Abstract
Sebanti Chatterjee. 2023. Choral Voices: Ethnographic Imaginations of Sound and Sacrality. New York: Bloomsbury. xvi + 192 pp. Notes, bibliography, glossary, index. ₹739 (paperback—ISBN: 9781501379871).
Pockets of ‘the cultural other’ will occasionally be found in every mainstream landscape of culture. Nonetheless, they often remain in oblivion and belong to insignificant minor spaces. Western music in India occupies such a status—either falling in the circles of the Westernised Indian elite or of ‘spoilt’ urban youth who tend to distance themselves from traditional musical cultures. Through an ethnographic excavation that captures the soundscapes of the Western classical and choir cultures of Goa and Shillong, this book strings together those sounds which are otherwise relegated to the category of the musical other in India.
The book attempts to hear through a multitude of sounds in their encounter with faith and communities by the invocation of an evocative sonic imagination that connects the themes of indigeneity, piety, schizophonia and nostalgia. All such realms, interfacing religious and musical genres, often grapple with anxieties relating to authenticity, tradition and sanctity in their transformative spaces. In the process of transformation, a critical dialogue, occasionally conflictual, takes place—the colonial imagination transposing a musical genre from a different cultural space onto the indigenous experiences of musicality. As the author concedes, this complex negotiation eventually shapes and punctuates the indigenous framework that remakes the choral renderings that belong to the sacred space of Christianity in India. As regions that constitute a signature of their own in the making of a set of cultural practices, specifically in the context of musical traditions, Goa and Shillong offer potent sites for this ethnographic endeavour. By locating colonial encounters and artworlds within the realm of the ethnic and regional, the work navigates the choralscapes of rituals, rehearsals, interactions and performances, entangled in the lifeworlds of the Goan Christians and the Khasis of Meghalaya. While encompassing this universe of sound subjects, sonic and sacral affinities, the book foregrounds the question of how choral repertoires acquire an indigenous framework. Since choral renderings in organised settings of piety occur specifically within the infrastructural arrangements of Christianity, how are indigenous traditions kept alive amidst those structures and pursuits?
Participant observation is meaningfully accomplished in the present context since the researcher has trained herself to become part of the choral group of practitioners within an institutional setting in Goa. Her participation as a soprano vocalist in the choir group enables her to grasp the nuances of distinct modes of voice production, modulation and the entire vocalic tradition in the rehearsal and performance settings. As the fieldwork unfolds, this rare advantage of being a practitioner of a genre while simultaneously researching it brings extraordinary richness to the ethnographic detailing of the sacralised sonic environment. Nonetheless, the work conveniently takes shelter in the usual tropes characteristic of much postcolonial scholarship—that of anchoring indigeneity within the indices of sacrality and of choral music.
While pursuing this constant quest to establish an indigenous repertoire within choral renderings, the author invokes concepts such as sonic interculturality, micro-genre, sonic materiality, schizophonic mimesis and so on to formulate a ‘multi-voiced dialogue’ (p. 33) in the understanding of ethicality and cultural negotiations in sites of music and religion. Nevertheless, the idea of sonic interculturality is confined here to merely retell a version of postcolonial encounters in which the triumph of the indigenous is witnessed over the colonial, through negotiations and eliminations. The aforementioned other concepts too traverse a similar analytical route. The concept of indigeneity is romanticised in pretty ways through expressions such as ‘soulfulness’ and ‘nostalgic’ (pp. 21, 143, 145–46) in many collusions of religiosity and musicality. Furthermore, the equivocation around the constitutive elements of ‘indigeneity’ marks their empirical absence as an abstract cultural other to Christianity, Catholicism and Evangelical traditions, which in contrast manifest within specific geo-political locations.
While the idea of indigeneity fills the analytical space of sacrality and music as a central construct, the author attempts to shift away from its usual political-economy paradigm and relocates it in the sphere of the cultural—what she calls ‘a splintered faith understood through vernacularized experiences’ (p. 17). This notion of indigeneity that hopes to tap into vernacularised sonic experiences primarily encapsulates identity formations of political overtones, perceptibly different from modes of political assertion and rights-based movements. However, they cannot be simply reduced to being merely cultural, especially when a form is subject to fragmentation and reassembling. In that sense, the iteration of a binary between the political and the cultural in the conceptions of the indigenous and the vernacular offers little conceptual yield in the analysis of the subtle resistance through which musical genres are reconfigured in particular regional settings. In Goa, though the church-based singular genre sets the tone for the sacral invocation of ritual and creative processes, the author finds that the sacred tunes outside of church spaces engaged with numerous sonic possibilities of reimagining genre, rhythm and style. However, the micropolitical aspects in such re-imaginings that make subtle allusions to ‘authentic’ singularity in a sacralised musical space, elude further probing.
A telling example of such a miscue is the author’s cursory engagement with the emergent domain of sound studies that questions ocular-centric social theory and the hierarchy of the senses. A broader version of this theoretical quest is anchored in multi-sensorial anthropology; a plea for replacing participant observation with participant sensation, which also goes missing in the analytical scheme of the book. Though certain concepts are deduced from the domain of sound studies, a constant trope of the work is to fall back on the Deleuzian formulations of assemblage, territoriality and so on. Critical accounts in sensory studies and sound studies make a counterpoint against the overwhelming textualisation and verbocentrism in 20th-century social theory. Against this backdrop, bending the pitch to a poststructuralist base-note in a project on sound and music, it seems uncharacteristic that the book tends to cling onto such a counterproductive theoretical disposition.
I would like to end this note with a semantic paradox; a typical textual invocation that is commonly found—‘This book looks at how the sacred’ (emphasis in original; p. 16)—in order to remind the reader that this book does not look, but listens to the many lives where choral voices and Christian worship are intermeshed in the making of a unique sonic sphere. This fall into the auditory unconscious stems from the predominance of the visual and the textual. Such slipperiness recurs at times even while the work is immersed in the act of listening and anchors its analysis on the auditory.