Reverberations from an unequal music
Much ink has already been spilt on the recent controversy around the conferring of the Sangita Kalanidhi award by the Madras Music Academy to T M Krishna. What is often overlooked in these discourses is that these values were put in place quite recently, over the course of the 20th century, when nationalism in its cultural iterations placed music and performance practices within a very particular template, in which the Madras Academy played a major role. It was no mean accomplishment, for it widened a listening habit within a modern urban setting, albeit to a small self-selecting community of connoisseurs whose location enabled them to play the role of gatekeepers and facilitate the transition of art music’s social location from the court, temple or salon to the modern concert stage. This involved a serious engagement with the aesthetics of vocalisation and percussion, with standardisation and anthologising of compositions and melodies that were seen as vital for the modern institutionalisation of Carnatic music.
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