Plurk paste

Notes
1. Singsing is a Tok Pisin term that refers to a gathering for the performance of (usually) traditional music, and is generally village based.
2. Papua New Guinea is divided into nineteen provinces for political and administrative purposes.
3. Standard here refers to the most common tuning of the guitar – the notes EADGBE from sixth to first strings respectively (perfect fourth intervals between all strings except for a major third interval between the third and second strings).
4. In the music I recorded the strings of the guitar were tuned to the notes D, E, A, E, A, C#, from sixth to first strings respectively.
5. Concatenating words by removing the vowels and referring to the acronym-like result is common throughout PNG. Irupara, a neighbouring village is often referred to as IRP (each letter pronounced as in an acronym) or IRPR. ‘BBK’ is therefore commonly used to refer to Babaka village. This has been extended in Babaka to BB Kings, and sporting teams are commonly known by this in sport competitions outside the village, such as local area tournaments or those in Port Moresby.
References
Feld, S. (1988) ‘Aesthetics as Iconicity of Style, or ‘Lift-up-over-Sounding’: Getting into the Kaluli groove’, Yearbook for Traditional Music 20: 74–113.
—— (1994) ‘From schizophonia to schismogenesis: on the discourses and commodification practices of “world music” and “world beat”’, in C. Keil and S. Feld (eds), Music Grooves, Chicago: The University of Chicago Press Hall, S. (1991) ‘The Local and the Global: Globalization and ethnicity’, in A.
King (ed.), Culture, Globalization and the World System: Contemporary conditions for the representation of identity, New York: Macmillan Hesmondhalgh, D. (1998) ‘Globalisation and Cultural Imperialism: A case study of the music industry’, in R. Kiely and P. Marfleet (eds), Globalisation and the Third World, London: Routledge Kemoi, N. (1996), ‘The History of the Bamboo Band in Bougainville’, Kulele: Occasional papers on Pacific music and dance, No. 2, Port Moresby: National Research Institute.
Lindstrom, L and White, G. (1990), Island Encounters: Black and white memories of the Pacific War, Washington: Smithsonian Institution Press.
McLean, M. (1994), ‘Diffusion of Musical Instruments and Their Relation to Language Migrations in New Guinea’, Kulele: Occasional papers on Pacific music and dance, No.1, Port Moresby: National Research Institute. The Guitar Cultures of Papua New Guinea
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Niles, D. (1994), ‘Religion, Media and Shows: The effects of intercultural contact on Papua New Guinean musics’, in M. Kartomi and S. Blum (eds), Music Cultures in Contact: Convergence and collisions, Sydney: Currency Press.
Sheridan, R. (1972), ‘Music (2)’, in P. Ryan (ed.), Encyclopaedia of Papua and New Guinea, Melbourne: Melbourne University Press.
Stella, R. (1990), Forms and Styles of Traditional Banoni Music, Port Moresby: National Research Institute.
Tatar, E. (1979), ‘Slack Key Guitar’, in G. Kanahele (ed.), Hawaiian Music and Musicians, Honolulu: The University Press of Hawaii.
Waiko, J. (1986), ‘Oral Tradition Among the Binandere: Problems of method in a Melanesian society’, The Journal of Pacific History, 21(1): 21–38.
Webb, M. (1993), ‘Tabaran: Intercultural exchange, participation and collaboration’, Perfect Beat, 1(2): 1–15.
Webb, M. (1995), ‘“Pipal Bilong Music Tru”/“A Truly Musical People”: Musical culture, colonialism, and identity in northeastern New Britain, Papua New Guinea, after 1875’, PhD thesis, Wesleyan University.
Webb, M. (1998), ‘Popular Music: Papua New Guinea’, in A. Kaeppler and J.
Love (eds), The Garland Encyclopedia of World Music, 9, Garland Publishing.
Webb, M. and Niles, D. (1987), ‘Periods in Papua New Guinea Music History’, Bikmaus: 7(1), 50–62.
Discography
George Telek, Telek, Origin OR030 (1997). Hybridity and Segregation in the Guitar Cultures of Brazil
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Hybridity and Segregation in the Guitar Cultures of Brazil Suzel Ana Reily
Hoje, quase eu não entendo Today I can hardly understand essa linguagem que falas! this language you speak!
És o instrumento das salas, You are the instrument of parlours, pois trocaste, ó meu violão, for you have exchanged, oh my guitar, pelos palácios dos nobres, the palaces of noblemen, que agora te dão açoite, who now flog you, a majestade da noite, for the majesty of the night, tua glorificação. your glorification.
(Catulo da Paixão Cearense 1924: 214)
Musical instruments and styles – clear public indicators of ‘cultural capital’ (Bourdieu 1979) – are often closely linked to status positions (see La Rue 1994), and in Brazil, musical symbols have constituted strong markers of class and racial affiliation. In the nineteenth century, for example, the French painter, Jean Baptiste Débret (1940 [1834–9]: vol. 2: 108), who arrived in Rio de Janeiro in 1816 with the ‘Artistic Mission’ recruited to teach at the newly founded School of Fine Arts, remarked:
It is a fact that in Brazil the cottage and the palace are common cribs of music. For this reason one hears day and night the sound of the marimba of the African slave, the guitar and the cavaquinho1 of the common man, and the most proficient harmony of the piano of the rich man.2
Débret’s observations certainly reproduce the dominant stance on the associations between instruments and social classes in Brazil at the time, but in actual practice the guitar refused to be confined to the ‘common man’: it could be found alongside drums amongst blacks and mulattos as well as in the drawing rooms of respectable households. This disjuncture between discourse and practice highlights a contradiction common to the ‘hybrid cultures’ (Canclini 1998 [1989]) of Latin America. Like the rest of this region, Brazil has been a space for the continuous – 158 –
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and systematic encounter of diverse social and ethnic groups, leading to the development of a myriad of syncretic cultural expressions. The very threat of this proximity, however, also generated powerful mechanisms to preserve the segregation of these groups, amongst which one can include the construction of discourses identifying particular instruments and musical styles with specific social groups.
The intermediary position of the guitar within the Brazilian social hierarchy placed it at the very crossroads of the tensions generated by the two opposing forces of syncretism and segregation. In a manner unmatched perhaps by any other musical instrument, the guitar moved with relative ease from one social sphere to another, such that it frequently mediated the country’s processes of cultural hybridisation.
This flexibility, however, often made it the focus of heated debates, and it became the target of hardened discourses aimed at fixing its social boundaries.
With the emergence of the nationalist-oriented modernist movement in the early twentieth century, it was the very hybridity of the guitar that was heralded, instigating a drive to transform it into the national instrument (Naves 1995: 25).
In flagging hybridity as a cultural ideal, the traditional mechanisms for promoting social segregation were challenged, requiring the intelligentsia to engage in a reassessment of their conceptions of ‘the popular’, without, however, compromising their aesthetic ideals. Indeed, the modernist project envisaged an ennobled popular guitar, which could be proudly paraded as Brazil’s contribution to the ‘concert of nations’. During the 1930s, the guitar did indeed emerge as the Brazilian national instrument through its centrality to samba. Although samba cross-cut the country’s social and racial divides, the carnivalesque associations it evoked did not exactly cloak the guitar with a serious image of nobility. It was not perhaps until the rise of bossa nova in the late 1950s that an internationally recognized, sophisticated – yet popular – guitar style emerge within the Brazilian musical scenario. The degree to which this hybrid genre promoted national integration, however, is questionable, as it had but tenuous links with the ‘common man’ (Reily 1996; Treece 1997).
In Brazil, then, the guitar provides a privileged means of addressing the tensions and contradictions of a hybrid culture. Through an historical overview, I shall outline the major fluctuations in the social spheres to which the guitar gained access, highlighting the processes of syncretism they generated as well as the discursive reactions they evinced. The chapter is divided into four sections: the first discusses the emergence of the hybrid cultures generated by the encounters between the diverse social sectors in colonial Brazil; the second focuses on the tensions between syncretism and segregation in the musical life of the nineteenth century; the third discusses the contradictions in the representations of the guitar amongst early twentieth-century Brazilian modernists; and the fourth addresses the impact of modernism and modernization upon the articulation of the guitar up to the present. Hybridity and Segregation in the Guitar Cultures of Brazil
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Prototypes and Trajectories: Guitars in Colonial Brazil
Records from the colonial period tend to be rather imprecise in their references to the guitar-like instruments used in Brazil, and this has hindered the study of their historical trajectories in the country. It must be remembered, however, that this problem is hardly unique to Brazil, for on the Iberian peninsula itself these instruments were far from standardized at the time; there was considerable variation in terminology, design and tuning as well as in the social contexts in which such instruments were used (Montanaro 1983; Lima 1964). There are, however, at least four Iberian prototypes from which the contemporary Brazilian instruments of the guitar family developed: the viola de mão (hand viola), or simply viola; the lute; the machete (also known as descante); and the guitarra.
3 References to the viola prototype begin to emerge in the thirteenth century, and these documents suggest that the instrument was used primarily by troubadours.
By the fifteenth century it had clearly become a common instrument of the Iberian popular classes in both urban and rural settings, and the dangers it presented – particularly in the urban context – were evoking strong reactions. In 1459, for example, state officials made a complaint to the court of Lisbon, claiming that bands of musicians playing violas used the distraction of their music to rob their audiences. This led to an edict determining that, unless there was a festival, anyone found in the streets with a viola after nine o’clock at night would be imprisoned, and the instrument and any other possessions would be confiscated (Lima 1964: 30). By the sixteenth century, however, the viola had gained favour in the Iberian courts, where it was plucked to produce a melodic line, distinguishing the techniques of palace musicians from the cruder strumming styles used by popular performers (Oliveira 1966). Although it was probably more widely used in Spain than in Portugal, the Portuguese court could boast musicians of high standard, such as the renowned Garcia de Resende (Tinhorão 1990: 26), and in 1535 Luís de Milan dedicated some pieces for the instrument to Dom João, then King of Portugal (Lima 1964: 29). While the viola managed to gain access to the courts, the guitarra remained an outcast of lowly associations (Oliveira 1966: 183).
Due to its noble links, the term viola came to be used generically for instruments of the guitar family in the colony of Brazil. A number of early colonial references indicate that violas were widely used by representatives of the church, especially the Jesuits, from the mid-sixteenth to the late-seventeenth centuries, in their endeavours to convert the natives (Leite 1937: 49). While the missionaries drew upon a repertoire derived from both the official church and the popular domain, many felt that popular instruments – such as violas, bagpipes, drums and tambourines – were particularly well suited to the enterprise of conversion; like Amerindian ritual life, the Portuguese folk traditions in which the popular instruments were employed – 160 –
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were marked by a participatory ethos, such that the natives seemed more readily inclined to engage with them.
Although cultural exchange within the missions was essentially unilateral, signs of syncretism did emerge within them. It has been claimed that the cateretê was a dance that developed from native prototypes within Jesuit coastal missions amongst the Tupinambá (Andrade 1933: 173). It seems clear that the name of the dance derives from the Tupi language, but no descriptions of the mission dance have been discovered that might attest to its native links. However, a double line dance called cateretê, which is commonly accompanied by violas, is still widely practised in rural areas of south-eastern Brazil. While the choreography of the contemporary dance may no longer bear any relation to its mission counterpart, it stands as testimony to encounters between natives and colonists. Indeed, many missions were strategically located near Portuguese settlements, serving as a supply of Amerindian labour (Karasch 1992), and the clergy serviced both communities, albeit separately.
Interestingly the cateretê has a devotional counterpart, in which a similar choreography is performed in honour of Saint Gonçalo of Amarante (c.1250), the patron saint of violeiros (viola players), and in Brazil Saint Gonçalo is typically portrayed playing the instrument (A. M. de Araújo 1964: 26–7; Reily 1998: 311).
While this may be pure coincidence, early documents regarding religious life in the colony indicate that carnivalesque forms of popular devotion derived from Portuguese prototypes were widespread, often with direct clerical support (Leite 1937–49). Given the frequency with which they are mentioned, it is safe to say that the favoured instruments of the colonists were the viola and the guitarra, and they were used to accompany both religious festivals promoted by church officials as well as secular entertainment.
Toward the end of the seventeenth century, references to violas within the official religious sphere begin to diminish in favour of instruments associated with the ‘modern style’, and what came to be known as ‘Brazilian baroque’ began to take shape. The focus of these musical developments were the mining regions, which were blossoming overnight into populated urban centres. Along with thousands of African slaves brought in to the region to work the mines, around 800,000 metropolitans came to the colony attracted by the Brazilian gold (Zemella 1990: 52). This invasion heightened existing social divisions, and they were particularly marked within the ecclesiastic sphere: Church activities were organised along racial lines, with separate congregations for whites, pardos (people of dark skin) and blacks. Attendance to orthodoxy focussed upon the devotional activities involving whites, which was also the sphere in which the prestigious new instruments were most prevalent. Although the modern style was associated with the colonial elites, the performers were frequently less privileged mulattos in the employment of wellendowed confraternities (Lange 1966). Through their activities, popular styles insinuated themselves into respectable circles; indeed, at the height of the Brazilian Hybridity and Segregation in the Guitar Cultures of Brazil
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baroque period, church concerts in the mining regions often included pieces with risqué lyrics reminiscent of popular modas de viola (secular songs accompanied by violas) set to chamber orchestras in the ‘modern style’ (Tinhorão 1990: 91–2).
With the rise of the new repertoire, the viola came into disrepute, with clerical objections directed at the instrument’s carnivalesque and secular associations. Yet, the Church was only partially successful in ousting the instrument from the religious sphere. Even one of the Church’s most ardent defenders in the early eighteenth century, the Bahian layman Nuno Marques Pereira (1939)4 was himself a viola player, a talent he employed at pageant plays and church festivals. This did not prevent him from claiming that the devil was a violeiro who invented profane modas (generic term for secular songs) to seduce his victims. There were also viola players amongst the clerics. In the latter part of the seventeenth century, for example, a mulatto priest by the name of Lourenço Ribeiro is said to have entertained the Bahian elites in their drawing-rooms with modas de viola (Tinhorão 1990: 48). In popular catholic activities – particularly those that took place in distant rural communities – the viola took pride of place, and it would eventually emerge as the quintessential peasant instrument.
Although the viola lost ground in the urban religious sphere, it remained the primary instrument for secular entertainment, both amongst the wealthy and the not so wealthy. The English traveller Sir George Staunton, who visited Rio de Janeiro in 1792, claimed that, along with the harpsichord, it was an acceptable parlour instrument for women to play (Staunton 1797: 161). But he also noted that ‘the black drivers of hackney chaise at Rio, in the interval of leisure, are often heard playing on the guitar upon their stands’ (Staunton 1797: 174). A late seventeenthcentury Bahian performer of modas de viola about whom there is considerable information is the Gregório de Matos Guerra (c.1635–95), though all the work attributed to him is contained in epigraphic documents. Gregório de Matos, who came to be known as the ‘Mouth of Hell’, drew the attention of his contemporaries because of the wittiness of his lyrics and the sharpness with which he commented on the customs and morals of the time. The lyrics of many of his songs vividly describe the hybrid character of the musical expressions of Bahia at the time, noting particularly the strong African influence upon dance styles, in which ‘the bum always dances’.
The continuous encounter between socially and ethnically diverse sectors during the colonial era produced a highly hybrid cultural environment, but it was not perhaps until the late eighteenth century that particular music and dance forms began to be identified as distinctly colonial inventions. The genres most commonly viewed as the first ‘authentically Brazilian’ musical expressive forms are the modinha and the lundu; while these styles followed distinct processes of historical development – the first ‘Afro-Brazilianizing’ a European form, the later ‘Europeanizing’ an African-Brazilian form – they eventually fused in the parlour context, to the – 162 –
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point of becoming practically indistinguishable from one another, both encompassed by the generic term modinha.
