Finding the Raga, Amit Chaudhuri
Finding the Raga, Amit Chaudhuri
List: $19.99 | Sale: $13.99
Club: $9.99

Finding the Raga
An Improvisation on Indian Music

Author: Amit Chaudhuri

Narrator: Fajer Al-Kaisi

Unabridged: 5 hr 34 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Publisher: Tantor Media

Published: 07/13/2021


Synopsis

Amit Chaudhuri, novelist, critic, and essayist, is also a musician, trained in the Indian classical vocal tradition but equally fluent as a guitarist and singer in the American folk music style, who has recorded his experimental compositions extensively and performed around the world. A turning point in his life took place when, as a lonely teenager living in a high-rise in Bombay, far from his family's native Calcutta, he began, contrary to all his prior inclinations, to study Indian classical music. Finding the Raga chronicles that transformation and how it has continued to affect and transform not only how Chaudhuri listens to and makes music but how he listens to and thinks about the world at large. Offering a highly personal introduction to Indian music, the book is also a meditation on the differences between Indian and Western music and art-making as well as the ways they converge in a modernism that Chaudhuri reframes not as a twentieth-century Western art movement but as a fundamental mode of aesthetic response, at once immemorial and extraterritorial. Finding the Raga combines memoir, practical and cultural criticism, and philosophical reflection with the same individuality and flair that Chaudhuri demonstrates throughout a uniquely wide-ranging, challenging, and enthralling body of work.

About Amit Chaudhuri

Amit Chaudhuri is the author of many novels, including, Friend of My Youth. Among his other published works are collections of short stories, poetry, and essays, as well as the nonfiction Calcutta and a critical study of D. H. Lawrence's poetry. He has received the Commonwealth Writers Prize, the Betty Trask Award, the Encore Prize, the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, and the Sahitya Akademi Award, among other accolades. Chaudhuri is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and holds the titles of professor of contemporary literature at the University of East Anglia in England and professor of creative writing at Ashoka University in India. In addition, he is a singer in the North Indian classical tradition and a composer and performer in a project that brings together the raga, blues, and jazz with a variety of other musical traditions. In 2017 he received the Sangeet Samman from the government of West Bengal for his contribution to Indian classical music.


Reviews

Goodreads review by Swapnam

I was born and brought up in India in a household where no one was formally trained in music and yet everyone was obsessed with it - gliding the radio knob through the ocean of static until one chanced upon an island of familiar melodies, replaying CDs of music videos till they were physically oblit......more

Goodreads review by Joachim

Being a fan of Indian ragas, weirdly this book didn't work for me. On one hand it was too centered around the author's personal life. On the other hand it came across as too technical, dry and difficult about the music itself. I was hoping for more of a broad cultural approach.........more

Goodreads review by Kartik

Literary history, autobiography and music studies combine in this fascinating, melodious book. Traces the history of the raga and ultimately its omnipresence through time and space in stunning prose and patience.......more

I can't say I have understood all the theory behind the Ragas but the book was extremely readable and re-read worthy. The theoretical explanations, personal anecdotes and the connections he makes between music and cultures from across East and West all make for a rich, many textured, multi-layered r......more