A book review is presented for Music and Temple Ritual in South India: Performing for Śiva, authored by William Tallotte, by Rolf Groesbeck.
Author Biography
Rolf Groesbeck, Professor of Music History/Musicology/Ethnomusicology, is active as an ethnomusicologist and performer (the South Indian drum chenda, the North Indian drum tabla, piano, keyboards, other global and Western percussion). His research has been mostly on the temple drumming of Kerala (India), where he conducted fieldwork between 1988 and 1990, in 2000, 2006, and in 2012, receiving a grant from the American Institute of Indian Studies. He has published articles in the journals International Journal of Hindu Studies (2018, on the coexistence of gifts and commodities in institutional pedagogy in Kerala); Ethnomusicology (1999, on improvisation); Yearbook for Traditional Music (2003, on timbre); Asian Music (1999, on the classical/folk dichotomy); and the Indian journal Kalasamskaram. His chapter “Disciple and Preceptor/Performer in Kerala,” based on a paper he gave at an International Council for Traditional Music colloquium at Harvard U. in 2004, appeared in the book Theorizing the Local (R. Wolf, ed., Oxford U. Press, 2009). He has published lengthy encyclopedia entries in the Garland Encyclopedia of World Music (on Kerala) and in the SAGE Encyclopedia of Music and Culture (on the ethnomusicological study of the individual and on ethnomusicological treatments of form), in addition to reviews in Ethnomusicology, Asian Music, World of Music,Museum Anthropology, and Yearbook for Traditional Music. He has also presented papers at Harvard U. (twice), at the U. of Chicago (also twice), at meetings of the Society for Ethnomusicology (SEM)(national and regional), the College Music Society (national and international), and at the South Asia Conference (Madison, Wisconsin), at a meeting of the European Association of Social Anthropologists (Estonia), and at UA Little Rock’s 2003 Arkansongs festival (on Robert Palmer’s contributions to American music), the Little Rock Film Festival, and a lecture-demonstration at the Little Rock Music Coterie. He has served as president of two different regional chapters of SEM (Southeast-Caribbean, 2000-01, and Southern Plains, 2012-13), on the local arrangements committee of the Society for American Music (2013), and on SEM program committees (regional and national). He coordinated the 2011 South Central/College Music Society meeting at UA Little Rock. His 1995 Ph.D. dissertation (New York U.) is one of the monuments of the scholarly literature on the music of Kerala. He also has BA and BM (Piano, Music History) degrees from Oberlin College.
Groesbeck, Rolf
(2024)
"Music and Temple Ritual in South India: Performing for Śiva,"
Yale Journal of Music & Religion:
Vol. 10:
No.
1, Article 6.
DOI: https://doi.org/10.17132/2377-231X.1318