5 In both Portugal and Brazil the term moda was used to refer to any type of folk song, but by the late eighteenth century its diminutive form, modinha, had become associated in Portugal with a particular type of operatic parlour love song. Although there was also a Portuguese form of the modinha, it was clearly distinguished from the more rhythmic and syncopated – that is, hybridized – Brazilian modinha.
Received accounts of the development of the Brazilian modinha typically begin with Domingos Caldas Barbosa (1738–1800), a native of Rio de Janeiro who emerged in the Portuguese parlours around 1775 with his viola de arame (wirestrung guitar), which he used to accompany a vast repertoire of morally questionable tunes which he called modinhas and lundus.
6 His performances caused shock waves – as well as considerable fascination – in the polite society of the metropolis, heightening notions of the rusticity and degenerate morality of the hybrid colonials.
António Ribeiro dos Santos (quoted in M. de Araújo 1963: 39), for example, had this to say of Caldas Barbosa’s impact on Lisbon parlour life:
[At an assembly I attended], young men and women sang such shameful love songs that I blushed with embarrassment, as though I were suddenly in a brothel or in the company of women of ill repute . . . Today, one only hears love songs with whimpering, lascivious dancing, open courtships, garishness. It is this that lulls the babies; that they teach to children; that young men sing and that women and maidens carry in their mouths.
What lack of modesty, of temperance and of virtue one learns from these songs! This disgrace has become general since Caldas began introducing his ballads and singing to the women. I know of no poet who is more harmful to private and public behaviour than this troubadour of Venus and Cupid; the dandiness of love, the simplicity of Brazil, and the general American laziness which, in his songs, only breathe the shamefulness and liberties of love, and the voluptuous airs of Paphus and Citar, and casts spells of venomous filters on the fantasies of young men and the hearts of women. I admire the ease of his style, the richness of his innovations, the variety of motifs in his songs, and the sharpness and grace of the refrains with which he brings them to conclusion; but I detest his themes and, even more, the way he treats them and sings them.
António Ribeiro dos Santos’s account would suggest that, at least for some members of Portuguese polite society, the colonial imprint on Caldas Barbosa’s modinhas was most noticeable in their unpolished thematic material. Gerard Béhague (1968: 68), however, has claimed that a Brazilian character is also evident in the music; drawing on extant scores of late eighteenth century Brazilian modinhas produced in Lisbon, some – if not all – by Caldas Barbosa, he noted that the early Brazilian modinha, unlike its Portuguese counterpart, made extensive use of syncopations, a feature attributed to the African legacy in the colony. Along with these ‘Brazilian’ characteristics, the highly ornamented melodic lines of these early pieces Hybridity and Segregation in the Guitar Cultures of Brazil
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evince the strong influence of Italian bel canto, which was greatly appreciated amongst the Portuguese elites at the time. Not surprisingly, it has been suggested that Caldas Barbosa created the Brazilian modinha by fusing the embodied musical practices he had assimilated in Brazil with the dominant parlour styles he encountered in Lisbon (Kiefer 1977: 15).
Caldas Barbosa was perhaps the strongest force in instigating the modinha craze that swept the metropolis in the late eighteenth century, but it was the Portuguese who reintroduced the genre in Brazil a few decades later, when the royal family, with an entourage of over 10,000 subjects, arrived in Rio in 1808 to flee from the Napoleonic threat. By the time the modinha made its way back to what was now the viceroyalty of Brazil, it had undergone considerable domestication. The shameful themes that had made António Ribeiro dos Santos blush with embarrassment had been suppressed in favour of more respectful forms of amorous expression, and the viola had been replaced by the piano. Repatriated, however, the same deeply embodied hybrid sensibilities that had guided Caldas Barbosa’s musical orientations would once again act upon the modinha, reinjecting it with local flavour.
Pianos and Guitars in the Imperial Era
Just as the mass immigration of Portuguese during the mining era had a strong ‘Europeanizing’ impact upon the musical orientations of the elites in Brazil, the arrival of the court and its entourage reignited the Eurocentric focus of the colony’s privileged classes. Gilberto Freyre (1968 [1936]) even portrayed this period as a turning point in Brazil’s cultural history. He argued that the ‘Lusitanian invasion’ drove Brazilians to conceal the hybrid elements of their local culture, because they had now come to be viewed as the embodiment of colonial cultural inferiority.
This Eurocentric shift is epitomized in the place pianos came to acquire for Brazilian polite society. Pianos were one of the great novelties to be introduced by the Portuguese, and these modern, noble instruments rapidly became central status symbols amongst the Brazilian elites. Families of sufficient means scrambled to acquire one, and young ladies set about enhancing their profiles by learning to play it. The demand was so great that by 1834, pianos were being constructed in Brazil, and local publishers were supplying the market with scores of modinhas and other drawing-room styles popular in Europe at the time (Vasconcelos 1988a: 52–3). As the prestige of the piano increased, that of the guitar – which was rapidly replacing the viola in the urban context – went into decline, and it was progressively ousted from respectable spheres. The guitar came to be viewed as the instrument of street musicians of low station (seresteiros and chorões), and in opposition to the ‘serious’ tastes of the elites, their hybrid repertoire came to viewed as vulgar and ‘popular’. – 164 –
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The emergence of a dichotomy between the piano and the guitar encapsulates a broader spectrum of civilising measures introduced by the monarch, Dom João VI. During the fourteen years the royal family was in the viceroyalty, Brazil was thrust onto the international scene, and it would emerge in 1822 as an independent nation. Since Rio de Janeiro had become the capital of the colony in 1763, it was chosen to house the court. Overnight Rio was transformed into an imperial capital, and by independence the sleepy town of 50,000 inhabitants had become a bustling cultural centre with a population of 100,000 (Skidmore 1999: 36). Following in the long-standing tradition of the Portuguese royal family, Dom João was a great patron of the arts and sciences, and during his stay he graced the city with the National Library (which by 1814 boasted a collection of 60,000 volumes, one of the largest in Latin America), the Medical School, the Botanical Gardens, the School of Fine Arts and many other institutions.
Music received special attention from the monarch. There were many musicians in the royal family’s entourage, and many more were to follow, including Marcos Portugal (1762–1830), the most prominent Portuguese composer at the time.
Indeed, the court actively recruited Portuguese musicians as well as Italian castrati to meet the demands of the new institutions (Mariz 1983: 49). Dom João launched his musical initiatives in the already established ecclesiastical sphere, with the founding of the Imperial Chapel. At its zenith, 300,000 francs were expended each a year on this establishment, which sustained fifty singers, a full orchestra and two chapel masters (Mariz 1983: 49). Of special note, though, was the introduction of secular public events into the musical life of upper-class cariocas (inhabitants of Rio de Janeiro). In 1813 the construction of the Royal Theatre of Saint John, modelled on the great Saint Charles Theatre in Lisbon, was completed, and it was inaugurated with the performance of the opera O Juramento dos Nunes, by Marcos Portugal (Appleby 1983: 44). Opera, especially the work of Rossini, was all the rage, and this highbrow form of entertainment would remain popular throughout the nineteenth century.
When Dom João VI returned to Portugal in 1821 with a much reduced entourage of 4,000 subjects, the musical orientations of the Brazilian elites had been altered dramatically. In the first decades of the new nation, however, carioca musical life lost much of its lustre. Although the prince-regent-turned-emperor, Dom Pedro I, was himself an accomplished musician, the debts incurred with independence forced him to drastically curtail state sponsorship of the music institutions founded by his father, leaving scores of musicians unemployed. The Imperial Chapel was particularly hard-hit; its orchestra had to be disbanded, and the number of musicians it supported fell to twenty-seven (Mariz 1983: 55).
With the growth of the coffee economy in the 1840s, however, the national deficit rapidly declined, allowing for greater imperial patronage. The new emperor, Dom Pedro II, was a willing supporter of the arts, but the funds he could make Hybridity and Segregation in the Guitar Cultures of Brazil
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available were insufficient to match the demands of an emergent bourgeoisie in search of cultural spaces worthy of their station. Thus, the carioca elites took to founding exclusive ‘clubs’ and ‘societies’, some more well-endowed than others, which became the main organizations for the promotion of secular concerts of serious music from the 1830s to the late nineteenth century. Each society promoted regular soirées, with a staple diet of Italian and French arias as well as light instrumental pieces and selected movements from chamber and orchestral repertoires; often poetry reading and short theatrical productions featured alongside the vocal and instrumental performances. After the official programme, dinner or refreshments were served, and the evening typically closed with a ball. As Cristina Magaldi (1995: 2) has pointed out, these events were more social than artistic, but the performance of art music served to demarcate the discerning tastes of those in attendance.
Throughout the nineteenth century musical markers played a significant role in defining the social boundaries which distinguished privileged (white) cariocas from the masses of dark-skinned popular classes that surrounded them. Herman Vianna (1999 [1995]), however, has argued that, in actual practice, the boundaries were far more porous than they have been made out to be; however entrenched the discourses separating the musical spheres of the privileged and the underprivileged may have been, musical interactions across the divide were frequent, everyday occurrences. Despite the disdain with which it was treated, the guitar was a primary mediator of these interactions, and its mediatory role was closely linked to the comings-and-goings firstly of the modinha and later of the choro.
Soon after its repatriation, the modinha – in its domesticated form, of course – gained popularity in Rio’s drawing-rooms, where it remained popular throughout the imperial era, its repertoire enhanced by many of Brazil’s most eminent composers, including José Maurício Nunes Garcia (1767–1830), Francisco Manuel da Silva (1795–1865), Carlos Gomes (1836–96) and many others. Although the piano was the favoured instrument for accompanying the modinha in the parlour context, it did not remain confined for long to this setting, nor did it remain restricted to the piano. According to Carlos Maul, Dom Pedro I’s mistress, the Marquesa de Santos, promoted soirées at her home during the 1820s, in which she ‘sang melancholy modinhas and lundus, accompanying herself on the gently plucked strings of the plaintive [guitar]’ (Maul quoted in Vianna 1999: 19) to a very distinguished audience of aristocrats and high-ranking civil servants. Popular musicians in Rio also took to the modinha, and guitar-playing street modinheiros (modinha performers) were quite prevalent in the imperial capital, some of them receiving acclaim from members of the carioca elites. The work of the informally trained guitarist Joaquim Manuel, for example, drew the attention of the Austrian composer Sigismund Neukomm (1778–1858), a student of Haydn, whose sojourn in Rio lasted from 1816–21; he edited a collection in Paris of modinhas by the popular – 166 –
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musician, which he had harmonised for piano. Joaquim Manuel also attracted the attention of the Frenchman Louise de Freycinet, who had this to say of him:
In terms of performance, nothing seems more surprising than the rare talent on the guitar of a . . . mestiço from Rio de Janeiro called Joaquim Manuel. On his fingers the instrument has an indescribable charm, which I have never encountered amongst our European guitarists, even the most notable. (Quoted in M. de Araújo 1969: 69)
As the decades went by, social boundaries hardened, becoming particularly entrenched during the reign of Dom Pedro II. Nonetheless, spaces for inter-class cultural interaction never disappeared completely. Perhaps the most documented of these spaces for the mid nineteenth century is Paula Brito’s printing shop, a meeting place for eminent carioca artists and intellectuals. But their activities were not restricted to highbrow cultural debates: they also engaged in light entertainment, often to the sounds of popular sereteiros. Some of the intellectuals even engaged in the performance of popular styles, most notably the Gypsy poet Laurindo Rabelo (1826–64), who ‘played sentimental modinhas and turbulent lundus on the guitar that made even the most sober and responsible attendants laugh uncontrollably’ (Moraes Filho 1904: 171). Allegedly even the eminent Francisco Manuel da Silva found respite at the shop, as here he could present his lighter repertoire of modinhas and lundus (Vianna 1995: 20).
During the 1860s the guitarist Xisto Bahia (1841–94) began to gain acclaim as an actor and a popular modinheiro, and his professional activities spanned several decades. Through his association with Artur Azevedo, a north-eastern playwright of national prominence, Xisto Bahia gained access to respectable spheres, his looks perhaps being one of his main attractions to the ladies, but others were won over by his ‘spirit of harmonious grace, unmatched for the special way in which he knew how to sing his own modinhas and those of other composers’ (Vincenzo Cernicchiaro quoted in Tinhorão 1986: 26). Xisto Bahia even received the applause of the emperor, Dom Pedro II (Marcondes 1977: 61), and several eminent poets provided him with lyrics, requesting that he put them to music (Tinhorão 1986: 27).
And there was also the renowned Catulo da Paixão Cearence (1866–1946), who was initiated on the guitar in Rio de Janeiro by a medical student, no less (Marcondes 1977: 182). Catulo began his musical career at a time in which the cultural discourses of the elites were at their most entrenched, and considerable energy was being expended to cleanse the country of its African heritage. It is perhaps for this reason that Brazilian musicologists have often argued that he was the primary figure in the ‘rehabilitation of the guitar’ (Marcondes 1977: 183). For Vianna (1999 [1995]), however, his acceptance into upper class circles might be better viewed as an indication of the degree to which the dominant discourses contradicted everyday practice. Indeed, alongside a disdain for all things popular, Hybridity and Segregation in the Guitar Cultures of Brazil
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incipient nationalist sentiments were fuelling a vogue for the country’s exoticisms, spawning some of the first major publications of local folklore by such eminent intellectuals as Amadeu Amaral, Arthur Azevedo, Mello Moraes Filho, Silvio Romero and others.
It is also worth noting that, although the piano repertoire was primarily European in origin, it was not restricted to serious music. The successive cycles of European dance crazes, such as the polka, the quadrille, the schottische and the waltz, also crossed the Atlantic, finding favour in Brazilian drawing-rooms. Just as the modinha had quickly seeped out into the streets to find its way to the guitar, these dance forms were also taken up by street musicians. Within these circles a popular instrumental style would develop which came to be known as the choro.
According to the standard narrative,7 the choro emerged around 1870 less as a distinct musical genre and more as a local way of performing European dance tunes, especially the polka. In its early phase the style was performed by an instrumental ensemble called a trio de pau e corda (wood and string trio), consisting of an ebony flute, which played the melody line, a cavaquinho (small, four coursed, instrument similar to a ukulele), which provided a percussive harmonic accompaniment, and a guitar, which provided the bass. In time, the choro would become ever more virtuosic and improvizational, and around the turn of the twentieth century other melody instruments started to be used in place of the flute, such as the bandolim, the clarinet and the ophicleide. Chorões typically performed at the house parties of their social equals as well as in cafés, hotels and cabarets, often in exchange for nothing more than food and drink.
Soon after its development amongst street musicians, the choro began a return journey into more respectable spheres, as a number of musically trained composers, such as Chiquinha Gonzaga (1847–1935), Alexandre Levy (1864–92), Ernesto Nazaré (1863–1933) among others, started to write choros for the piano. It is worth noting, however, that these composers often called their pieces Brazilian tangos; by thus distancing them from the street form, they hoped to give them greater respectability. As this popular piano style developed, however, a new distinction was to emerge, that between pianeiros – a derogatory term that referred to popular pianists – and pianistas – ‘real’ pianists, thereby redrawing the boundaries to safeguard the sanctity of the piano.
Throughout the nineteenth century, discourse focused upon the demarcation and preservation of musical boundaries, against a backdrop in which they were being continuously transgressed, the guitar serving as a primary mediator of these transgressions. As the century came to a close, however, nationalist sentiments had become increasingly marked amongst influential sectors of the country’s intellectuals, shifting the focus of debate onto the stances of the elites toward the cultural manifestations of the popular classes. These voices challenged Eurocentrism by highlighting the cultural dependence it had engendered in the nation. If the country – 168 –
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was to free itself from this cultural bondage, stock would have to be taken of its hybridity, a move that threatened to break down the barriers that had been so studiously constructed throughout the century to preserve the segregation of the country’s distinct cultural worlds.
