Singing the Wind : Four essays on Muttusvami Diksitar – David Shulman

Description

Muttusvāmi Dīkṣitar was one of the three canonical composers of Carnatic music at the end of the eighteenth century and the first three decades of the nineteenth. A devotee of the Tantric school of Śrīvidyā, he composed over 400 astonishing and innovative kritis, most of them addressed to a god or goddess in the great Tamil temples. He liked to compose in sets of eight or more songs, meant to be heard as a whole. Singing the Wind, published in the 250th anniversary year of Dīkṣitar’s birth, offers close readings of or listenings to four select compositions, their cultural matrix, the verbal text that is sung, and the musical structures and patterns they contain. These essays offer a wide-angle cultural-historical perspective on Dīkṣitar’s massive corpus, as seen through the prism of the four remarkable compositions examined in this book.