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143 Notes Introduction 1. The term music likewise has a long extrasonic tradition in Islamic and European scholarship. In the Boethian musica mundana /musica humana /musica instrumentalis scheme, for example, only the last is, strictly speaking, audible. The classic Aristotelian dismissal of the music of the spheres on the basis of its inaudibility (1984 [350 bce]: 11.9 [290b30–291a6]: 479) is founded, tautologically, on the necessary audibility of music. But a parallel tradition of speculative music theory that reaches beyond sound has nonetheless persisted (see Shihab-ud-din Subrawadri in Godwin 1986 [12th c.] and Ilnitchi 2002: 44). 2. Improvisation is, admittedly, a word that means too much. Among other things, it seems to pit creative spontaneity against traditional repertoire, an unsustainable opposition in Hindustani music. Here I follow Widdess and Nooshin (2006) in using it loosely to refer to the generation of music in the course of performance by the performer. Later chapters will introduce a number of more precise Indic terms to refer to improvisation. 3. There is a slight difference between my use of musicking in this context and Christopher Small’s influential reworking of the English verb to musick (1998). Small’s expanded sense of musicking includes what Daniel Cavicchi (2011) calls “audiencing”: attending concerts, listening to sound recordings, and other means of directing oneself toward the musical performances of other people. There certainly is much to say about the bodily engagement of listeners with music. In this book, however, for the sake of clarity, musicking refers strictly to singing and playing instruments—whether alone, in teaching, or in concert, with a special focus on the bodily action this involves. 4. Sometimes two singers perform together: Nazakat and Salamat Ali Khan, Mohammad Rashid and Mohammad Sayeed Khan, Rajan and Sajan Misra, etc. In these cases, singers typically alternate between singing through-composed sections in unison, and taking turns improvising. It is rare that two singers will sing overlapping improvised parts except briefly and incidentally. 5. My use of flesh may remind some readers of Merleau-Ponty’s sophisticated development of the term chair, translated as “flesh” in English (1969), but there is Notes to Chapter 1 / 144 no connection. My use of flesh-body is more closely akin to Merleau-Ponty’s corps objectif and to Husserl’s Körper. 6. Man and dimagh, like soul and spirit, have entered modern vernaculars from different languages (man is Sanskritic, while dimagh is Arabic; soul is Germanic, while spirit is Latinate). Also like soul and spirit, they are both among the resources used by speakers of modern vernaculars to describe distinct facets of the self. 7. The -ic adjectival suffix in English is phonetically and grammatically equivalent to the -ik adjectival suffix in Indic languages (dharmic, karmic, tantric, etc.). As paramparic serves here as an Indic loan word in English, I have preferred the conventional English suffix. 1. A History of Moving and Singing in India 1. Although gesture tends to be mapped onto the prevailing Muslim/Hindu binary as “Muslim,” particularly in films, it is not the case that Muslims are, either in depiction or in fact, particularly voracious gesturers. Amir Khan, for example, the “yogi-like” singer described later in the chapter, was a Muslim. 2. Although closed eyes function as a sign of piety here, it is important to note that closing the eyes was among the faults found in formulaic lists in medieval music treatises. 3. One important exception to this trend was the great dancer Balasaraswati, who occasionally made a point of singing while dancing. 4. Though this shift was profound, it also appears to have occurred over the course of decades. An intermediate stage between the old order of singing courtesans and the new order of the respectable female concert singer was marked by an intermediate, English-language term for the new kind of female singer: the “songstress.” Songstresses typically performed thumri while seated, and the recitals took place at the houses of wealthy patrons (Pradhan 2004: 341). Although songstresses typically did not stand and dance, many still performed ada—stylized gestures that mimed the words of the song being sung. Quinn interprets ada and other similar seated dance forms as an intermediate step in the elimination of dance from musical performance (1982: 92). 5. An exception is the recitation of drum syllables by Kathak dancers, and the relatively new practice, among students of Chitresh Das, of softly singing a naghma (fixed melodic loop) to oneself...