The Tupi’s Lute: The Guitar in the Modernist Movement
The tensions between syncretism and segregation came to a head in the early twentieth century, when an avant-garde intelligentsia linked to the nationalistoriented modernist movement embarked upon the project of defining the symbols of national identity. As Santuza Cambraia Naves (1998: 25) has pointed out, the guitar played a prominent symbolic role in Brazilian modernism, for its potential to mediate between the local cultures of the nation’s popular classes and the ‘universal’ aesthetics of high art. This mediatory role is cogently embodied in an image in Mário de Andrade’s poem, ‘O Trovador’ (the troubadour), from the collection, Paulicéia Desvairada (deranged São Paulo) published in 1922: Sou um Tupi tangendo um alaúde (I am a Tupi Indian Playing a Lute). In a rather less poetic – but certainly more explicit – fashion, Manuel Bandeira (1886–1968), a leading modernist poet, presented his discourse on the guitar in 1924 in an article published in Ariel – Revista de Cultura Musical, a cultural periodical widely read in modernist circles at the time:
For us Brazilians the guitar had to be the national, racial instrument. If the modinha is the expression of our people, the guitar is the instrumental timbre to which it is best suited . . .
Unfortunately up to now the guitar has been cultivated among us in a careless manner . . .
The guitar has also been resisted for its fame as an instrument of the low-minded, of intrigue and as an accomplice to roguery in seductive late-night revelries . . . It has been rehabilitated, however, with the visit of two foreign artists, who revealed its resources and the true school of the great Spanish virtuosi to our amateurs. I am referring to Agostinho Barrios and Josefina Robledo . . . Besides the repertoire of the guitar itself, it has all of the repertoire of the lute . . . Our guitarists have composed very interesting pieces with a Brazilian character. Yet we have only heard about them. This is the case of the maxixes8 by Arthiodoro da Costa, João Pernambucano, Quincas Laranjeiras and others of equal merit. (Bandeira, quoted in Naves 1998: 26–7)
Not surprisingly Bandeira concluded his discussion with a reference to Heitor Villa-Lobos (1887–1959), an obvious candidate to the honourable role of the Tupi with a lute, even though the composer was rather reluctant to embrace the role, a fact not lost on the poet: Hybridity and Segregation in the Guitar Cultures of Brazil
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Villa-Lobos . . ., who is now in Paris . . . played the guitar when he was young. And he composed quite a bit which is tightly locked away . . . And I don’t know if he has thrown them into the sea . . . He doesn’t like to speak of this. This prejudice is not modern and it isn’t the least bit national. (Bandeira, quoted in Naves 1998: 27)
Today, of course, Villa-Lobos may be best remembered for some of his guitar solos, such as the Choro No. 1 (1921), the Estudos (1929) and the Prelúdios (1940), which have become standard repertoire for the instrument. Indeed, his relationship to the guitar was at best ambiguous, and this was already evident even at a time in which his skills as a guitarist were still at their height. His first wife, Lucília Guimarães, an outstanding pianist in her own right, perceived this, and in her diary she noted her impressions of the day they met, 1 November 1912. Villa-Lobos had been taken to her home by a family friend, where he was to play guitar to entertain the household. Her remarks on the soirée are as follows:
The evening of music went well, extremely pleasant, and for us the guitar in VillaLobos’s hands was a success. When he finished his presentation, Villa-Lobos indicated his desire to hear the pianist, and I played a few pieces by Chopin, and it seemed to me that he was impressed by the technique and interpretation of the performance.
However, Villa-Lobos felt embarrassed, perhaps diminished even, because at that time the guitar was not a parlour instrument, for real music, but rather a vulgar instrument played by street musicians (chorões) and serenaders (seresteiros). Suddenly, as though overcoming a depression, he declared that his real instrument was the cello, and he insisted that we arrange a meeting at our house to hear him play it. (Quoted in Horta 1987: 24–5.)
Villa-Lobos was born in Rio to a fairly comfortable middle-class family.9 His father, Raul Villa-Lobos, an employee of the National Library, had a keen interest in music, and he sponsored frequent soirées of chamber music in the family home.
He had studied the cello at conservatory, and he took it upon himself to initiate his son on the instrument at the age of six, followed some years later by clarinet tuition.
The young musician showed early signs of his musical aptitude, but his father’s premature death when he was only twelve years old threatened his further musical development. Against his mother’s wishes, who envisaged for him a secure career as a physician, the lad slipped away from home as often as he could to join the chorões, amongst whom he acquired his skills as a guitarist. At the age of sixteen he moved to the house of an aunt, which gave him greater liberty to pursue his interest in the popular styles of the era.
After his marriage Villa-Lobos did not only start neglecting the guitar, he also began to avoid any reference to his days amongst chorões until much later in life.
By the time he met Andrés Segovia in Paris in 1924, he was so out of practice he was unable to play more than a few bars (Santos 1975: 12–15). But had he not – 170 –
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met the Spaniard he may never have written the Estudos, the Prelúdios or any of the other pieces he dedicated to the master guitarist. Most of the extant guitar pieces he wrote during his bohemian days still remain unpublished.
The symbolic value of the guitar for the ideologues of Brazilian modernists hinged upon its potential to mediate between cultural spheres on both horizontal and vertical axes. Horizontally, it could mediate between the rural and the urban, the regional and the national, the national and the international; vertically, it provided a link for integrating popular culture and high art as well as the racially defined social classes related to these disparate spheres. But if Brazil was to participate as an equal in the ‘concert of nations’, the guitar would have to be cultivated in accordance with the universal aesthetic ideals of high art, while preserving its national character. According to Bandeira, this is precisely what the Spanish virtuosi had achieved for their country. Before the guitar could become the national instrument, the deeply rooted prejudices still held against it by many influential members of the art world, including some of those attached to the modernist movement itself, would have to be overcome. Despite their efforts, however, it would be several decades before the piano would finally lose its place of prominence in Brazilian parlours.
The Aftermath: Guitars in Twentieth-century Brazil
Although the guitar would remain relatively marginal to the world of Brazilian art music, the modernist movement pre-empted the nationalist fervour that would soon take the country by storm, shifting the national focus away from the aesthetic preferences of the elites to those of the popular classes. To be sure, this shift was boosted by the populist agenda of Getúlio Vargas, who came to power in 1930, where he remained until 1945.10 The Vargas regime focussed upon industrialization, coupling this drive with a strong nationalist discourse, aimed at integrating the popular classes into the country’s economic and political structures. The nationalist project centred on the image of the ‘cordial mestiço’, a dignified hybrid labourer proud to be contributing to the prosperity of the country. Emblems of hybridity were forcefully promoted as symbols of national identity by the Vargas propaganda machine, and with the advent of the radio, music played a leading role in defining what would be taken for national culture.
The onset of the Vargas regime coincided with the emergence of samba, a hybrid popular style which drew on musical elements from the lundu, the maxixi and the choro, providing the Vargas regime with a ready-made musical form well suited to its agenda. Samba was co-opted and fashioned through censorship to promote ‘Brazilian-ness’. With its carnivalesque associations, samba could be heralded as the felicitous integration of diverse cultural and racial groups that had been achieved in the country, and through the radio, this image was propagated across the entire country. Hybridity and Segregation in the Guitar Cultures of Brazil
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In the early decades of the twentieth century samba began to take shape within a few circles of popular musicians of low income, who met informally for their own entertainment, just as modinheiros and chorões had done before them. The most influential of these enclaves were the sambistas (samba musicians) who met in the home of Tia ‘Aunt’ Ciata, in the wharf district of Saúde, and those of Estácio de Sá, who founded ‘Deixa Falar’ (Let Them Speak), the first samba school, in 1928. The new style attracted the attention of the nascent music industry, but its rusticity offended the aesthetic sensibilities of record producers, who also felt the style would displease their target audiences, namely those with sufficient income to afford radio receivers. In response, they took to contracting trained arrangers to polish the popular compositions, while also drafting in songwriters and singers from comfortable backgrounds to insure the standard of their recordings (Schreiner 1993: 111; Shaw 1999: 50). Thus, alongside the rustic samba of the morros (hills), a reference to the slums built on the hills of Rio, a more melodious high-brow samba emerged, which came to be known as ‘city samba’ or samba-canção (songsamba); it was the latter which dominated the airwaves, its stars becoming household names throughout the country. The golden age of samba was dominated by exuberant singers with powerful throats, often backed by big-band-type orchestras.
Samba promoted an image of tropical flamboyance and alegria (joy, happiness) coherent with the Vargas agenda.
With samba declared the national music, the guitar, the favoured instrument of samba composers, began to take on the aura of a national instrument. Indeed, Donga (1891–1974), who – together with pianeiro Sinhô (1888–1930) – claimed authorship of the first ever samba to be recorded, Pelo Telefone (By Telephone), in 1917, was an accomplished guitarist and cavaquinho player. The great demand for a steady supply of new sambas gave rise to numerous meeting places for sambistas, ranging from studios to cafés and music stores, and these circles of musicians tended to congregate around master guitarists. The Café Nice was a well-known meeting place for popular musicians (Shaw 1999: 47), as was the music store ‘O Cavaquinho de Ouro’ (Máximo and Didier 1990: 65). It is said that guitarist Noel Rosa (1910–37), one of the most prolific and enduring samba composers, wrote many of his songs in the bar De Carvalho, located in his neighbourhood of Vila Isabel (Shaw 1999: 92).
Samba certainly fostered national interest in the guitar, but it was insufficient to overthrow the dominant view amongst the upper class that it was not a serious instrument. Indeed, resistance from parents could be heavy handed toward youths who showed excessive interest in taking up the instrument. For those who did, the guitar became a symbol of renunciation. Noel Rosa, for example, had been prepared by his family to attend medical school, but he rejected this profession in favour of the less respectable world of popular music (Bastos 1996: 160). Amongst the darker lower classes, however, samba was one of the few available means of social ascent – 172 –
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(Pereira 1967). It is due to their guitar skills that such musicians as Donga, Ataúlfo Alves (1909–69), Bide (1902–75) and countless others from underprivileged backgrounds were able to secure a livelihood that did not involve manual labour.
As central as guitarists were to the world of samba, the focus of popular attention was directed primarily toward the singers; they were the undisputed stars of the radio. Yet with the emergence of bossa nova in the late 1950s national – and international – attention was drawn specifically to Brazilian guitar techniques.
Epitomized in the figure of João Gilberto (b. 1931), bossa nova centred on the image of a crooner sitting alone on a bench in the far corner of an intimate night-club, picking out sophisticated chords in smooth, but disjointed, rhythmic patterns to the sound of a soft speech-like melodic line that invoked an utopian dream world of ‘love, smiles and flowers’.11 Sitting at the interface between popular music and art music, bossa nova, with its distinctly Brazilian character, would finally produce the lute-playing Tupi which the modernists had envisaged. Furthermore, bossa nova definitively established the legitimacy of the guitar amongst the country’s middle and upper classes, consolidating its place as the quintessential national instrument. In urban centres across the country, middle-class youths rushed to take up the guitar, all attempting to imitate João Gilberto’s unique guitar technique.
Carlos Lyra (b. 1936) and Roberto Menescal (b. 1937) were amongst the first to capitalize upon this surge of interest, setting up a guitar academy in 1958, which initiated anxious youths into the secrets of their idol. From then on piano teachers would lose ground to the legions of guitar instructors responding to the new demand.
With the emergence of bossa nova the guitar became the instrument to crosscut the social divisions of the country. It could be heard from the poorest and darkest quarters to the richest and whitest, in both rural and urban contexts. Yet bossa nova also laid bare the musical boundaries marked by style which samba had striven so forcefully to conceal. Although it drew on elements from samba, the elitism and gimmicky character of bossa nova distanced it from its popular roots (Reily 1996; Treece 1997). Its lyrics addressed the carefree existence of an affluent youth culture, downplaying the stereotypical carnivalesque image of Brazilians as over-emotive and exuberant people, typical of samba, to portray them as contemplative, sophisticated and cosmopolitan. Thus, despite the hegemonic status it achieved, the actual popularity of bossa nova was restricted. Even when MPB (Música Popular Brasileira [Brazilian Popular Music]), which succeeded bossa nova, attempted to create styles that consciously drew on regional musical referents, the mainstream remained the reserve of the middle and upper classes.
Meanwhile guitars and guitar-like instruments were being employed in countless localized styles, most of which were – and many continue to be – entirely ignored by the mainstream music industry. Violas, for example, are the most common instruments used in north-eastern cantoria, a musical duel between two performers; Hybridity and Segregation in the Guitar Cultures of Brazil
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many gaucho traditions of southern Brazil are accompanied by the guitar; and in the South-east a viola and a guitar are the main instruments used to accompany música sertaneja, something of a Brazilian counterpart to American country music, which is typically performed by a duo (dupla) singing in parallel thirds or sixth.
Though highly popular within their restricted spheres, these sounds – like those of Arthiodoro da Costa, João Pernambucano, Quincas Laranjeiras and others of equal merit during Bandeira’s time – have remained unheard by the vast majority of middle and upper class audiences. It is worth noting, however, that música sertaneja did manage to make a break-through into the mainstream toward the end of the 1980s, much to the dismay of those with discerning tastes. This was achieved by the shear numerical force of low-income fans with sufficient buying-power to set national trends.
The struggle, therefore, continues. Indeed, today it is the very legitimacy of the guitar as national instrument that is being challenged, with voices emerging in defence of other popular instruments. For Roberto Nunes Correa, for example, the ‘real’ Tupi’s lute is the viola, and he has prepared a tutor for the instrument to make his point. The manual contains information about the viola in Brazil, followed by musical scores for eight pieces which exemplify its artistic potential in a manner reminiscent of the modernist discourse. In his own words:
Besides not finding a place for their music, violeiros today also face the . . . depreciation of their art. It is common to find people using the terms viola caipira and violeiro in a belittling way, even pejoratively, as though the figure of the violeiro were old-fashioned, or, as the violeiros themselves say, an old useless rogue. This distorted mentality is gratuitous . . . ; besides being the most representative instrument of our folklore, it is not a limited instrument. On the contrary, it has great potential, and it is of an impressive timbral richness; the variety of its tuning systems provides extremely original harmonic fields. Our intention is to restore and promote what has been done in relation to the viola, and amplify its space, that is, to use it as a solo instrument as well as to integrate it in chamber orchestras. (Corrêa 1989: 18)
Other voices reject string instruments altogether in favour of the drum, the instrument which in Débret’s time was exclusive to slaves. In fact, today Brazil’s main contribution to global culture is its percussion-based traditions. Over the past decade, samba bands have emerged in many parts of the world, including Europe, America, Australia, Japan and other places. These groups draw their repertoire from the rhythms of the famous samba schools of Rio, but also – and perhaps more importantly – from the blocos Afro of the Northeast, which are alleged to be more ‘authentic’. It may be difficult to image the drum ever to be taken for a serious instrument; but surely nineteenth century Brazilians would have found it difficult to conceive that the piano could ever be displaced by such a vulgar instrument as the guitar. – 174 –
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Notes
1. The cavaquinho is a four-coursed string instrument which looks like a ukulele.
2. All translations are my own unless otherwise stated.
3. The Portuguese viola was most commonly described as a six double-coursed string instrument shaped like the modern guitar, though it was somewhat smaller and had a wider ‘waist’. This instrument was the forerunner of the Brazilian viola, but in its most common forms in Brazil today the viola is a five doublecoursed instrument with a much narrower waist than the Portuguese prototype; tuning systems for the instrument vary considerably. In Brazil the lute left its mark on the bandola and the much smaller bandolim. Although bandolas have become virtually obsolete, the bandolim, a mandolin-type instrument with four double courses typically tuned in fifths (g-d-a-e), is still used as a melody instrument in several Brazilian musical styles. The machete is the antecedent of the cavaquinho, which, like its Portuguese counterpart, is shaped like a small guitar and has four single courses. In Brazil it is generally played with a plectrum to provide an harmonic percussive accompaniment to a number of styles, and its two most common tunings are d-g-b-d and d-g-b-e. The guitarra, a singlecoursed instrument, was, of course, the forerunner of the guitar, which in Brazil came to be known as the violão (large viola). It was standardized in the mid nineteenth century, and today the Brazilian violão is virtually identical to the acoustic Spanish guitar.
