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1 BOOK 1 CASSETI’E CULTURE by Peter Manuel. Chicago, I L University of Chicago Press, 1993.302pp., appendixes, bibliography,glossary,index. Reviewed @ GeraldHartnett, Music Department , WeslqranUniversisity, Middletown, CT 06459, U.S.A. A s an academic discipline, ethnomusicology remains surprisingly unaffected by critiques of authorial presence that brought about dramatic upheavals in anthropology and ethnography proper 10years ago. While the reasons for this are complex and themselves in need of scholarly attention, it makes sense to pay close attention to the occasional ethnomusicological work that confronts head-on the discipline’s tendency to reduce an “other”culture to a quantifiable set of differences to be shelved amid volumes dedicated to primate studies and strange attractors. sette-based music in northern India, Cassette Culture,endeavors to dojust that. Its writing is grounded in old-fashioned materialism, politicized in the service of generating emancipatory consciousnessand sensjtive to critical advances originating far afield from musicologicalscholarship . Manuel is upfront about ethnography’s perilous historical relation to colonialism-and this sensitivityto context legitimates his attempt to have it both ways: i.e. to treat the widespread socialand cultural ramifications of audiocassette technology’s incursion into Indian life as a quantifiable entity and as an activistdiscourse. ogy throughout, and Cassette Culture contains an extremely valuable historical account of cultural production under the influence of media technologies (phonograph, film, audiocassette ) and the recording industry. The phonograph’s ability to mass-produce recordings altered musical content in India. The ghazal and qawwali, two traditional musicalforms associated with Peter Manuel’s copious study of casIn fact, Manuel foregrounds technolclassicalHindi and Urdu culture, achieved prominence during the early decades (1910sto 1930s)of the Britishowned recording companies’ technological monopoly on production and distribution for clear reasons: their calculated commercial success stemmed from a pan-regional appeal arrived at by removing improvisational elements from the music while introducing Western pop rhythms and instrumentation. Thus, an industrialized reduction of traditional musical forms achieved commodity status during a time when an expandingbourgeois phonograph-owning audience made possible the growth of a monopoly recording industry catering to, and in some ways creating, the needs of its clientele. By the 1930s,however, film soundtracks usurped other recorded popular musical forms, becoming Indian pop music’s sine qua nonfor the next 40 years. While the reason for film’snatural seductivenessin a country bearing an illiteracy rate of 65% may be obvious, Cassette Culturecites severalconsiderably less evident factors contributing to its appeal. For example, the book argues that the film industry prospered in part because it offered investment opportunities for indigenous Indian capital that, unlike the post-colonial record industry, were unrestricted by government regulation or private monopoly interests. Ironically,film and music produced under these ostensiblymore desirable economic relations quickly grew sterile, generalized and formulaic. Manuel wryly notes how the emplacement of “star”and “spectacle”systemsdistracts attention from the material impoverishment endured by most Indians (p. 44), and careful treatment is given to contentious issues regarding the meaning and use of film in its social context. One interesting section of the book follows divergent Indian viewpoints on the viabilityof film and film music as mediators of a consciousness that is either feudal and false (as maintained by many Indian intellectuals), or desirably tradition -affirming (as evidenced by the cinema’s astounding commercial success with the Indian public, with 15million people attending films daily).Whatever the answer is, it is certain that an identifiable mainstream style emerged as a result of film music’s mass-produced condition , thriving at the expense of many folk genres that “haveeither disap peared or survived only by compromising with film culture” (p. 55). Enter the audiocassette. Manuel cites astronomical sales growth of pre-recorded tapes, from $1.2 in 1980to over $21 million (US.) by 1990 (p. 62),while film-soundtrack market share fell dramatically .Relations between established recording companies and pirate cassette labels provide a glimpse into capitalism ’s proclivityfor fashioning strange partnerships out of conflicting values and traditions. As cassettesenhanced the commercial viabilityof some marginalized song forms, they simultaneously detracted from the importance of live musical and ritual performance. One fascinating example shows how recordings of Hindu priests supplanted the need for their physical presence during ceremonial functions (p...

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