Music of the Raj: A Social and Economic History of Music in Late Eighteenth-Century Anglo-Indian Society (review)

Music of the Raj: A Social and Economic History of Music in Late Eighteenth-Century Anglo-Indian Society. By Ian Woodfield. New York: Oxford University Press, 2000. [xvi, 274 p. ISBN 0-19-816433-5. $74.] Music examples, illustrations, glossary, bibliography, index.

The life of British colonists in late- eighteenth-century India is a subject that intersects with several scholarly fields of study including Asian studies, history, political economy, and the anthropological and historical study of the arts. Ian Woodfield's book on British colonial music culture of the latter part of the eighteenth century adds significantly to our knowledge of the role music played in the lives of British civil servants and military officers who lived in the urban centers extending from Oudh to Calcutta along the Ganges River. In Music of the Raj, Woodfield attempts a reconstruction of the musical life of British colonists by relying primarily on the personal letters of his "informants," supplementing this source of historical information with other miscellaneous sources such as newspaper announcements and advertisements, shipping inventories, and records of music collections. While Music of the Raj is essentially a historical study, it is also an example of historical ethnomusicology in that it emphasizes the relationship of cultural and social patterns of Anglo-Indians to the musical practices they maintained.

Woodfield introduces the main characters of his study in the introduction. Of central importance is the Fowke family, whose letters to friends and colleagues provide an abundant source of information about Anglo-Indian musical life in the last two decades of the eighteenth century. The letters of Joseph Fowke and his two children, Margaret and Francis, contain commentary on topics ranging from the difficulty of keyboard maintenance in India's harsh climate to concern over presenting one's best singing voice in glee singing with a prospective marital match.

Chapter 1 examines trends in the export trade that supplied Anglo-Indians with musical instruments and sheet music. The safe transport of harpsichords and pianos from England to India presented a formidable challenge, and instruments often suffered damage from the trauma of a long journey by sea. Woodfield estimates that the number of keyboard instruments entering Calcutta each year ranged from forty to sixty. Smaller instruments such as violins, flutes, and French horns were transported more easily since their owners could keep them in their possession during the trip to India. One gains a rough idea of the diffusion of Western instruments to the subcontinent from appendix 1, which contains a sampling of the entries registered in the Bengal Inventories, volumes in the India Office Library that detailed the possessions of men who had died in India. These records allow Woodfield to estimate that about 10 percent of Anglo-Indian men owned at least one musical instrument (p. 25).

The Bengal Inventories also provide a few detailed lists of music collections of Anglo-Indian colonists. These exemplify that the colonists' musical taste mirrored that of their countrymen living in London. Conditions in India did influence some aspects of the colonists' repertoire. For example, symphonic literature was practically nonexistent; there simply were not sufficient numbers of musicians to have an orchestra. There was an abundance of sonatas —especially for violin and flute, as these instruments were easy to transport to India (p. 37)—and other pieces that would be appropriate for performance by amateur musicians. A representative selection of the "ancient" music of composers such as Arcangelo Corelli, George Frideric Handel, and Francesco Geminiani was also a common component of the music collections of Anglo-Indians.

While the tone, method, and style of his scholarship is that of conventional historical musicology, Woodfield does address issues such as power relations and gender that are more closely associated with the new musicology. These issues emerge most clearly in chapters 2 through 4. The topics covered here include the activities of...