4. The original dates of Pereira’s manuscripts are not known, but he was born in 1652 in Bahia and died in Lisbon some time after 1733 (Tinhorão 1990: 68).
5. Because the modinha is seen to be central to the development of a Brazilian national musical culture, it has been the object of considerable research, including major studies by Mário de Andrade (1980 [1930]), Mozart de Araújo (1963) and João Batista Siqueira (1979) as well as numerous studies of lesser breadth.
A survey of this vast literature has been conducted recently by Manuel Veiga (1998).
6. The lyrics to many of his songs were first published in two volumes, called Viola de Leredo, between 1798 and 1826; a few scores of his compositions were also made available after they were discovered several decades ago in the Ajuda Library in Lisbon (Béhague 1968).
7. On the choro, see: Appleby (1983: 70-3), Schreiner (1993: 85–101), Tinhorão (1986: 103–10; 1997: 107–25), Vasconcelos (1988b) among others.
8. A fast syncopated dance music form of the late nineteenth century commonly viewed as the forerunner of the samba.
9. On the life and work of Villa-Lobos, see: Appleby (1983: 116–38), Béhague (1979: 183–204), Horta (1987), Keifer (1986), Mariz (1977) among others. Hybridity and Segregation in the Guitar Cultures of Brazil
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10. Getúlio Vargas regained power from 1950 to his death in 1954.
11. The title of João Gilberto’s second LP, released in 1960, was O amor, o sorriso e a flor (Love, Smile and Flower), epitomizing the thematic material of bossa nova lyrics.
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–10–
Rock to Raga: The Many Lives of the Indian Guitar Martin Clayton
Introduction
What roles does the guitar play, and what meanings does it convey in India?1 These are not easy questions to answer, because the instrument has spread into many different musical genres, in various geographical regions of the subcontinent.
This chapter is nonetheless an attempt, in response to those questions, to sketch out the main features of guitar culture in India. I see it as a kind of snapshot: partial, blurred and lacking fine definition perhaps, but offering a perspective that more focused and tightly framed studies could not.
My account is based on a few weeks’ travel in India,2 concentrating on the main metropolitan cities of Chennai, Mumbai, Calcutta and Delhi – although it also draws on the reports of many inhabitants of these cities who have migrated from other regions, particularly those rich in guitar culture such as Goa and the north-eastern states. In other respects it draws on as balanced a sample of accounts as could be achieved in a short time: those of players from professional virtuosi to rank amateurs, of repertoires from Indian classical to rock and jazz, as well as those of makers, retailers and repairers. Finally, this account draws on many years studying the music of India – albeit most of those years studiously ignoring the very genres to which, in the winter of 1998–99, I turned my attention.
What I knew of the Indian guitar before my research began included Brij Bhushan Kabra’s excellent recordings of North Indian classical music on slide guitar, the first of which date from the 1960s 3 and those of his successors including Vishwa Mohan Bhatt, who had recently made an international name for himself by recording a well-received album with Ry Cooder. (That album, A Meeting by the River, 4 had won the pair a Grammy Award in 1994, a fact of which I was reminded in India on many occasions.) I also knew that the guitar was one of many instruments used in Indian film music, where the Hawaiian style of playing had once been prominent, and that imported recordings of guitar-based rock music are easily found in metropolitan record shops. – 180 –
Guitar Cultures
That was the skeleton I wanted to flesh out. More importantly I wanted to gauge how the instrument was regarded – as a foreign import suitable mainly for foreign music? If so, how and why had it been adapted to Hindustani classical music?5 In a society proud of its own musical heritage, how and why had a foreign instrument like the guitar made such an impact? How, in brief, had the dialectic between the guitar as a bringer of global (i.e. largely Euro-American) culture to the world, and its local adaptations and appropriations, panned out in India?
Figure 10.1 Mondal Brothers’ guitar shop in Calcutta The Many Lives of the Indian Guitar
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This chapter will emphasize the wide spread of the instrument – the guitar is extremely common and familiar throughout urban India, although rather less so in most rural areas by all accounts – and the wide range of repertoires performed.
In short, the huge popularity of the guitar in contemporary India should be clear.
The guitar, in its various guises, is also inevitably associated with a variety of other factors, such as the ethnic, linguistic and religious background of players – above all the instrument is associated with the West, with Christianity, and with
Figure 10.2 Gibtone, Calcutta with shopowner Enamul Haque standing in the doorway and a crate of guitars in the foreground – 182 –
Guitar Cultures
Goan and Anglo-Indian mixed-race communities. More widely, attitudes to the guitar in India are bound up with attitudes to ‘Indianness’ and ‘the West’, to conceptions of Indian cultural identity and to notions of ‘tradition’ and ‘modernity’, which give a particular local colour to responses to globalization.
Before discussing the current use and status of the guitar in India, it will be helpful to set the instrument’s Indian presence in historical context, since the history of the guitar in India is inextricably bound up with the history of European colonialism and Christian proselytization.
Christians, Europeans and Western music in India: history, ethnicity and identity
A Brief History of the Indian Christians
One of the major themes of this chapter is ethnicity and identity, and in particular those of the groups described by the labels Christian, Anglo-Indian and Goan.
The easiest way to begin an explanation of these categories is with a brief history of Christianity in India. The oldest Christian communities in India are those of the southern states of Kerala and Tamil Nadu, often referred to as Syriac (or Syrian) Christian, which were, local tradition has it, established by Saint Thomas the Apostle after his arrival in the year 52 CE. This community was joined by further converts following the conquest of Goa by Portugal in 1510 CE and the subsequent establishment of a string of European trading stations around the Indian coast.6 The Portuguese always claimed proselytization to be at least as important an aim of their colonial expansion as trading profit. As a result, according to one estimate, by 1600 there were about 175,000 Christians in India, about 50,000 of whom were in Goa (Pearson 1987: 121).
The Portuguese authorities actively encouraged intermarriage, and there was in many respects little discrimination in Portuguese India between Indian Christians, settled Portuguese and mestiços (those of mixed parentage). In later centuries these ‘Goans’ were to be found not only in the latter-day Portuguese colonies of Goa, Daman and Diu, but further afield, particularly around the European trading posts and garrisons (see Abel 1988: 9–11), to which they soon began to migrate. According to one recent account, ‘There are around 730,000 Portuguese Indians, commonly known as Goans or Goanese, about half of whom live in the state of Goa and the others elsewhere in India’ (Library of Congress 1996: 211).
The term ‘Anglo-Indian’ has been used in a range of senses, but the usage assumed here (and by most of my informants) is that of the Government of India Act 1935, in which an Anglo-Indian is described as a person of European descent in the male line, born in India of parents who were habitually resident there.7 ‘Anglo-Indian’ applied in this sense principally to the descendants of British men and their Indian wives – as with the Portuguese, in the early decades of British The Many Lives of the Indian Guitar
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involvement in India few European women travelled to India, and intermarriage was officially encouraged from 1687 to around 1785, although attitudes changed thereafter. The British colonial authorities were not always so sanguine as the Portuguese about the benefits of missionary activity: nonetheless, both Protestant and Catholic missionaries were active in British India from the eighteenth century, and had some success in converting members of tribal, lower caste and dalit (‘untouchable’) groups.
In the British period and latterly in independent India, the status of AngloIndians has been famously marginal and problematic – at the risk of gross generalization, the classic picture describes them as looked down on by the British as ‘half-breeds’ and also mistrusted by Indians who perceived them to be loyal to British rule (Anglo-Indians did indeed play an important role in putting down the revolt or ‘Mutiny’ of 1857). Partly as a result of their rejection by both British and Indian populations, the Anglo-Indians effectively became an endogamous group some time in the nineteenth century, which they largely remain. They are the only group in India acknowledged as having English as their first language, are mostly Christian and tend to favour Western dress.
The Anglo-Indian population has dwindled since independence as many emigrated (to the UK, Australia and Canada in particular), although a contingent remained behind, largely in urban centres. Estimates for the size of the AngloIndian community range from 100,000 to 300,000.8 It is difficult to be at all precise, but as the population of India soars over the billion mark it is unlikely that the combined Goan and Anglo-Indian communities number much more than a million, or 0.1 per cent of the total. The total Christian population was estimated as 20 million, around 2.3 per cent of the Indian population, in the 1991 census. Their significance to Indian guitar culture, however, far exceeds this numerical strength – besides the Goans and Anglo-Indians, the converted ‘tribal’ populations of the north-eastern states have also enthusiastically adopted the guitar.9 During my visit in the winter of 1998–99, Christians were in the news in India.
Partly because of a strong showing by the Congress Party under Sonia Gandhi, Rajiv’s Italian-born widow, the Hindu nationalist parties decided to turn their attentions from the Muslim minority to the even smaller Christian community.
Reports started to reach the press of attacks on missionaries and the burning of churches. Some Hindu organizations stepped up reconversion programmes, and disseminated anti-Christian propaganda. The Nobel Prize awarded to the UK-based economist Amartya Sen was, we were told, part of a global Christian plot to destabilize Hindu India; Christianity and anti-national activity always went hand in hand.10 While it would be an exaggeration to describe anti-Christian feeling as endemic in India, this effort to portray Christians as an ‘enemy within’ is significant, not least because it taps into wider concerns over India’s national identity and destiny, and its relationship to the powers of the industrialised West. – 184 –
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Western Music in India
The history of Western music in India has hardly begun to be written, but it is known that various forms of Western musical culture were to be found on Indian soil soon after the arrival of the Europeans. Ian Woodfield reports that the ‘guitar was the preferred instrument of Portuguese and Spanish sailors’ in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries (Woodfield 1995: 82), and the instrument was certainly imported into Goa: there is no reason to suppose that the presence of the instrument, in its various forms, in the territory has not been continuous since the early sixteenth century.11 The Portuguese banned many forms of indigenous music, while teaching their own repertoires in seminaries and parish schools; church music in particular thrived (Harrison 1975: 343–4). As Goans began to migrate to the factories and garrisons of other European powers in the seventeenth century, they took the guitar with them. Abbé Carré reported in sarcastic fashion from a Dutch factory near Golconda in 1673:
The Dutch employ . . . among others a fine troop of musicians. These are poor Christians from Kanara, near Goa. They had passed their youth in slavery with some Portuguese nobles, where they had learned to strum a guitar and sing some airs, almost as melodious as penitential psalms. They have become so proud of their accomplishments that, finding nothing to attract them in their own country, they visit the oriental courts, as they think there is nothing more charming and melodious than their music. I had this diversion at all our meals. One tortured a harp, another strummed a guitar, a third scraped a violin, and two others, having no instruments but their voices, joined in with the rest in such a way that one could not listen to their harmonies without pity and compassion. (Abbé Carré, cited by Woodfield 1995: 245.)
By the late eighteenth century, as the British sought to cement and bureaucratize their rule and men began to bring wives over from home rather than marry locally, their households became the site of European-style domestic music making – as in Britain at that time, the harpsichord was a particularly favoured instrument – as well as public performance, at least in major centres such as Calcutta.12 It is not clear just how widely used the guitar was in British India in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, although there is some evidence that it was used as a chamber instrument by Europeans.13 Since the instrument was popular with women in Europe at the time, it seems probable that guitars were imported in greater numbers as the numbers of European women in India increased in the nineteenth century.
It is not clear from published accounts at what point Anglo-Indians assumed an important role in the musical history of India. Unlike the Goans, Anglo-Indians (at least those of British descent) do not have a particularly ‘musical’ image in India – which may mean simply that they were less inclined to take up music as a profession. The Many Lives of the Indian Guitar
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Anglo-Indians were prominent within the Army until the late eighteenth century, when the British authorities became nervous of their presence and drove them out; they may, however, have continued to make up the great majority of military bandsmen after that watershed.14 References to music in accounts of the Anglo-Indian community are generally brief, but tend to confirm the importance of dance and music in the community’s social life. Gist and Wright, for instance, reported in 1973 that dance and singing were important forms of recreation for the Anglo-Indians:
Group singing of popular and sentimental songs – invariably Western in theme and music – is a favorite form of informal recreation when Anglo-Indians gather together in a spirit of good fellowship. Teenagers and young adults usually prefer ‘rock’ and other forms of popular music to the familiar melodies which are favorites of the older adults.
(Gist and Wright 1973: 147)
This picture is corroborated by the Calcuttan jazz guitarist Arthur Gracias:
Basically the Anglo-Indians are very fun-loving people and very very musical. They have a lot of music, they love fun and frolic and there’s music almost every day in most Anglo-Indian homes. They sing, they play guitar, piano . . . and they love to interact.
(Arthur Gracias, pers. com.)
Where the services of professional performers of Western instruments were required, Goans (along with, perhaps, small numbers of Europeans and AngloIndians) answered the call. Pearson reports that as many Goans migrated, ‘in the nineteenth century Goans in British India acquired a reputation as servants, cooks and musicians’ (Pearson 1987: 155). By the 1950s, he continues, ‘Of [the 80,000 Goans] in Bombay, the main occupations were seamen (37 per cent), cooks and waiters (18 percent), clerks, tailors and ayahs [maids or nurses] (each 8 per cent) and musicians (2 percent)’ (Pearson 1987: 156). This would suggest a figure of roughly 1,600 professional Goan musicians resident in Bombay, most if not all Christians and performers on Western instruments, and many no doubt employed in the film industry.
The Guitar’s Indian Origins
This history is not, however, universally accepted: in India, the suggestion of foreign origin is always likely to produce strong reactions. At the Archive and Research Center for Ethnomusicology (ARCE), the invaluable ethnomusicology archive in Delhi, a press cutting caught my eye: a piece from a Hindi newspaper, it suggested that the modern guitar is none other than the kacchap vina, an ancient Indian instrument long since forgotten at home but taken up abroad and popularized by the Americans: – 186 –
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. . . some Indians and many foreigners labour under the misapprehension that the guitar is a foreign instrument and that its use in India began in this present era. But this is not true. (Sinha 1998, my translation).
The author of this piece goes on to explain, with reference to musicologist Swami Avanindranath Thakur, that the kacchap (‘tortoise’) vina, whose form is ‘the same as’ the modern guitar, is mentioned in the Samaveda, one of the most ancient and sacred of Hindu texts.15 His conjecture is that the instrument gradually became more popular in the West whilst new instruments began to supersede it in India; eventually it was lost together with the prabandha songs (precursors of the modern dhrupad) which it had accompanied, while a new type emerged in America under the name ‘guitar’. How had this happened? The guitar must have been taken to Hawaii from India by Anglo-Indians, and from there spread to the rest of the world. A second type of kacchap vina meanwhile spread to Spain, where it became known as the ‘Spanish guitar’. Moreover, the name is actually not gi Œr (the usual Hindi transliteration), but g´tŒr, a contraction of g´t (song) + tŒr (string or wire), the name given because it was used to accompany songs.16 The attribution of Indian origins to anything of perceived cultural value is often mocked and satirized by Indians themselves: a character on the BBC comedy series Goodness Gracious Me, for instance, repeatedly tries to persuade his son of the Indian origin of phenomena from Superman to the British Royal Family, with hilarious effect. In some respects the argument cited here is indeed rather far-fetched (to the point of absurdity when, for instance, the author claims that ‘Hawaiian’ is a contraction of ‘Hawaii’ plus ‘(Indi)an’). The idea is of interest however, and not only as an instance of a perceived need to ascribe Indian origins to the guitar before it can be fully accepted. What the author fails to discuss is the more specific point that the technique of playing guitar (or other stringed instruments) with a slide may in fact have been disseminated from India.
