D ph
Sacred Singing in a South Asian City: Music, Performance and Meaning in Bhaktapur, Nepal. By Richard Widdess
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 10657587 |
|---|---|
| Authors | A Morcom, Alexa M Morcom (0000-0003-4654-5308, Royal Holloway University of London, corresponding author) |
| Year | 2015 |
| Volume | 96 |
| Issue | 2 |
| Pages | 313-315 |
| Publication date | 2015-05-01 |
| Peer Reviewed | Yes |
| Open Access | No |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | Music and Letters (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 0027-4224 • E-ISSN: 1477-4631 |
| Publisher | Oxford University Press (PUBLISHER • GB) |
| DOI | 10.1093/ml/gcv025 |
| OpenAlex | W1751750781 |
| Language | EN |
| Citations received | 3 |
Dāphā: Sacred Singing in a South Asian City is a book of immense depth and rigour. It is a meticulous study of a tradition of devotional singing in the ancient Newar city Bhaktapur, located in the Kathmandu valley in Nepal. Dāphā is performed in Bhaktapur most days of the year, morning and evening, by a number of groups in the city largely made up of male members of the farmer caste. With its loud singing, often indistinct pitching, and lack of emphasis on vocal virtuosity or gloss, it is not the kind of music that tourists and other visitors would generally rush to see. Thus it appears a somewhat humble tradition. However, over the course of the book, Widdess explores how dāphā is entwined with the vast South Asian musical continua of rāga and tāla, of ‘great’ (court and classical) and ‘little’ (local) traditions, of sacred singing, devotional poetry, and complex trajectories of political and historical change. Thus the scope of the book is at times astonishing, and the effect of reading this extremely rich ethnography, history, and analysis of dāphā is something like walking into a tardis.
Acoustics · Aesthetics · Art · Classical music · Ethnography · Ethnomusicology · Literature · Meaning (existential) · Morning · Musical · Poetry · Singing · Sociology · Visual arts · Anthropological Studies and Insights · Anthropology · Diverse Musicological Studies · History · Medicine · Philippine History and Culture · Psychology
| Unique citing works | 3 |
|---|---|
| Citations per year | 0.27 |
| Citation span | 2015 - 2015 (1) |
| Citation velocity | historical |
| Highly cited | No |
| Citation types | Neutral: 1 |