Finding the Raga

An Improvisation on Indian Music

By Amit Chaudhuri

2021

First Published

3.70

Average Rating

204

Number of Pages

6H13M

Audio Length

Finding the Raga is more than a book that tries to make sense of Indian classical music and of how Indian music challenges Western notions of what music might be. It is a work of self-inquiry, as might be expected from Amit Chaudhuri, a musician who is also a novelist; a novelist who is also a critic and essayist; a trained and recorded performer in the Indian classical vocal tradition who was also, once, a guitarist and songwriter in the American folk-music style and is now a composer and recorded performer of experimental music. Each one of these undertakings and selves signifies turns at different points in his life, and each turn and change of direction brings a fresh perspective on music, writing, and what it means to take on and do these things. No category—Indian, Western—is a given in this book. Partly a record of one of the most important turns in the author’s life, toward North Indian music, and of its long aftermath, Finding the Raga is also part autobiography set in 1970s Bombay, part essay, and part detailed analysis of how we might grasp the conceptual underpinnings as well as the experience of music. It explores the different ways in which music relates to the world—whether it’s through representation or evocation, as in Western music, or through the raga being sung at different times of day and in different seasons, as in Indian music—and also tries to understand what the act of listening involves for individuals and cultures.

Avg Rating

3.70

Number of Ratings

149

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4 STARS

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3 STARS

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1 STARS

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Author

Amit Chaudhuri

Author · 16 books

Amit Chaudhuri was born in Calcutta in 1962, and grew up in Bombay. He read English at University College, London, where he took his BA with First Class Honours, and completed his doctorate on critical theory and the poetry of D.H. Lawrence at Balliol College, Oxford, where he was a Dervorguilla Scholar. He was Creative Arts Fellow at Wolfson College, Oxford, from 1992-95, and Leverhulme Special Research Fellow at the Faculty of English, Cambridge University, until April 1999, where he taught the Commonwealth and International Literatures paper of the English Tripos. He was on the faculty of the School of the Arts, Columbia University, for the Fall semester, 2002. He was appointed Samuel Fischer Guest Professor of Literature at Free University, Berlin, for the winter term 2005. He is now Professor in Contemporary Literature at the University of East Anglia. He was made Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in 2009.