The Hawaiian guitar’s origins remain contested, but one story involves Indian influence. Donald Mitchell and George Kanahele report a tale told by the Hawaiian composer Charles E. King, in which he describes an occasion in 1884 when he saw ‘Gabriel Davion – a young man who was born in India, kidnapped by a sea captain and finally brought to Honolulu’, who had attracted attention for his ‘new way’ of playing guitar with a slide (Kanahele 1979: 366–7).
The guitar itself had by this time been known in Hawaii for some decades, having been introduced via north America in the early decades of the nineteenth century:17 the motivation for slide playing seems to have been, as elsewhere, a desire to better imitate vocal nuances. This fact was noted by Mantle Hood, who suggested that: ‘The manner in which the text of a Hawaiian song is sung and the manner in which the same song is played on the Hawaiian guitar are very similar.
It is difficult to say which influences the other, but since the singing voice was present long before the steel guitar, it is probably safe to assume that the instrument The Many Lives of the Indian Guitar
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is imitating the voice’ (1983: 142–3). As Hood suggests, this strong affinity between voice and stringed instrument is common at least to India and Java besides Hawaii.
The technique of playing slide guitar was popularised by a Hawaiian, Joseph Kekuku, around the turn of the century (Kekuku was the first to record on slide guitar, in 1909),18 but Hood is convinced that he was inspired by Davion’s introduction of a technique he had learned in India: ‘Fairly stated, we should say Davion introduced the principle to the Islands and Kekuku developed a Hawaiian version of the guitar that became the steel guitar’ (1983: 145). This technique is used on both the north Indian vichitra vina and the south Indian gottuvadyam, and was probably first used on the ekatantri vina (a single-stringed stick zither), certainly by the seventh century CE and possibly as early as 200 BCE (Hood 1983: 144-5, drawing on the work of B. C. Deva).
The international craze for Hawaiian music took in not only America and Europe but also many Asian countries.19 In India, John Marsden and Charles Kohlhoff report, Hawaiian hit records and movies of the 1930s and 1940s enjoyed great popularity. Hawaiian touring groups began to visit India, and also, ‘a number of Indian musicians began to take up Hawaiian music. (All of these performers were Anglo-Indians, Anglo-Burmese, Goans and Indonesians rather than full-blooded Indians)’ (Kanahele 1979: 166). The best known of these musicians was Garney Nyss (1916–98), who formed his band the Aloha Boys in 1938 and continued to perform Hawaiian guitar for the next 60 years, recording with HMV India and broadcasting through All India Radio.20 The sound of the Hawaiian guitar was to remain an important part of the Indian soundscape for several decades, as it became part of the film-music sound-palette21 and was also employed in other popular genres, particularly in Bengal. Before long, moreover, the potential of the instrument as a vehicle for Hindustani (North Indian) classical music was recognised. Slide guitar is now widely accepted as a suitable instrument for classical music, and I was fortunate to be able to interview the two leading performers, Vishwa Mohan Bhatt and Debashish Bhattacharya.
My account of present-day Indian guitar culture begins with Bhattacharya.
Travelogue I: Calcutta
The Classicist
I found Debashish Bhattacharya’s flat after criss-crossing south Calcutta’s bewildering residential colonies for what seemed an age. Street signs, let alone maps, are a rarity here, but this is a place governed by human geography – there is always someone around to ask. When I finally arrived Debashish was there at his balcony to welcome me, smartly dressed in blue silk kurta and waistcoat, sending his student down to carry my bags: he was ready for my video camera . . . – 188 –
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One of the new breed of brilliant classical guitar virtuosi, Debashish Bhattacharya was brought up in a musical family: both his father and mother sang khyal and light-classical songs. The first instrument he touched, at the age of four, was a six-string acoustic Hawaiian guitar belonging to his mother. Surprising as this may sound, at the time (Debashish was born in 1963) the Hawaiian guitar would have been a common sight in middle-class Calcuttan households. Apparently the Hawaiian guitar craze was such – his comment was confirmed by other Bengali friends – that it became almost de riguer for a middle class Bengali girl to learn to play Rabindrasangeet (Tagore songs) on the Hawaiian guitar, a skill acquired largely to help her marriage prospects.
The guitar has been used in Bengal, in genres from theatre music to adhunik gan (‘modern songs’) for many years. One reason for its popularity in Calcutta, Bhattacharya explained, was that a Hawaiian master named Tau Moe (b. 1909) had visited India several times (the first time in 1930) and actually stayed in Calcutta from 1940 to 1947 where he performed regularly at the Grand Hotel, and took over responsibility the hotel’s entertainment.22 Tau Moe’s influence was significant in the burgeoning popularity of the Hawaiian guitar in India. Moe’s student, the Calcuttan Anglo-Indian Garney Nyss, had apparently won second prize in an international Hawaiian guitar competition some years back: Nyss had taught a Bengali Christian named Rajat Nandy, and Nandy had taught Bhattacharya. Thus, Bhattacharya is not only linked to the Hindustani vocal tradition through his guru Ajoy Chakraborty, and to the nascent Hindustani guitar tradition through Brij Bhushan Kabra, but also to a sixty-year-old Calcuttan Hawaiian guitar tradition.
The first attempts to play Indian music on the guitar may have been those of Van Shipley, a Methodist originally of Lucknow (latterly resident in Mumbai) who learned from Ustad Allauddin Khan and designed his own eight-string electric guitar back in the 1940s.23 Bhattacharya credits the well-known musician and teacher Jnan Prakash Ghosh with playing Hindustani music on ‘slide tanpura’ on All India Radio broadcasts, and encouraging a Western-style guitarist named Sujit Nath to try to play a little Indian music. Mark Humphrey cites the 1953 film Ladki in which one song ‘opens with a brief meditative slide guitar line reminiscent of a slow alap . . .’(1994: 110).24 To most Indian classical music lovers however, the guitar is associated most strongly with the name of Debashish Bhattacharya’s teacher, Brij Bhushan Kabra.
Kabra it was who in the 1960s made the first recordings on guitar as a classical soloist, playing an f-hole archtop with three of its six strings used as chikari – strings tuned to the system tonic Sa, found on Indian instruments such as the bin (rudra vina), sarod and sitar, which are plucked repeatedly to provide a high-pitched drone and rhythmic punctuation. Bhattacharya claims to have added extra chikari strings in 1978 (thereby freeing up more of the main strings for melodic work), and by the mid 1980s was playing an instrument with both the added chikari and taraf The Many Lives of the Indian Guitar
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(sympathetic strings). ‘Chikari’ or ‘tarafdar’ guitars (those with chikari strings only, or with both chikari and taraf) can now be bought as standard models from several Indian manufacturers.
The current instruments are by no means standardised however, either in design, tuning or playing technique. Vishwa Mohan Bhatt, for instance, currently plays a twenty-string guitar (with eight main machine heads, plus twelve for the taraf mounted on a special neck extension), while Debashish Bhattacharya plays a twenty-two-string instrument with just six main machine heads, plus fourteen on a neck extension and two more at the front (treble side) for chikari.
25 Bhatt favours a vina-like26 layout and technique: chikaris are placed on the bass side (i.e. closer to the player’s body) and played with a thumb pick, while the main strokes of Hindustani instrumental technique, represented by the spoken syllables (bols) da and ra, are produced with picks on the first two fingers of the right hand.27 Debashish Bhattacharya has moved the chikari to the treble side of the instrument (closer to the audience) and produces da and ra strokes with thumb and first finger respectively, which he suggests facilitates greater speed and produces less stress on the player’s body.
Bhattacharya explained to me that the guitar, in its adapted form, is actually an ideal instrument for Hindustani classical music, on account of its tone and impressive sustain – the latter being the main reason all the classical players give for taking up the instrument. The key is that these features, together with the possibility
Figure 10.3 Debashish Bhattacharya with student – 190 –
Guitar Cultures
of producing subtle pitch inflections, make it possible to imitate Indian vocal style to an uncanny degree (which of course parallels the story that Blues players took up the bottleneck guitar in order to better imitate the human voice, and may also be the key to its appeal to Hawaiians). It is beyond dispute that in sustain and freedom of pitch modulation, a slide guitarist does indeed have a considerable advantage over, for instance, a sitarist.
The other advantage of the guitar is, according to Bhattacharya, that as a Western instrument it is more easily accepted abroad – and it is clear that he sees his innovations in terms of global appeal.
It is always better to communicate [with] people of the world and of different culture with an instrument which is already popular . . . the language is already learned by the global people. So if I play Jaunpuri in sursringar, 28 maybe it [would be] a very interesting and very rare thing of acknowledgement, but if I play the same raga on guitar it will touch people’s heart much faster and much deeper.
[The] guitar has its maybe 20, 25 or 30 varieties around the world – who knows, maybe more than that. And it imitates the sound of different culture, all over the world.
The world has changed a lot, at this point we are sitting within the globalisation era, the world is becoming smaller and smaller. We have different dialects, different moods, different fooding, different clothing, language everything. But thanks, guitar all over the world sounds the same, the language is the same. (Debashish Bhattacharya, personal communication.)
Bhattacharya’s instrument, whose design he has copyrighted, goes under the name ‘Hindustani Slide Guitar’: the name is not his own, any more than ‘Mohan Veena’ is Vishwa Mohan Bhatt’s own idea. In fact, Bhatt seemed almost uncomfortable with his instrument’s new name: while the renaming might appear to be an overt sign of Indianization and distancing from the instrument’s foreign origins, this motivation was not apparent in either musician’s account. Both artists stressed the primacy of the music played on the instrument (as well as their own role in its popularization). According to Bhatt,
This instrument is named as Mohan Veena – Mohan is my middle name. Some American recording company and magazine suggested this name . . . There was a magazine in which they wrote ‘this is a Mohan Veena, not a guitar’. Now a lot of people are coming up after this, and they’re following this style of mine and also the instrument I made.
There is very good following now, and many young boys, musicians are coming up, they’re taking up this instrument as their career.
[The instrument is] a guitar, no doubt about it, the body, everything is of the guitar.
It’s a modified guitar, so I always write ‘modified guitar’ – ‘Mohan Veena, A Modified Guitar’. I think the name is not important, it’s the work and the music which I play.
Guitar is a Western instrument, I know that, and what I play on it is Indian classical . . . (V.
M. Bhatt, personal communication.) The Many Lives of the Indian Guitar
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Calcutta Jazzmen
Fascinating and impressive as the Hindustani guitar style of Debashish Bhattacharya, Vishwa Mohan Bhatt and others is, the number of such players is very small and the number of adapted instruments sold likewise.29 India is home to far more players of Western genres such as jazz, rock and pop; in Calcutta I was lucky to meet the city’s two leading jazz players, Carlton Kitto and Arthur Gracias.
Figure 10.4 Debashish Bhattacharya’s guitar – 192 –
Guitar Cultures
Arthur Gracias lives in the Anglo-Indian district of Calcutta, around the corner from Mother Teresa’s headquarters. A slightly nervous, but utterly charming man, Gracias was rather embarrassed by the building work going on in his flat: he could only show me his guitar cases, and the corner which normally houses the PC workstation on which he composes film music. Gracias’s grandfather was Spanish, his father born in India; his mother was Anglo-Indian. Brought up in a family full of musicians he soon took up guitar and piano, studying classical music through the Royal School of Music in London but above all developing a taste for jazz. After a period playing with Sonny Lobo’s big band at the Grand Hotel, Gracias decided it was time to move on:
I thought I should branch out on my own, because I had to have my own identity, and I studied Indian classical music [with] some very good Indian classical musicians . . .
And I thought it would be a very good idea to fuse Indian classical music with jazz, which are both very powerful improvisation forms. So I began researching that, and I was recorded by Humphrey Walden in the early seventies for BBC, and they broadcast some of my music. (Arthur Gracias, personal communication.)
Gracias is one of India’s original Indo-jazz fusion musicians: he has performed with a variety of bands working with various combinations of Indian and Western instruments (Gracias himself playing both piano and arch-top acoustic-electric guitar) since the late 1960s. He was the only Anglo-Indian musician I met who expressed a desire to meld musics – far more commonly Anglo-Indian musicians to whom I spoke expressed disinterest in local musical forms.30 When I asked him how much interest there was amongst Anglo-Indians in Indian music, in fact, Gracias could speak only of his own personal experience and motivation:
It depends. I thought it was very very impressive from the improvisational point of view, and also meditational values are there, and I thought I could bring about the mix of the two creative forms. Of course today things are moving so much faster, the introduction of computers, the world is much more smaller, you get to interact with other musicians all over the world and I think music doesn’t belong to any one person. It’s a very free thing, it’s a global thing today, it’s world music . . . It’s music, it’s either good music or bad music, that’s it! (Arthur Gracias, personal communication.)
Gracias’s neighbour Carlton Kitto, a Bangalore-born Anglo-Indian,31 takes a rather different line: a jazz purist in stark contrast to Gracias’s approach, he told me he argues with Gracias about it, but good-naturedly by the sound of it. Kitto plays at the Grand Hotel with his jazz quartet every Saturday, and teaches about forty students at the Calcutta School of Music and another thirty-five privately; he told me that all his students are Bengalis (not Anglo-Indian), since ‘the Anglo-Indian youth all want to be Springsteen or Bryan Adams’. He cares only for ‘pure jazz’, The Many Lives of the Indian Guitar
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and that means bebop in particular, although he played me a selection including cool jazz and bossa nova.
I’m trying to spread the movement of Bebop, and get them to understand pure jazz, you see, rather than fusion and rock- and funk-jazz . . . I think [Bebop] is the greatest thing that has happened to jazz. (Carlton Kitto, personal communication.)
He had taught thousands of students in his time, and was proud that his proselytization had achieved some success;
One of our jazz club members [is] Ajay Ray, he’s an authority on jazz . . . Ajay had gone to one of these remote villages and found a fellow over there playing a solo of John Coltrane, He said ‘Good God, where did he pick this up?’ Fellow couldn’t speak English also. He said ‘My Sir taught me this’, [Ray] said ‘Who’s your Sir?’, and he said ‘Carlton Kitto!’. (Carlton Kitto, personal communication.)
My unavoidable impression talking to Carlton Kitto was of a man out of place and out of time. Kitto spent years teaching himself to play by ear from American records, and avidly reading all he could of Charlie Christian and his peers at the American library. His relatives have mostly moved away to the UK and Australia, leaving him adrift in an ever-shrinking community: he expects to send his three daughters abroad too, but won’t himself leave. Kitto complained at the difficulty in obtaining jazz recordings in Calcutta, and the general decline in the music scene in the city since he moved there in the 1960s to be at the centre of the music industry.
Perhaps his biggest complaint was that so few people appreciated his music anymore – like many of my interviewees I sensed a barely contained excitement that someone was, at last, showing an interest. He dismissed any thought of interesting himself in Indian music – ‘No, no I never heard, I never liked that part of it!’ On the contrary, the highlights of his musical life were encounters with jazz greats on their rare visits to Indian shores.
