Customer Reviews

Music in North India: Experiencing Music, Expressing Culture (Global Music)

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Great book/cd package. Text and b/w photos provide a history of styles, locations and great practicioners of this fantastic and deep musical heritage. The recorded samples provided are both emotive and historical. Doing my own self-study of Indian music has me reaching for this set often. Included tal (rhythm) exercises will reveal how difficult even the basics of their rhythmic system is. Author George Ruckert is a longtime top member at the AACM college of Indian music in California and knows very well how to bridge the Westerner towards this foreign ocean of an art form. This book deals with true Indian classical, not Bollywood or moderised Indo-pop.
Also I highly, highly recommend the "Raga Unveiled" dvd set which along with the above book/cd may have you falling into, appreciating and beginning to get an understanding of this complex, spiritual and beautiful musical form.

The author is a practitioner, so he is perhaps writing for thsoe serious about performing this music themselves. But for the non-musical novice, it is all technical and intimidating. The selections on the CD are superb, though -- there's even some hard to find vintage stuff from the early 1900s. the author conveys his passion for the music, and invites the reader to know/hear more. But the book itself as a whole is too technical. I was lost trying to figure out all the ta-taka-takita-takadimi. But there are so few books of this kind out there, so this is the best you can get.