.” Opinion would begin to swing the other way many years after Beethoven’s death, but what is singularly striking is that musicologists have been loath to consider how Indian philosophy may have contributed to carving out in Beethoven’s frame of thinking a space for the melancholic longing for the liberation that the Buddhists describe as nirvana and the Hindus as moksha. After the Upanishads and Shankaracharya, Ramana Maharishi and Sree Narayana Guru, India must recognize that Beethoven has given us the music of advaita.
Source: “Imagining Beethoven in India” by Vinay Lal (Professor of History & Asian American Studies, University of California, Los Angeles UCLA)
URL: https://vinaylal.wordpress.com/2020/12/30/imagining-beethoven-in-india/
Date visited: 2 January 2020
[Bold typeface added above for emphasis]
pp. 16 music notation and article on Tagore’s music by Philippe Stern & Arnold A. Bake
Download the full issue here: https://unesdoc.unesco.org/images/0006/000643/064331eo.pdf
More on and by Rabindranath Tagore >>
Listen to Tagore: Unlocking Cages: Sunil Khilnani tells the story of the Bengali writer and thinker Rabindranath Tagore: https://bbc.in/1KVh4Cf >>
The acclaimed BBC 4 podcast series titled Incarnations: India in 50 Lives has also been published in book form (Allen Lane).
“I was moved by how many of these lives pose challenges to the Indian present,” he writes, “and remind us of future possibilities that are in danger of being closed off.”1