I played here with Charlie Byrd, I did a duet with him . . . that was about 75–76 . . . I played with a lot of greats. I played with Duke Ellington initially, that’s where it all happened, you know! He was rehearsing when he came down to Madras, and some of my fans . . . pushed me on the stage with a guitar and said ‘Go on, play. Here’s your chance man!’ So Duke turned around and said ‘Hey, what have we got here . . . you wanna play son?’, and I said ‘Yeah, I’d love to!’ So Billy Strayhorn went on the keyboard and they [said] ‘What do you wanna play?’ and I said ‘Satin Doll’. He said ‘Where did you get our tune from?’ I said I knocked it off a record . . . ‘Okay, play!’ – they were curious. I played about five tunes with them, they were sort of impressed, they said ‘How the hell did you do this on your own, you mean to say you didn’t have any formal studies?’, I said ‘No, nothing, I’m just a self-taught guy’. (Carlton Kitto, personal communication.) – 194 –
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Travelogue II: Mumbai
Pepsi Powerblast
On the evening of 12 December I found myself waiting outside the gates of Rang Bhavan, an open-air venue in central Mumbai, for the promised 6.30 pm start of the ‘Pepsi Powerblast’ rock gig. The crowd, mostly of college-aged men, many in Iron Maiden or Metallica T-shirts, gathered and formed an orderly queue – across the street stood a small knot of middle-aged women in short hair and Western dress, whom I took to be Parsis. The scheduled start time came and went, the crowd became understandably annoyed and briefly threatened trouble – but without serious intent, and the early evening passed slowly. Once the long-awaited event was underway, the first of the local cover bands took to the stage, a technically able but lacklustre group. ‘School’s Out!’ bellowed one fan, ‘Play some grunge man!’, ‘Nirvana!’: they were rewarded with some Led Zeppelin songs, which went down well enough.
My attention wandering to the banners at the back of the stage, I read that the event was ‘A charity concert in aid of the World Zoroastrian Organization youth wing for the destitutes’ – hence the visible Parsi presence. The Parsi community are descended from Persian Zoroastrian refugees who arrived in India some time between the eighth and tenth centuries CE. They retain their religion, but are nonetheless generally perceived to be one of India’s more Westernized, as well as its wealthiest, community. Despite their tiny numbers (perhaps as low as 80,000 in total) Parsi patronage, as well as a number of talented musicians, have had an impact on both Indian and Western music: many Parsi musicians are employed in the film industry; Zubin Mehta is a Parsi, as is the noted khyal singer Firoz Dastur, as was rock star Freddie Mercury.32 Locally made rock is often associated in India with communities perceived as Westernized – and this includes Parsis as well as the various Christian communities and some middle-class Hindus and Muslims.
Unfortunately I had another date elsewhere that evening and missed the headline act, a local band called Brahma.33 Looking for their tapes in record shops the next day, I had no success: recordings of Indian rock bands are extremely hard to find.
Sales for locally produced rock music have been negligible, save for a tiny handful of stars such as the Goan, Remo Fernandes: they are dwarfed by those of filmi and other Hindi (and to some extent Punjabi) language pop and ghazals.
34 The difficulty in establishing a market for local English-language rock is demonstrated by the fact that lately even Remo has abandoned English and started to sing in Hindi.35 Rock music is not, however, difficult to find in India. It can be found in the form of recordings and occasional tours by foreign bands (Iron Maiden visited India during my research trip),36 and also in the local rock scene, mainly on the college circuit. The Many Lives of the Indian Guitar
– 195 –
Locally produced rock music in India is generally played by ‘college bands’: most play exclusively covers, few record and most disband shortly after leaving college. As one magazine feature put it:
For years, the rock music scene in India has followed a predictable and most unexciting path. A rock band normally starts out playing the college circuit, soldiers on for a few years, becomes disillusioned by the lack of opportunities, ultimately leading to its members hunting for more ‘standard’ jobs. Meanwhile, the latest and the glitziest that the Europeans and the Americans have to offer is gobbled up by an avaricious public.
(Sreenivasan 1991)
Pepsi- and Coca-Cola, in time-honoured fashion, fight over the Indian soft drinks market (in this case in a three-way battle with local pretender Thumbs-Up). In the best traditions of glocalization they must tread the fine line between offering the glamour and sex-appeal of American popular culture, and appearing to support desi (local) culture and local heroes. In the winter of 1998–9 Pepsi stole a march over their rivals by signing cricketer Sachin Tendulkar to endorse their product: all three Cola manufacturers feature prominently amongst advertisers on cable television pop music shows, and here in Mumbai Pepsi threw considerable promotional weight behind what was, effectively, a small-scale showpiece for a handful of local cover bands. If Indian-produced rock is ever to make a commercial impact, it will be surprising if the sponsorship of such multinational corporations does not figure prominently in the tale.
Guitars on Film
Also in Mumbai I managed to meet a very popular young music director37 by the name of Vishal Bharadwaj. I asked Vishal about two of his recent soundtracks, which I’d been listening to in my hotel room: Satya, which featured a wide range of guitar styles, and Maachis, which largely avoided the instrument.38 Why did he use it more in some movies than in others? The difference, he replied, was in the setting: the guitar is suitable for a modern, urban situation, which is the case for Satya (Truth); Maachis (Matches) is set in rural Punjab, where a rabab would be more suitable.39 Satya is a story set in the modern Mumbai underworld, a romance between a young gangster and a girl from whom he must keep his criminal life secret. The opening number Badalon se (‘From the clouds . . .’) features the greatest variety of guitar styles, acoustic and electric: Vishal explained that piece is from the hero’s perspective – the boy is saying he can’t believe he’s falling in love. ‘It was a Bombay, modern character, so . . .’ ‘So it’s modern music?’ ‘It’s modern music . . . and I love guitars!’ – 196 –
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The player on that song, Tushar Parte, is a professional session player whose father used to be a music arranger and director in the films. In fact, the family tradition in music goes back a little further: Tushar’s grandmother Kamala Devi was a sitarist employed as companion to the Queen of Kolhapur in the 1930s and 1940s;40 her husband Anantrao Parte, besides being a music lover and patron was personal doctor to the famous stage and film actor Prithviraj Kapoor. Through the Kapoors, Anantrao was able to introduce his son Jaykumar into the Bombay film industry in the 1940s: Jaykumar Parte became a successful music director and arranger, working extensively with the famous music directors Kalyanji-Anandji.
Jaykumar had studied both Hindustani music and piano, on which instrument he took Trinity College examinations.
Jaykumar’s son Tushar, then, was brought up in the Bombay film music scene.
He has seen the shift from the days of big studios and the big sound – orchestras of seventy-five to one hundred musicians were common – to modern studios based on digital hard-disc recording systems where, thanks to click-tracks, there is no need for musicians to actually play together. Tushar, a consummate session man, is at home in this world, moulding his sound to the dictates of his music director.
He also, nevertheless, avows a deep love of his family farm in Kolhapur, and of the local lavani songs – his musical diet included such local forms alongside film music and Western styles.
T.P.: I am from Kolhapur, which has got a tradition of lavani, 41 a different style of Indian music . . .
M.C.: They’re Marathi songs?
T.P.: Yes, Marathi songs; there’s a dholki 42 and a woman dancing . . . ethnic clothes, sari she’s wearing, ornaments, and the tunes are very exciting, they’re very beautiful, it’s got a different colour.
M.C.: So you grew up listening to this?
T.P.: Yeah, I’m quite familiar with the lavanis, because this is what we heard.
At the same time, I also did a lot of listening, listening to the Voice of America, to the BBC jazz hour or whatever . . . (Tushar Parte, personal communication.)
Tushar now has a project, called Mythological Wine Music, which involves him playing guitar and emulator,43 with his wife Suchita singing Sanskrit shlokas, 44 and had been making demos for a Western record company shortly before my visit. Parte was fairly relaxed about the project: since he can make a good living playing for the films, he has time to indulge himself doing something he wants to do. That also includes, as he demonstrated to me, developing a new style of playing which incorporates – alongside riffs borrowed from the late Texas bluesman Stevie Ray Vaughan – the rhythms of the lavani songs of his native Maharashtra. The Many Lives of the Indian Guitar
– 197 –
Conclusions: Interpreting the Indian Guitar
Although guitars have been played in India since the sixteenth century – well before the modern six-string standard was developed in the late eighteenth century45 – the instrument seems to have had little impact, at least outside Goa, until the early twentieth-century Hawaiian guitar craze. The fashion for Hawaiian guitar having declined, the instrument is now found in many genres: in Hindustani music,
FOR POSITION ONLY
Figure 10.5 Tushar and Suchita Parte, aka Mythological Wine Music publicity shot – 198 –
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where modified forms of the Hawaiian guitar have been developed; in Western genres such as rock and jazz and in Indian popular music including film songs and ghazals. Professional guitarists have been drawn largely from the Goan, AngloIndian and north-eastern Christian communities, although in recent years increasing numbers of Hindus have taken up the instrument.46 The guitar is at present amongst the most popular instruments in India, in all senses of the word; if the shops I selected at random are representative, it is probable
FOR POSITION ONLY
Figure 10.6 Music and Dance Teacher – a Hindi textbook cover The Many Lives of the Indian Guitar
– 199 –
that more are sold – at least in the metropolitan cities – than any other instrument bar the harmonium. It is used for an incredible variety of repertoires and played in many different styles. But, since it is identified as foreign, Western, ‘modern’ and largely Christian, its place in Indian culture is bound to be problematic – especially in times when secularism is in retreat and the politics of religious nationalism have taken root.
The sometimes bewildering array of positions taken up with respect to ‘The West’ is of course not surprising in view of India’s colonial history, and its enduring weakness in economic and strategic terms vis-à-vis the US and other Western powers. Political, media and not least academic discourse is peppered with references to India’s pride in its ancient cultural heritage and expressions of resentment at the former colonial powers; meanwhile the country rushes headlong towards industrialization and urbanization, and the distant goal of ‘catching up’ with the West. For all the protestations of India’s greatness, the excitement with which any international recognition of India or an individual Indian’s achievement is met – whether the world’s discomfiture at India’s 1998 nuclear tests, Amartya Sen’s Nobel Prize or indeed V. M. Bhatt’s Grammy – is telling. Advertising takes up similar themes: a Calcutta tram proclaims the Bank of Baroda slogan, ‘Indian roots, International spread’, while a huge hand-painted hoarding in Chennai proclaims ‘Indian biscuits, International quality’.
Notions of tradition and modernity are of crucial importance to current debates on Indian national identity. For many people in India, ‘tradition’ is assimilated to Indianness and ‘modernity’ to the West: after all, the idea of an ancient cultural heritage is central to most constructions of Indian cultural identity, while technological innovation has largely been seen as imported by Europeans. Set against this simplistic dichotomy are those who would claim the existence, or at least the possibility, of a distinctively Indian take on modernity – described in terms of an integration of the best of India’s ‘cultural heritage’ with an outward-looking, technologically advanced national consciousness – an idea that resurfaces continually in various forms of discourse. Contestations of the guitar’s status and meaning can usefully be interpreted against this background.
The guitar obviously has the potential to act as a symbol of the West: a foreign instrument which, perhaps, presents a challenge to India’s great musical heritage.
The fact that it is largely associated within India with the Christian community, and with a Westernized anglophone elite, makes this all the more likely. And yet this very status makes the appropriation of the guitar a powerfully symbolic gesture, and the Grammy Award to Vishwa Mohan Bhatt unsurprisingly made a huge impact.
As Bhatt himself explained to me, since the Grammy, ‘Now a layman also knows me – not only the musician – but a layman also [will think] “Oh, he’s the one who has brought honour to our country”.’ – 200 –
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Moreover, the appropriation can work on many different levels. Not only can the instrument itself be adapted; as the guitar spreads from Westernized, Christian communities to the rest of Indian society, musicians begin to conceive of sociomusical relationships in terms of the bond between guru and shishya (master and disciple): in this respect it is telling that Tushar Parte speaks of a Mumbai-resident American, D Wood as his ‘guru’. Taking this theme even further, Debashish Bhattacharya explained the lineage behind his Hawaiian guitar knowledge; ‘So I’m the fourth generation. If you want to know more you should go to Bob Brozman: he learned from Tau Moe directly so he is only the second generation.’ 47 The Hindu tradition that musical knowledge (like other forms of knowledge) was handed down from the Gods to mortal men in the distant past, and that this knowledge has been gradually corrupted and forgotten since that time, still has some currency. To be closer to the source, to have fewer links in the chain and thus have allowed less opportunity for the corruption of knowledge – this is important even where the source is a Samoan-born master of the Hawaiian slide guitar.
Mainstream popular culture maintains and thrives upon a dialectic between the local and the global. Hindi songs outsell English songs by some distance on the Indian market, yet their musical accompaniment incorporates the latest sounds and techniques of the (US- and UK-dominated) global pop music industry. India’s musical production is not about to abandon its distinctive sounds, but it will continue to absorb and adapt what it can from abroad. Professional rock and pop musicians in India are always conscious of the West – not least because they have to obtain imported equipment,48 but also because they understand the paradox that in order to develop an international market they must localize their style.
The Indian classical players are doing to the guitar what their predecessors did to Central Asian instruments to produce the modern sitar and sarod – in some respects quite literally, as in the additions of chikari and taraf strings. By doing so they prove the same point, that the guardians of Indian culture will only feel totally comfortable with foreign artefacts once they have been fully assimilated to the local mainstream.
The kacchap vina argument shows how important it is, for some, to demonstrate the Indian lineage of the guitar in order that it can be fully accepted. This story is not widely accepted however, even in India – much more commonly expressed is the view that the guitar is an imported instrument which can be and is being appropriated. For the classical players, the adaptation is justified by the successful results (according to the aesthetic criteria of Hindustani classical music), and moreover since the ploy may be expanding the global audience for Indian music.
Indian musicians see themselves as players in every sense, not merely as pawns, in the game of globalization.
Those players who have mastered Western styles but who do not (unlike most Anglo-Indians and Goans) identify overwhelmingly with the West, face a slightly The Many Lives of the Indian Guitar
– 201 –
more subtle challenge – one can see a response to that in Tushar Parte’s Mythological Wine Music and his experiments with lavani rhythms, the impulse to bring together guitar technique and a distinctively Hindu, Maharashtrian consciousness.
The sense I picked up from many Christian musicians, on the other hand, was of the guitar acting as a link into global networks which hold more appeal than those on offer closer to home. The love of British and American guitar magazines, the devotion to the great jazz masters, the years spent learning by ear from difficultto-find recordings with no support structure to speak of, all tell the story of the guitar linking its Indian players to the wider world.
When Indians wanted guitars and guitarists, as with other forms of Western music, it was largely Goans and Anglo-Indians who filled that need; the Christian domination of Indian guitar culture is only now being significantly challenged as Hindu Indian boys take up the instrument in large numbers. It is in no way coincidental that this marginal group should be crucially involved in the Indian appropriation of the guitar, an ‘intermediate’ group acting as intermediaries in the absorption of a foreign musical instrument, a marginal group articulating the conflicts and tensions, but also (albeit often reluctantly) the creative and artistic potential of the meeting of Indian and Western musical cultures.
The story of the guitar also dramatizes many of the conflicts and dilemmas facing post-colonial India. The guitar is the instrument that most easily links one to the wealth and modernity of the West, its consumerism and individualism. And yet it is a foreign infiltrator, a Trojan horse promising glamour and yet bringing with it anti-national, decadent culture. To be made safe it has to be appropriated, adapted, Indianized – and, if at all possible, sold back to the outside world as a proclamation of India’s musical genius on the global marketplace. The dazzling virtuosity of Bhattacharya and Bhatt are a testament to the benefits of this approach, yet it is ironic that to the outside world this brilliant Indianization, the music of a mere handful of virtuosi, becomes the only visible part of the Indian guitar scene – the remaining and far greater part remains unseen and unheard, since that part which wants to identify with the West is of no interest to the West. The far greater numbers of aspiring Methenys and Springsteens are, to all intents and purposes, invisible. This is perhaps the most telling paradox of all – that while the globally mediated impinges on each locality, only the locally rooted stands a chance of success in the global market.
Resources
For more information and web links on Indian guitars and guitarists visit: http:// www.open.ac.uk/Arts/music/mclayton/indian-guitars – 202 –
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Acknowledgements
It would be impossible to exaggerate the importance of the help and support I received in preparing this chapter, or the debt I owe to those who have assisted me. First and foremost I must thank those who generously gave up their time to be interviewed and recorded: Kumar, Ananda Kumar, Isaac Joe, Patrick Fernandes, Vishal Bharadwaj, Tushar Parte, D Wood, Clifford Pereira, Laurie Lopez, Hannibal Castro, Hitesh Sonik, Debashish Bhattacharya, Arthur Gracias, Carlton Kitto, Peter Remedios, Enamul Haque, Sumith Ramachandran, Pradeep Mukherjee, Vishwa Mohan Bhatt, Kennedy Hlyccho, Jamyang Dolma, and Chimme Dorje. My only regret is that space did not allow me to give proper accounts of all the wonderful musicians who spoke and played for me, and time did not allow me to meet more of the fine guitarists I would like to have spoken to.
