Cultural Project Notes - with vocabulary words
For my Cultural Project, I focused on two narrow examples of Indian music and attempted to show how these two songs exemplified certain aspects of Indian culture. I used the "product, practice, perspective" model that we discussed in class to organize my research into the products created - a classical Indian raga and a Bollywood song; the practices - meditation, religious rituals, and showing culture through popular movies; and finally, the perspective - the importance of music in Indian culture seems to stay the same, but is shifting from a religious to an entertainment-driven product. Of course this is a generalization, as both traditional and modern forms of music are listened to across India today. But the evolution of the Bollywood movie industry has created an entirely new form of music being created in India.
I chose the Ravi Shankar video as an example of a classical Indian raga because Shankar is the most popular sitarist known to the Western world and because the raga clearly showed aspects of traditional music that I wanted to discuss during my presentation. For instance, he clearly played an alap at the beginning of his raga and a jala at the end, as I explained during the presentation. I chose Balam Pichkari from the Bollywood film Yeh Jawaani Hai Dewaani because it is was favorite tune while I was in India and because I knew it would be interesting for other students to watch during the presentation.
Links to the two videos used:
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