Please join us on Thursday, March 6 for a discussion with Regula Qureshi about her ongoing work translating a nineteenth-century Urdu music treatise, Ma’dan-ul-Musiqi (Mine of Music). See below for a brief note about the project from Prof. Qureshi.
As always, we will meet at 4:30pm in Goodspeed 205. Our workshop is open to the public and all are welcome.
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Discovering a Mine of Music (Ma’dan al Musiqi 1956), is a barely explored 19th c. treatise of Indian music that challenges the translator with its Persianized Urdu, and its multivocal use of Persian, Hindi and Sanskrit.
Written by a Lucknow courtier who also held a British colonial post this highly syncretic work is modeled on musicological treatises of past centuries while richly chronicling current oral tradition oral traditions and musical practices in Sanskrit and Persian interpretive frames. It is also a connoisseur’s personal chronicle of the courtly musical life cut off by the British destruction oft he Lucknow Court while also contributing to their agenda to make classical cultural knowledge accessible through vernacular texts. Part of this effort was the 1925 publication of the treatise (Hindustan Press), through local Muslim efforts.
I look forward to outline the challenge of this work, in the hope to receive critiques and ideas in a open-ended EthNoise! discussion.