I would also like to thank the following people and institutions for help, advice, contacts and personal accounts of guitars, guitarists and guitar music, or for comments on an earlier draft of this paper: Sonjuhi Priyadarshini, Musee Musical, Pro-Music, Manohar Lal of Shruthi Musicals, Park Sheraton Hotel (Chennai), Music Academy Madras, Kenny Vassou, the waiters at the Four Seasons Hotel (Mumbai), K. J. Singh, Rekha Bharadwaj, Suchita Parte, Anna Morcom, Lopa, Bhargava’s Musik, Anil, Veena and Hari Sahasrabuddhe, Danny the STD/cassette man, Deepak Choudhury, Ashim Malik, Sudha Kaur, Rila O’Brien, Reynolds, Gibtone, Mondal Bros, Calcutta School of Music, Maya Ghose, Barunkumar Pal, Shubha Choudhury and ARCE, Kai Friese, Rahul Ram and his colleagues in Indian Ocean, Dinesh Nigam of Adarsh Sangeet Karyalaya (Delhi), Sadhana at Bina Musical Stores, New Bharat Music House, Lhadup Tsering, Thinle Richen, Katherine Brown, Gerry Farrell, Gregory Booth, Edward Henry, Gordon Thompson, Peter Manuel, Daniel Neuman, Alison Arnold, Mark Trewin, Matt Allen, Scott Marcus, Amanda Weidman, Zoe Sherinian, Gayathri Kassebaum, Mark Humphrey, Nicola Dibben, Kevin Dawe and Andy Bennett.
This research was generously supported by The Open University’s Arts Faculty Research Committee.
Notes
1. By India I refer here to the subcontinent as a whole before independence, and to the Indian state thereafter: the instrument’s later history in Pakistan and Bangladesh, for instance, is not covered here. The Many Lives of the Indian Guitar
– 203 –
2. From 4 December 1998 to 14 January 1999, my research was conducted in the four metropolitan cities. A list of interviewees and others who have assisted in this project will be found under ‘Acknowledgments’.
3. See in particular The Call of the Valley, with Shiv Kumar Sharma, Hariprasad Chaurasia and Manikrao Popatkar. HMV ECSD 2382 (1968), re-released on EMI/Hemisphere 7243-8-32867-2-0.
4. Water Lily Acoustics, WLA-CS-29-CD (1993).
5. The guitar has been used rather differently in Carnatic (South Indian) classical music: here, R Prasanna has made a name for himself performing both classical and fusion styles on a six-string electric guitar.
6. The Portuguese had first landed at Calicut as early as 1498. For a survey of the history of Christianity in south India as it relates to musical performance, see Sherinian 1998: 55ff.
7. Abel 1988: 8; India 2001: D24. The term includes some but not all ‘Goans’, as well as so-called ‘Domiciled Europeans’, those of entirely European descent who nevertheless had settled in India for several generations.
8. The discrepancy may be due to some estimates including only those of British descent, and others including also Indo-Portuguese and others. See Gist and Wright 1973: 2–3.
9. The north-eastern states are those to the north and east of Bangladesh: Assam, Manipur, Nagaland, Meghalaya, Tripura, Mizoram and Arunachal Pradesh. Most of this area was only integrated politically with the rest of the subcontinent as a result of British expansion in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.
10. Sonia and her Congress Party were indeed defeated in the elections of the following autumn, although it is debatable what part this outburst of antiChristian agitation played.
11. For an accessible survey of music in Goa, see Sardo 2000.
12. See Head 1985, Leppert 1987.
13. William Hamilton Bird’s The Oriental Miscellany, for instance, published in Calcutta in 1789, includes arrangements of keyboard pieces for guitar, flute and violin, and a solo guitar arrangement of all the pieces (Gerry Farrell, personal communication.) Head notes an advertisement in the Calcutta Gazette of 15 July 1784, offering for sale ‘Harpsichord, Forte-Pianos, Organs, Guitars, French and Spanish Violins, Violincello, Flutes, Florios, and common Aeolian Harps, Horns and Bassoons, Haut-Boys and Clarinets and all the new music . . .’ (1985: 551). The place of the guitar in this list may indicate a prominence in European domestic music-making second only to keyboard instruments.
14. Gregory Booth, personal communication.
15. For more on the kacchap or kacchapi vina – which appears to refer most commonly, at least from the tenth century, to a fretless short-necked lute – see Deva 1977: 93–4, Miner 1993: 27. – 204 –
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16. I think the transliteration is best here, although the two ‘t’s sound quite different; the one transliterated with a subscript dot is retroflex, and generally used for an English ‘t’, while that without the dot is dental (like an Italian ‘t’ but more so).
17. Hugh Davies writes, ‘Around 1830 Mexican cattle traders introduced the guitar into Hawaii’ (1984: 207). Other reports speak of Spanish-American or Portuguese cowboys as the agents. Kealoha Life suggests that ‘the Spanish gutstrung guitar was introduced to Hawai’i from Spain and Mexico in 1830, and the steel-strung guitar imported from the Portuguese Azores Islands in 1865’ (Ruymar 1996: 18).
18. Spottswood 1996: 68–9. For a fuller account of the version of the story which holds Kekuku to be the originator, see Roberts (1926: 10–11), who notes the existence of similar techniques in Japan and Africa. see also Ruymar 1996.
The first recordings of slide guitar in the Blues was made in 1923, and that in country music in 1927 (Evans 1977: 319).
19. And, perhaps later, African: Gerhard Kubik notes that ‘In the 1940s and 1950s the Hawaiian guitar attained popularity in southern Africa. This led to a revitalisation of an old instrumental technique: playing on one string by means of a “slider” . . . The term Hawaiian has been adapted into the local Bantu languages, hence “hauyani”’ (1984: 207). Similar phonetic adjustments have occurred in India: although there is no standard spelling, that favoured by a Delhi music school – ‘havion’ – is not atypical.
20. Zachariah 1998.
21. Miner reports: ‘Film-music directors have included Western instruments in their orchestras since the early years of sound film in the 1930s. In the first few decades [of sound film], film orchestras included the accordion, mandolin, Hawaiian guitar, clarinet and conga drums” (2000: 347).
22. Arthur Gracias (personal communication.). See also Moe’s own account in Ruymar, 1996: 33–8. Moe is actually Samoan-born, but moved to Hawaii at the age of 11 and married a fellow Hawaiian musician (Rose) with whom he established a family troupe.
23. Dale, personal communication.
24. Alap is an unmeasured introductory movement in Indian art music.
25. Five of the six main strings are used for melody, twelve of the fourteen are taraf: between these two sets, the other three strings are called ‘supporting strings’, in imitation of Ali Akbar’s sarod layout.
26. That is, based on the north Indian rudra and vichitra vinas, both plucked stick zithers.
27. On the sitar these are produced with inward and outward strokes respectively, on the sarod downward and upward plectrum strokes.
28. Rag Jaunpuri on the archaic plucked lute sursringar. The Many Lives of the Indian Guitar
– 205 –
29. One of Calcutta’s (and therefore India’s) biggest guitar manufacturers, Gibtone, estimated that the proportion of such instruments sold was less than 1 per cent of the total (Enamul Haque, personal communication.).
30. This perception is echoed in Sardo’s report of music in Goa: ‘Catholics neither learn nor perform Indian classical music’ (2000: 737). Sherinian (1998), however, mentions a Christian performer of Carnatic music on guitar, named M. J.
Ravindran. The general picture seems to be one of very little interest shown by Christian communities in Indian classical music, but of a handful of notable exceptions such as Gracias and Ravindran.
31. Kitto’s mother was English, and his father Philippino. Due to the war, both were stationed in Bangalore where Carlton was born in 1942. He does not meet the official criteria for definition as ‘Anglo-Indian’, although this is his unequivocal self-identification.
32. The late Freddie Mercury was born Farokh Bulsara in Zanzibar, in 1946, the son of Indian Parsi parents. He was schooled in Bombay between the ages of five and fourteen, where he began his music study on the piano (Sky 1992: 8–13). Mercury, lead singer of the British rock group Queen, was in most respects a mainstream figure – Western media attention rarely focused on his ethnicity. Nor did I encounter evidence of his being regarded in India as an ‘Indian’ rock star, or indeed evidence of his band being disproportionately popular, for that or any other reason. Khyal is the most widely performed genre of North Indian classical vocal music.
33. Interestingly, Indian rock bands are often named in a distinctively Hindu fashion.
34. The ghazal is a poetic form, originating in the Farsi (Persian) language but adapted to South Asian languages, particularly Urdu. Ghazals, sung in a variety of styles, are extremely popular on the subcontinent.
35. Like most Goans, Remo Fernandes speaks English more fluently than Hindi: since he began singing in Hindi, Indian media coverage has often drawn attention to his (allegedly poor) pronunciation of the language.
36. It is difficult to be sure which varieties of Western pop and rock music attract the greatest interest in India. During my visit the three major Western attractions were Iron Maiden, Sting and Ricky Martin.
37. That is, composer of film music.
38. Maachis, Pan Music MPX 5416 (1996); Satya, Venus VCDD 753 (circa 1997).
39. The rabab referred to is the plucked short-necked lute played in Afghanistan, Pakistan and north-west India.
40. Kolhapur now lies in Maharashtra state, south of Mumbai and north of Goa.
41. Lavani is a distinctively Maharashtrian variety of song sung mainly by professional female entertainers. – 206 –
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42. The dholki or dholak is a small barrel drum, popular in a wide range of folk and popular music contexts throughout north and central India and Pakistan.
43. Keyboard-based sampler.
44. A shloka is a Sanskrit couplet, usually comprising sixteen-syllable lines and generally addressing religious (Hindu) themes.
45. See, for example, Turnbull and Tyler 1984: 99f.
46. Enamul Haque, joint owner of Gibtone, told me that interest in the guitar amongst the Muslim community was ‘almost zero’. Muslim guitarists are however to be found in some rock bands, and in the performance of specifically Muslim genres in some areas (see Booth 2000: 428, Groesbeck and Palackal 2000: 948).
The guitar appears currently to be very much identified as a male instrument in India, notwithstanding the post-war Bengali fashion for girls to play Rabindrasangeet (the songs of Nobel laureate Rabindranath Tagore) on the instrument, or indeed the earlier feminine connotations of the instrument in European culture. Instrumental performance of Indian music remains largely maledominated, although this is gradually being challenged by a number of female virtuosi.
47. Bob Brozman (b. 1954), a leading American slide guitar player and authority on early Hawaiian music, has collaborated with Tau Moe since the late 1980s.
48. Although Indian manufacturers (most of them based in Calcutta) produce thousands of guitars each year, even the makers themselves admit their instruments’ quality is poor – they claim that their main concern is to keep prices very low.
Peter Remedios, boss of one of India’s leading guitar-makers Reynolds, suggested to me that the local market will not stand the higher prices that improved standards would bring. Professional guitarists all use imported gear (in past years equipment has been brought back from abroad by players on foreign trips; now imported Fenders are available in shops such as Reynolds), and they have no interest in slightly improved Indian models: most amateurs have a very limited budget, and it is to these players that the local makers cater (Peter Remedios, personal communication).
References
Abel, E. (1988), The Anglo-Indian Community. Survival in India, Delhi: Chanakya Publications.
Booth, G. (2000), ‘Popular Artists and their Audiences’ in A. Arnold (ed.), South Asia: The Indian subcontinent. The Garland encyclopedia of world music, Volume 5: 418–30, New York: Garland Publishing.
Davies, H. (1984), ‘Hawaiian Guitar’, in Grove Instruments, II: 207, London: Macmillan Ltd. The Many Lives of the Indian Guitar
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Deva, B.C. (1977), Musical Instruments, New Delhi: National Book Trust.
Evans, T. and Evans, M.A. (1977), Guitars: Music, history, construction and players from the Renaissance to rock, New York: Paddington Press.
Gist, N.P. and Wright, R.D. (1973), Marginality and Identity: Anglo-Indians as a racially-mixed minority of India, Leiden: E. J. Brill.
