Sitting down to watch Satyajit
Ray’s 1958 film The Music Room, I
already knew that many critics claimed it as a classic not only of Bengali
cinema, but also of world cinema. On my part, it was a purposeful first
step into Ray’s filmography, a director who stands with only a handful of
others in the auteur club. But, at the same time, I steeled myself for
disappointment. Knowing that a work of art is a masterpiece often does not ease
the experience; that knowledge frustrates it. Such was my experience with Ray’s
film: I found myself unmoved by the plight of the fallen aristocrat, Biswambhar
Roy, played so convincingly by Chhabi Biswa. Driven by his obsession (indeed,
one could make a convincing case for addiction)
to music, Roy loses his family, his fortune, the respect of the community, and,
by the end, some part of his sanity.
You should understand that this isn’t
the Beatles or Beethoven that’s driving him down this dark road; it’s Indian
music. Why is this so hard for me to understand? It’s because there’s a big
cultural gap between my Western appreciation for music and Indian music; it’s
not that I don’t like the music that
appears in the film (there are three memorable concert sequences), it’s that I
don’t understand it.
~
In ethnomusicologist Bruno
Nettl’s essay “The Nonmusical Language: Varieties of Music,” he lights on the
concept of bimusicality, a fairly familiar one if you’re accustomed to scooting
around the ethnomusicology world…but not so much if you caper around, as I do,
in the mainstream Western one. Bimusicality, at its essense, is the concept of
being ‘fluent’ in two or more musical traditions. In some sense, it depends on
how one defines ‘tradition’; there is some wiggle room, for instance, to call
classical music and hip-hop separate musical traditions, but I think that it’s
a bit of an overstatement. To claim, on the other hand, fluency in both
“Western” music and “south Asian” music seems like a clear case of
“bimusicality.”
Of course, that’s not to say that
there has not been any intermingling between the forms over the past century.
Memorably, the Beatles (among other British Invasion groups) seized Indian
music and culture as an inspiration. George Harrison’s tutelage under sitar
master Ravi Shankur has become the stuff of cross-cultural legend. Equally,
Indian and south Asian music has borrowed pop forms and styles from the Western
world. However, there remains a difficult gap between south Asian (from here on
out, I’ll speak to Indian music in particular) musical forms and Western music
forms.
Part of the trouble for me in
watching The Music Room—with its
three showcase scenes of musicians who were famous in
India—I was not struck by the beauty or sadness or complexity of the music. I
promise you, I tried. Instead, I was left with the irremediable sense of
‘foreignness.’ The music—not only its language, but also its instruments and
its rhythm and sense of melody—were alien to my ears. Certain musical moments
were even painful to me; some of the
singing sounded less great and more grating.
My experience with the film’s
music brought me back to one of my early encounters with world music, in the
figure of Hamza el Din, perhaps the best-known Nubian musician in history. I
suspect it was a chance encounter of el Din’s dizzying oud-playing, relaxed vocal lines, and the fact that I was doing
yoga at the time, but his music struck a spiritual chord with me that I could
not escape. Of course, I understood nothing of the Nubian music
tradition—neither the importance of el Din (who owns the dubious distinction of
playing with the Grateful Dead), nor the style of Nubian traditional music, nor
even the language el Din was singing, nor what an oud even was. (An oud is a fretless, stringed instrument similar to
a lute played mostly in Arab countries.) Looking back on my connection to el
Din’s music, I can’t help but feel that the exchange was fraught with pride on
my part: I was proud that I liked the
music. Pride in one’s taste—musical or otherwise—isn’t an attractive thing;
loves and hates in the art world shouldn’t be constructed off the ego of the
viewer/listener.
The issue with my love of el Din was
that, very literally, I had nothing to compare him to. It would have been inaccurate to create peers for him in the Western music world (the Grateful Dead?!). It’s hard to imagine a counter case to
my experience with el Din. These two worlds—that of Western music (or even,
let’s say, American folk music) and traditional folk music are not
interchangeable entities. It wouldn’t make sense to offer up the example of a
Sudan native sitting down to a Bob Dylan record. It would be meaningless to
offer up that comparison without actually doing it and interviewing the person
afterwards. (Would we make him do yoga? Would we send him on a jog? The more I think
about it, the more I can’t help but feel that yoga has intrinsically been tied
to my experience of el Din’s music—if there was ego involved in connecting to
his music, there was certainly ego
connected—at least initially—in being able to take yoga ‘seriously’…which I
clearly wasn’t yet doing, anyway.)
~
What does all this have to do
with The Music Room? I started
talking about a film and then I segued into music and bimusicality. The
connection is this: if we can have different musical traditions that require
separate fluencies, then what stops us from having different film traditions
that similarly require their own fluencies?
The answer, obviously, is not this easy to answer, but I don’t think music and film are reducible to possessing any of the same
elements. They are fundamentally different media, especially in their temporal
sense; music has existed for millennia—programmed, many argue, into our very
genes. Cinema, on the other hand, is a modern invention. Cinema was arguably
born at the beginning of the global era. Far more than any other art form
(speaking broadly, of course), cinema is global.
That said, there are cultural
differences. The first and most obvious one is language. When I watch The Music Room, I cannot ‘understand’
the dialogue; I must read it. But, as we all are aware, subtitles are often
clunky and awkward, never able to fully expound upon the complex and vibrant
nature of the language. Despite this shortcoming, I cannot help but feel that
cinema is—partly thanks to its roots as a silent form and partly thanks to the
human fascination with visual forms—centered in image. Italo Calvino, in his
‘memory exercise’ “A Cinema-Goer’s Autobiography,” puts it far better than I:
“…only half of each actor and
actress was truly present, in the sense that we got only their bodies and not
their voices, which were substituted by the abstraction of the dubbing, by a
conventional, alien, insipid diction, no less anonymous than the printed
subtitles which in other countries (or at least in those where filmgoers are
thought to be more mentally agile) tell you what the mouths nevertheless
continue to communicate with all the considerable charge of individual
pronunciation, of a phonetic signature made up of lips, teeth, saliva, made up
above all of the varying, geographically conditioned accents of the American
melting pot, in a language that for those who understand it offers nuances of
expression and for those who don’t brings with it an extra musical potency… […]
…[The American voices] become part and parcel of the film’s enchantment,
something inseparable from the images, a sign that the power of the cinema was
born silent…” (Calvino, The Road to San
Giovanni, pp. 53-4)
Rethinking the ‘American’
references into a different context—in the case of The Music Room, to Bengali India—you can see the complications we
face as American viewers of this kind of foreign cinema. But, Calvino insists
(as do I), film is still essentially visual. There are shadings of syntax (‘language’)
differences between different film traditions, but the global context the film
form has grown up in prevents it from having the same closed-off ‘language’ in
the way of Western and south Asian musical traditions.
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