What I will be doing for the next 2 years

Dear Friends,

I thought that it would be a good idea to tell you all what I am up to. My Dissertation, tentatively titled "Making Banaras Tabla: An Actor Network Approach to Musical Production" was approved by my committee last year in June. In that document, I argued that when we hear musical performances it is not just the performers, but the instruments themselves that are creating sound. Instruments are actively participating in the production of music. In this sense, they are "Actors". It follows then that musical production is not something created by a single individual, but rather by a network of "actors" both human and non-human. My work focusses on a particular set of non-human actors involved in musical production: the instruments.

Subsequently, these instruments did not appear magically out of a vaccuum. They were in fact built by another set of actors including musical instrument makers, their tools, the materials they used, and perhaps other workers they have contracted to perform specific tasks. Subsequently, the instrument itself can also be seen as the product of a network of human and non-human actors. It is to this network and the way in which these actors come together to produce the instruments that ultimately contribute to musical production that I shall devote my research.

In order to do this research, I had to situate myself in a particular place. I chose India for a variety of reasons. The primary reason is that I have perhaps more experience with Tabla than I do with any other instrument, which is a product of the fact that for the last decade I have tried to pick up a new instrument just about every year..... It is also strategic in the sense that I will also be learning quite a bit about the music of South Asia and hope to be able to teach undergraduate courses on the region in the future.

In the fall of last year, I applied for approximately 1 Bajillion grants. That's a specific term. In October, I was offered the American Institute of Indian Studies Junior Research Fellowship - which unfortunately disqualified me from even being considered for the Social Science Research Council or the Wenner Gren Foundation. So as of Last October, I had the luxury of actually knowing that I would, in fact, be going to India for my dissertation research.

In the spring I taught my first stand alone class at NYU called "The Art of Listening" which focussed more on "Sound" than it did on "Music" but also spent a good deal of time interrogating what it means to be an "audience". That was very exciting, and very time Consuming.

Then in the course of about 2 weeks in late April I heard back from a number of grants. I received another grant from the American Institute for Indian Studies to spend a year of Language training in Lucknow. I received a Fulbright Student Award and a Critical Language Enhancement Award that would have provided me with 13 months of funding for language training and research. Finally, I also received a Foreign Language and Area Studies Fellowship for Summer language training from NYU's department of Near Eastern Studies.

After much hemming and hawing, Nikki and I ultimately decided to politely decline the Fulbright award, because it would not allow itself to be combined with any other award. I was, however, able to combine the other three awards.

So this is what is going to happen. On June 11th (Next Thursday) I am going to fly to New Delhi for a 2 day Orientation, then I am going to fly to Lucknow on June 15th to begin my Summer Urdu Language program which continues until August 22nd. Some of you may wonder why Urdu and not Hindi. There are several reasons. One is that both languages sound the same only have slightly different vocabularies. For the most part they are mutually intelligible, despite being written completely differently. The second is that Urdu is spoken by most Muslims in South Asia, and from my preliminary research it seems that the VAST majority of tabla makers are Muslim. Finally, if I had signed up for Hindi classes, I would have spent a year in Jaipur - Rajasthan - which does not have a particular history of tabla production or performance. Lucknow is one of India's historic centers of tabla - so it is an ideal location to spend a year. Perhaps I will find some time on the weekends to get some research done while studying for my classes.

As for Nikki, she will not be coming until late August, and we currently do not know the exact dates. We think that she will be spending the fall semester in Lucknow and the Spring Semester in Bangalore; however we haven't figured that out yet. Still in the works.

We DO know, however, that we will return to the US in June of next year - and would love to see everyone when we get back. We will probably be returning to India in August to begin the research portion of the trip.

If you have read this much, you obviously care a lot about what the two of us are up to. If you feel so inclinced, shoot us a line to let us know what YOU are doing.

Love, Peace, and Happiness,

Allen