Temporalities of North Indian Classical Listening: How Listeners Use Music to Construct Time

Abstract

This chapter explores how ethnography with musical listeners can illuminate relationships between music and time. While much existing scholarship equates musical temporalities with qualities of the ‘music itself’, this chapter addresses the need for research that considers the diverse ways listeners use music to engender experiences of time. Alaghband-Zadeh focuses here on rasikas, connoisseurs of North Indian classical music. She shows how rasikas construct and experience North Indian classical performances as sites of leisurely temporality: this is both an ethical practice, aligned with ideas of virtue, and also a means for rasikas to position themselves as set apart from a world they view as increasingly characterized by speed. Alaghband-Zadeh argues that music is a powerful temporal resource: a means through which people cultivate ways of inhabiting time. Moreover, the immediate temporalities of live performances contribute to the production of broader, public temporalities of modernity, changing social formations and imagined histories.