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Guitar Cultures
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– 209 –
Index
Belfour, Robert 24 Berry, Chuck 98, 108 Bharadwaj, Vishal 195 Bhattacharya, Debashish 4, 7, 187–90, 200, 201 Bhushan Kabra, Brij 179, 188 Bide 172 bluegrass 4 blues 2–4, 52, 54, 101, 113 acoustic 27, 39 barrelhouse 14, 17 Canadian blues artists 5–6, 27, 32–9 Chicago 31, 39 country-blues 27, 31, 32, 33, 39 downhome 27, 31, 32 festivals – Fredericton 32, Harbourfront 32 revivals 32, 39 Southern blues 4, 12 Vaudeville 27 Bomase village (Papua New Guinea) 142 Bon Jovi 110 bossa nova 158, 172, 193 Bourdieu, Pierre 6, 63 Bracey, Ishman 22 Bragg, Billy 53 ‘Brazilian baroque’ 160 Brazilian guitar style 4 Bream, Julian 4, 67, 72, 157 Brewer, Blind Jim 28 Bridie, David 153 Brilliant Corners, the 46 British blues boom 3 Brito, Paula (printing shop) 166 Britpop 58–9 Brooks, Garth 110 Broonzy, Big Bill 30, 31, 33 Brouwer, Leo 3, 68 Brozman, Bob 200 Burning Bush 56 Burnside, R.L. 24
accordion 17 Acoustic Guitar magazine 106 Adams, Bryan 99, 192 Adelphi Club (Hull, UK) 46 Aerosmith 99 Albeñiz, Isaac 66 Alhambra Palace 73 All India Radio 187, 188 Alves, Ataúlfo 172 A Meeting by the River 179, 203n4 American Music Conference (AMC), the 101, 113 And the Cradle Will Rock (Van Halen) 117 Andersen, Eric 96 Andrade, Mário de 168 Anthony, Michael 117, 128 Anthrax 110 Appadurai, Arjun 63 Archive and Research Centre for Ethnomusicology (Delhi) 185 Aria guitars 126 Atkins, Chet 105 Attali, Jacques 29
Babaka village (Papua New Guinea) 139, 146 Bahia, Xisto 166 Baiteta Bushband Boys 150 Baiteta village (Papua New Guinea) 150 Balance (Van Halen) 123 Bandalon se (Hindi film) 195 Bandeira, Manuel 168, 170, 173 bandolim 167, 174n3 banjo 11, 13, 21, 98, 114 five-string 22–3 BB Kings, The 146 B.C. Rich 110 Beatles, The 3, 46, 47, 90, 91, 94, 95, 97, 98, 99, 107 Beatlemania 107 Beck, Jeff 3, 99 – 210 –
Index
Buzzcocks, The 53 Byrd, Charlie 193 Byrds, The 40, 93, 96, 98 Byrne, David 47
Cable 46 Caldas Barbosa, Domingos, 162–3 cariocas 164–8 Carter, Bo 24 Cathedral (Van Halen) 128 cavaquinho 157, 171, 174n3 CBGBs 47 Celtic guitar style 4 Chaney, David 4, 51 Charters, Samuel B. 31 Charvel guitars 125 Chet Atkins Appreciation Society 105 Chicano, Eugenio 68 choro 165, 167, 169, 171 Choro No 1 (Villa-Lobos) 169 Christian, Charlie 28, 113 Civil War (American) 14, 18 Clapton, Eric 3, 27, 95, 97, 99, 100, 105, 109, 114, 122 clarinet 167, 169 Classical guitar 3, 4, 63–87, 135 Cobain, Kurt 55 Cobo Hall (Detroit) 131 Concierto de Aranjuez (Rodrigo) 67 Conde Hermanos guitars 67 Contreras, Manuel 70–3 Cooder, Ry 4, 79 copyright law 152 Córdoba International Guitar Festival 63, 68, 81 Costa, Arthiodoro da 173 Costello, Elvis (and the Attractions) 49 country music 3, 101, 107, 113 Cream 122 Crook, Paul 110 Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young 40 Crudup, Arthur ‘Big Boy’ 24 cultural capital 6, 157 cultural imperialism 136 Cup-tea sing-sings 139
Danelectro guitars 91, 100 Davion, Gabriel 186
Dave Matthews Band, The 41 Davis, Guy 27 Débret, Jean Baptiste 157, 173 desi 195 ‘devil-songs’ 17 Di Meola, Al 67 Díaz, Francisco Manuel 74–80 Diddley, Bo 31, 54 Disraeli Gears 122 Diver Down (Van Halen) 128 Donga 172 Dr. Feelgood 48 Duke Ellington 193 dulugu ganalan (‘lift-up-over-sounding’) 141 Dump 51 Duncan, Robert 121 Dury, Ian (and the Blockheads) 48, 49 Dylan, Bob 39–40, 92, 110
Electric Prunes, The 47 Emerson, Lake and Palmer 48 Epiphone guitars 7, 92, 93, 94, 102 John Lennon Casino model 102–3 Eruption (Van Halen) 128–9 Espinel, Vincente 66, 81 Estes, Sleepy John 34 Estúdos (Villa-Lobos) 169, 170 Eurocentrism 167 Everley Brothers, the 108
Fahey, John 40 Fair Warning (Van Halen) 129 Fall, The 53 Falla, Manuel De 66 Farka Toure, Ali 4 Feld, Steven 141, 153 Fender, Leo 107 Fender guitars 6, 100, 107, 110 Broadcaster 107 Stratocaster 6, 50, 97, 103, 125, 126; Squire Stratocaster 95, 96 Telecaster 8, 94 fiddle 11, 13, 16, 21 finger-picking style (Deep South) 12, 24, 33 flamenco 4, 64–81 passim Floyd Rose tremolo device 126 folk 3, 4, 92, 94, 98, 107 American 25, 97 Index
– 211 –
African-American 11, 12–13, 22, 24 folk-blues 32, 33, 39 revival (1960s) 5, 29–31, 58, 103 Festivals: Mariposa 29, Newport 29, 39–40 folk-rock 40 Frankfurt School 119 Frith, Simon 4, 108; and Angela McRobbie 55
garage 46, 46–7 Garbage 49 García Lorca, Federico 64, 66, 77, 81 gender and the guitar 54–7, 76–7, 130, 206n46 Genesis 48 Gerundino Fernandez of Almeria 77 Gibson guitars 6, 7, 28, 34, 98, 99, 110 J-200 34, 96 L 34 L1 42 Les Paul 6, 99, 109, 124–6 Gibtone guitars 7, 205n29, 206n46 Gilberto, João 172 Gomes, Carlos 165 Gonzaga, Chiquinha 167 Goodness Gracious Me 186 Goroka Show, The 143 Gorky’s Zygotic Mynci 52 gospel 20, 21 Gracias, Arthur 185, 191–2 Granada 73–80 Granados, Enrique 66 Grande, Felix 66 Graves, Blind Roosevelt 22 Gretsch guitars 93–4, 96, 98, 110, 125 Gruhn, George 103–4, 109, 110 grunge 55, 123, 194 Guild guitars 99 guitar collections 35 guitar hero 52, 117–134 Guitar Player magazine 124, 125 guitar tunings (blues) 20–1, (stringband) 144–50 Guitar World magazine 124 guitarra 159, 160, 174n3 Guthrie, Woody 29
habitus 63 Hagar, Sammy 119, 128, 129 Hagstrom bass guitar 112
Haley, Bill (and the Comets) 108 Hall, Stuart 153 Handy, W.C. 15–16, 17, 19, 23, 27 Hard Day’s Night, A 96, 99 harmonica (in blues) 13, 17, 31 Harmony Sovereign guitar 34 Harris, Corey 27 Harris, Emmylou 96 Harrison, George 93, 94, 96, 99 haus simok 151 Hawaiian guitar tradition 4, 13, 19, 23, 145, 179, 186–7, 204n19 heavy metal 3, 4, 52, 53, 55, 57, 58, 100, 117–34 Hell, Richard (and the Voidoids) 47 Hemphill, Jessie Mae 24 Hendrix, Jimi 99, 103 Hindustani classical music 180, 188–9, 196, 200 Hindustani Slide Guitar 7, 190 Hofner guitars 8, 34 Hole 56 Holly, Buddy 98, 103, 108 home-recording technology 51, 95, 96, 100, 106 Tascam home recording unit 52, 95 Hood, Mantle 186–7 Hooker, John Lee 22, 24, 31, 32, 33 Hopkins, Lightnin’ 31, 33 House, Son 23, 24 House of Guitars, The (Rochester, NY) 95 Howell, Peg Leg 21 Hurt, Mississippi John 20, 21, 24, 30 hybrid cultures 157, (in Brazil) 157–77 passim
Ibanez guitars 110 Indian classical music Indian film industry 186, 195–6 Indian guitar (string configurations) 188–9, 204n25 Indian origins of the guitar 185–7 indie rock 123 Indo-jazz fusion 192 Iron Maiden 194
Jackson, Lulu 20 Jackson guitars 110, 126 James, Skip 24, 30 – 212 –
Index
jazz 3, 4, 11, 13, 14, 50, 101, 113, 135, 179, 185, 191–3 jazz-rock 4, 50 Jefferson, Blind Lemon 21, 22, 28, 33 Jew’s Harp 17 Jim Crowism 14 Johnson, Lonnie 30, 33 Johnson, Robert 22, 23, 33, 34, 42 Johnson, Tommy 17–18, 19, 20, 24 Johnson, Wilko 48 Jump (Van Halen) 117
kaccap vina 185–6, 200, 203n15 Kaluli people 141 Kaye, Lenny 47 Kekuku, Joseph 187 Ketama 72 ki 145, 150 Kilburn and the Highroads 48 King, Albert 33 King, B.B. 6, 28, 31, 33, 41, 114 Kinks, The 47, 120 Kingsmen, The 47 Kitto, Carlton 191–3 ‘knife-songs’ 17 Kottke, Leo 40 Kramer guitars 110, 125, 126 kwaia 138
Ladki (Hindi film) 188 Laing, Dave 48 Laranjeiras, Quincas 173 Leadbetter, Huddie (‘Leadbelly’) 17, 19, 20, 22, 24, 29, 30, 32, 34, 98 Leana, Gele 147 Led Zeppelin 57, 73, 194 Lennon, John 94, 102–3 Levy, Alexandre 167 Lewis, Furry 21 lifestyle (and indie-guitar culture) 51 Lipscomb, Mance 34 Lobos, Heitor Villa 3 lo-fi recording 51–2 lokal musik 136 Lomax, Alan 40 de Lucia, Paco 4, 66, 67, 72, 81 lundu 161–2, 165, 166, 170 lute 159 Lyra, Carlos 172
McCartney, Paul 8, 92 McCoy, Charlie 21 McDowell, Fred 22, 23, 24 McGhee, Brownie 29, 30, 31 McGuinn, Roger 96, 97, 98, 99 McLaughlin, John 4 McNew, James 51 McSwain, Rebecca 111 McTell, Blind Willie 20 Maachis (Hindi film) 195 Machado, Antonio 66 machete 159, 174n3 Malagasy guitar style 4 mambu 141–2, 143 mandolin (in blues) 11, 15, 17, 21, 114 Manson, Shirley 49 Manuel, Joaquim 165 Manuel, Peter 67 Marquesa de Santos Marr, Johnny 54 Marshall amplifiers 50, 117 Martin guitars 34, 98, 100, 110 mass cultural theory 51 Memphis Minnie Douglas 34 Menescal, Roberto 172 Mercury, Freddie 194, 205n32 Metheny, Pat 4 Middleton, Richard 40, 41 MIDI (Musical Instrument Digital Interface) 111, 152 Milan, Luís de 159 Mississippi Delta 18 Mississippi Sheiks, The 21 Mo, Keb 21 Moab Boys Stringband 148 modas 161–2 modernist movement (Brazil) 158, 168–70 modinha 161–8 passim, 171, 174n5 Moe, Tau 188, 200, 204n22 Mohan Bhatt, Vishwa 4, 179, 189, 190, 199, 201 Mokinnies Stringband 151 Monsters of Rock 118 Motors, the 49 Music Man guitars 125, 126, 127 Música Popular Brasileira 172 música sertaneja 173 Musician magazine 127 My Bloody Valentine 50 Mythological Wine Music 197, 201 Index
– 213 –
National Association of Music Merchants (NAMM) 101, 113 National guitars 34 Nazaré, Ernesto 167 Nelson, Rick 90, 91, 98, 108 Neukomm, Sigismund 165 new wave 46 North Indian classical music 4, 179, 187–90, 192 nuevo flamenco 72 Nunes Correa, Roberto 173 Nunes Garcia, José Marício 165 Nyss, Garney 187, 188
Odum, Howard W. 16–17, 23 Olivia Tremor Control 52 ophicleide 167 organ 17, 203n13 ovasis 136
Page, Jimmy 3, 122 Paixão Cearence, Catulo de 166 Palmer, Tony 3 Paramana Strangers, The 140 Parte, Tushar 196, 201 Pata Negra 72 patis 140, 144, 150 parlour guitar tradition 3, 11, 13, 14, 20, 22, 23, 24, 34 Patton, Charley 17, 19, 22, 23, 24, 34 Paul, Les 7, 99, 125 Paul Butterfield Blues Band 39 Peabody, Charles 16, 17 Pearson, Barry Lee 18 Peavey guitars 125, 127 Peel, John 56 Pelo Telefone 171 Peña, Paco 68 Pepsi Powerblast 194–5 Pernambucano, João 173 Perry, Joe 99 piano (in blues) 11, 13, 17, 19, 21–2, 27, 31 Brazil 167, 169, 170–1 India 192 Picasso, Pablo 64, 68, 81 pick (plectrum) 130–1 pick-ups 50, 100 Barcus Berry 39 D’Armond 93
piezoelectric 35–9 single-coil 125 Pink Floyd 48 poetics of place 76 Pohren, Don 65, 77 Ponce, Manuel 3 Prelúdios (Villa-Lobos) 169, 170 Presley, Elvis 90, 96, 97, 98, 99, 107, 109 progressive rock 47, 48, 52, 53 pub rock scene (London, UK) 46, 48, 49 punk 4, 46, 52, 53, 57, 120–3 New York Punk Scene (mid-1970s) 47, 48, 49, 58 UK punk scene 48–9, 50
Quakes, The 148, 152 Queen 57, 205n32
rabab 195, 205n39 Rabello, Laurindo 166 Rachell, James ‘Yank’ 21 ragtime 11, 13, 14, 16, 19–20, 21, 22, 23 Ramirez, José 66, 68–9, 70, 72, 76, 81 rap 100, 111 Ratung village (Papua New Guinea) 148 Red Guitars, The 46 Red Wedge 53 Reed, Jimmy 24 reggae 5, 152 Reinhard, Django 28, 113 resis 142–44 Resende, Garcia de 159 Reyes, Manuel 68, 70, 77 Reynolds, Simon 111 rhythm ’n’ blues 3, 107, 108 Riatt, Bonnie 27 Richards, Keith 8, 99 Rickenbacker guitars 96, 97, 98 Right Here, Right Now (Van Halen) 129 Riot Grrrl 56 Riverside Club (Newcastle, UK) 46 Robertson, Roland 2 rock 3, 4, 5, 50, 52, 53, 55, 57, 58, 117–34, 179 Rock Around the Clock 108 rockabilly 107 Rodrigo, Joaquín 3, 67 Rolling Stone 123 Rolling Stones, The 46, 47, 91, 99 Romero, Pepe 68 – 214 –
Index
Roosevelt, Theodore 14 Rosa, Noel 171 Roth, David Lee 110, 117, 119, 129 Rurunat village (Papua New Guinea) 145
samba 158, 170–3 Sambora, Richie 110 Sanlucár, Manolo 68, 79 Santana, Carlos 3 sarod 188, 200, 204n25, 204n27 Satriani, Joe 7, 72 Satya (film) 195 Scott, Keith 99 Sears and Roebuch ‘Roy Rogers’ guitar 113–14 Sebastopol 20–1, 23 Seeger, Pete 40 Segovia, Andrés 42, 66, 67, 72, 169 segregation 158 Sen, Amartya 183, 199 seresteiros 163, 166, 169 Sex Pistols, The 57 Shipley, Van 188 Silva, Francisco Manuel da 165, 166 Silvertone guitars 99 singsing tumbuna 138 Siouxsie Sioux 57 sitar 188, 200, 204n27 slide (or ‘bottleneck’ or ‘knife’) guitar style 21, 23 Slits, The 57 Smith, Patti 47 Smiths, The 54 Sor, Fernando, 66, 81 Sound of the Suburbs, The (TV documentary) 56 Spanish-American War 19 Spanish Fandango 20 Spanish Fly (Van Halen) 129 Spinazzola, Carlo 32, 34, 41 Sprott, Horace 28 Squeeze 49 Stairway to Heaven 73 Standells, The 47 Stella guitars 34 Stills, Stephen 99 Stokes, Frank 21 Stranglers, The 48 string bass 21
Strummer, Joe 48 subcultural theory 45 Subterranean Homesick Blues 92 ‘superstrat’ 126 surf 4 syncretism 153, 158, 160
Takamine guitars 110 Takemitsui, Toru 3 Talking Heads, The 47 tapping 52, 128–9 Tarrega, Francisco 66, 67 Taule, Anthony 148 Telek, George 148, 153 Terry, Sonny 29, 30 This is Spinal Tap 53 Tippett, Michael 3 Tokuraeba, Richard 148 Tolai people 143 Torres Jurado, Antonio 65, 72 Townsend, Pete 108 ‘train-songs’ 17 tremelo technique 21, 125, 128 Trynka, Paul 126 Tupinambá people (and Tupi lute) 160, 172, 173 Turina, Joaquín 66
ukelele 7, 135–155 passim
Vai, Steve 7, 72, 110 Van Halen, Alex 128 Van Halen, Eddie 4, 7, 52, 117–34 Van Ronk, Dave 30 Vargas, Getúlio 170–1 Vaughan, Stevie Ray 103, 114, 196 Velvet Underground, The 47 Villa-Lobos, Heitor 3, 168–70 vina 7, 185, 187–90 viola (of guitar family) 159–63, 172, 173, 174n3 viola de arame 162 violin 21 vintage guitars 7, 7–8, 92, 101, 102, 103–6, 109–11, 112, 113–14 Vintage Guitar magazine 103, 105–6 virtuosity 118, 124, 125, 128–9, 170 Volkslied 32 Index
– 215 –
Walker, T-Bone 28, 33 Walser, Robert 118 Warhol, Andy 47 Washabaugh, William 67 Washburn guitars 47 Waters, Muddy 6, 22, 24, 28, 30–1 Watt Roy, Norman 48 Wayne’s World 73 Weaver, Curley 20 Western music in India 184–5 White, Bukka 23, 28 White, Josh 29, 30 Whitesnake 110 Who, The 47
Wilkins, Rev. Robert 30 Williams, Big Joe 23 Williams, John 4 Williams, Robert Pete 22 Women and Children First (Van Halen) 117 Wood, Ron 99 Woodstock 108
Yes 48 Yo La Tengo 51 You Really Got Me 120 Young, Johnny 21 Young, Neil 93, 99