Arnold Bake was a Dutch ethnomusicologist and musician who spent nearly fourteen years in India, during four sojourns, studying its music and related culture. In 1938 and 1939, he and his wife, Corry, also a musician, traveled through South Asia audio recording, filming, and photographing musical performances. They spent about nine months in South India. In 1984 and 1985, Nazir Jairazbhoy, who had been associated with Bake for seven years at the School for Oriental and African Studies in London, and Amy Catlin, an American ethnomusicologist, together visited many of the same sites in South India. Using Bake's recording catalog as a guide, they investigated the contemporary status of the performance genres Bake had documented. They claim that over fifty of the types Bake recorded are still vital. This one-hour videotape and accompanying monograph bring together some of Bake's documentary film, photographs, and recordings with Jairazbhoy's and Caitlin's video recordings of the contemporary versions of types Bake had studied, along with some types Bake did not document, and interpretive comments. The genres viewed include, from Karnataka: Haransikari ritual chant and trance scenes, Bhuta devil dancer; from Tamilnadu: Toda funeral, Kota musicians and dancers, Nadar
villupattu bow singers (including a trance medium); and Kerala: Ottan Thulal dance drama, Nayyar boys harvest bow songs, Pulluvan serpent rituals and enactments, and Teyyam rituals. More than fifty different performances from Bake's films and the restudy videotapes are presented.
The video and film footage of the performances is riveting, with much dancing, brilliant and fantastic costumes, unusual musical instruments, and spirit possession trances. The quality of the video image is good, although the sharpness is not quite up to broadcast quality. The sound quality of the recent recordings is excellent and that of the Bake recordings fairly clear. It is correctly stated that the video "contains too much information to be seen as a normal documentary," but even the uninitiated will find the performances fascinating, suggesting the use of at least portions of the video in introductory or nonspecialist applications.
The accompanying monograph includes introductions to Bake's fieldwork materials and the many difficulties that had to be overcome in using them, descriptions of the restudy technology and methods, maps of the routes of both teams, a list of each video image, the video script, ethnographic and interpretive notes, and an index and bibliography.
A primary objective of the study was to determine how the music had changed. Jairazbhoy identifies four pan-Indian processes and provides examples of each: classicization (whose connection with Sanskritization is discussed, both having the goal of status elevation), modernization, institutionalization, and festivalization. Jairazbhoy states that "The impact of the modern festivals on performers and the societies in which their performances originate has scarcely been explored" (p. 66). (Could he possibly have missed my article on the topic?) "Institutions for the Promotion of Indigenous Music: The Case for Ireland's Comhaltus Ceoltoiri Eireann," Ethnmusicology 33, 1:67 - 95.) Also in the way of general findings, he asserts the pan-Indian distribution of three performance types: oboe ensembles, stick dances, and hobby horse dances, providing numerous examples (some amazing) from Bake and Restudy footage. All three are explained with diffusion theories and the latter two are also said to be fertility symbols. Since in their routines the hobby horses are always battling, and never copulating, at least a part of their symbolic significance would seem to be that of military and political power.
An interesting tangent in the study of modernization is a persuasive demonstration of film music's influence and how it is achieved. Jairazbhoy states, "To appreciate the full impact of film songs on the general populace, one needs to see the extravagance of their techniques." The video shows a nagasvara ensemble in Madurai playing a song from the film Qurbani. Then we see the song's performance in the actual film (used by permission): a strobelight-lit female night club dancer, showing plenty of thigh, is pictured in an extreme close-up of her mouth as she sings to a loudly rocking electric bass riff, Western dance band drums, and santur (hammered dulcimer).
Jairazbhoy asserts that the primary advantage of the survey, as a methodology, is that it permits (and even promotes, I would add) a broad perspective that can lead to the discovery of important general principles. A disadvantage of the survey, which is not mentioned in the rather abbreviated discussion, is that it tends not to allow enough time for researchers to penetrate many of the layers of local meaning of a performance. The importance of this kind of interpretation is seen in Jairazbhoy's own insightful remarks regarding the auspiciousness of the oboe in India and the conflict over the name of the nagasvara. Moreover, part of the meaning of a song is in the lyrics, and none are translated in this study. It is clear that full understanding of a society's music requires both the long-term regional or single-site studies (which have lately been proliferating in the study of Indian music and folklore) and the extensive survey such as the one presented in the Bake Restudy--an attractive and compelling document of India's many-splendored music traditions and their patterns of change.
