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Wild but pleasing when understood: Hindustani airs & cultural translation

Location

The Inigo Rooms Somerset House East Wing Strand Campus

Category

Conference

When

18/05/2012 (15:00-18:00)

Contact

Frankie Kalogirou +44 (0)20 7848 1843

Description

This symposium will take William Hamilton Bird's Oriental miscellany  (1789) - the first published collection of Indian music transcribed from live performance into Western notation and adapted for harpsichord - as the starting point for an examination of art, culture and music and dance performance practice in late 18th and early 19th century India.

Introducing the Hindustani air as a locus of Enlightenment thinking, it will explore the genre's meaning as an embodiment of contemporary political, philosophical and anthropological attitudes.

Programme:

• Symbol of the Enlightenment: the Hindustani air as politics, philosophy and anthropology. Professor Bennett Zon (University of Durham)
• Lucknow: a rich cultural city 1775-1856. Dr Rosie Llewellyn-Jones
• Time and tune in Hindoostan, circa 1800. Professor James Kippen (University of Toronto)
• Wounding eyelashes and wanton smiles:  recreating women's dance practice from 18th and 19th century North India. Dr Margaret Walker (Queen's University)
• Fairies, cypresses and cupbearers: the Persian and Urdu texts in Sophia Plowden's album. Dr Katherine Butler Schofield (King's College London)
• The oriental miscellany: notation and beyond - interpretation and performance. Jane Chapman and Mohammad Yusuf Mahmoud.

Free entry but please reserve a place.

Further information can be found on the Foyle Special Collections Library webpages.