Tales, tunes, and tassa drums : retention and invention in Indo-Caribbean music / Peter Manuel.

"Today's popular tassa drumming emerged from the fragments of transplanted Indian music traditions half-forgotten and creatively recombined, rearticulated, and elaborated into a dynamic musical genre. A uniquely Indo-Trinidadian form, tassa drumming invites exploration of how the distinctive nature of the Indian diaspora and its relationship to its ancestral homeland influenced Indo-Caribbean music culture. Music scholar Peter Manuel traces the roots of neotraditional music genres like tassa drumming to North India and reveals the ways these genres represent survivals, departures, or innovative elaborations of transplanted music forms. Drawing on ethnographic work and a rich archive of field recordings, he contemplates the music carried to Trinidad by Bhojpuri-speaking and other immigrants, including forms that died out in India but continued to thrive in the Caribbean. His reassessment of ideas of creolization, retention, and cultural survival defies suggestions that the diaspora experience inevitably leads to the loss of the original culture, while also providing avenues to broader applications for work being done in other ethnic contexts"-- Provided by publisher.

"In this study, Peter Manuel discusses Indo-Caribbean music that uses a set of neotraditional music genres to explore how the distinctive nature of the diaspora and its relation to the ancestral homeland have conditioned the trajectories of its music culture. Focusing particularly on tassa drumming, a popular Indo-Trinidadian genre, Manuel traces the roots of neotraditional Indo-Caribbean music genres to North India and explores the ways in which these genres can be seen variously to represent survivals, departures, or innovative elaborations of transplanted genres. He examines music that was carried to Trinidad by Indian immigrants in the early twentieth century, including some forms that died out in India while thriving and evolving in their new world home. Drawing on rich ethnographic work, Manuel reassesses ideas of creolization, retention, and cultural survival in ways that have potentially broad application to other ethnic contexts"-- Provided by publisher.

Includes bibliographical references (pages 258-263) and index.

Description based on online resource; title from .pdf title page (provided by publisher, viewed 2020-10-15).

Cover -- Title Page -- Copyright -- Contents -- Preface -- 1. Introduction: Global Perspectives on the Indo-Caribbean Bhojpuri Diaspora and Its Music -- 2. The Trajectories of Transplants: Singing Alha, Birha, and the Ramayan in the Indic Caribbean -- 3. Chowtal and the Dantal: Finding Fertile Soil in the New Homelands -- 4. Bhojpuri Diasporic Music and the Encounter with India -- 5. Tassa Drumming from India to the Caribbean and Beyond -- 6. Concluding Perspectives -- Notes -- Glossary -- References -- Index

English.

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