IISER MOHALI

About the Workshop: When we speak of the music of the mystics what we generally think of are the words or the poetry, and the philosophical meanings derived from the poetry. We also discuss the raga and tala, i.e. we understand a piece of music in terms of its grammar. Meaning however is quite profoundly created through musical genre/choice of genre and style, voice techniques, context (of performance) and indeed by the performing(and listening) body/bodies.

The workshop will examine how we listen to music and what we listen to, what meanings we assign to the music. We will discuss how musical genre, embodied presence(s) and performing contexts can change/reframe/make deeply complex, the essential meaning of a given ‘song’. Among the issues we will try to understand are the collapsing of the sacred/secular division and hierarchy in music, gendered voice, the presence of community, and the construction of the singer as ‘artist’. We will do this by listening to selected audio/video recordings, and discussing these.

About Vidya Rao:Vidya Rao is a performer of thumri-dadra and ghazal. For many years the disciple of the legendary singer, the late Vidushi Naina Devi, she continued her study of this form under the late Vidushi Shanti Hiranand and the late Vidushi Girija Devi. Her initial training in khayal was under the late Prof. B.N. Datta and thereafter under Pandit Mani Prasad.

An award-winning artist, Vidya Rao has performed at national and international forums to appreciative audiences. She has lectured at many forums, and has conducted workshops and lecture-demonstrations. She has composed and sung for the theatre, film and dance, and has also recorded several CDs. Her repertoire ranges over thumri-dadra, ghazal and allied forms, the songs of medieval sufi and bhakti poets, verses from Hindu and Buddhist texts and the Islamic forms of naat, soz, nauha etc. She has also researched and written extensively on music and the performing arts. Her research and writing work has focused on gender and musical form, and her work has been published in academic journals and as chapters in books. Her book ‘Heart to Heart: Remembering Nainaji’ is a memoir of life with her guru Naina Devi.

Vidya Rao was the recipient of a Fellowship from the Ford Foundation, and a Senior Fellowship from the Department of Culture, GOI. She has been Visiting Professor at the School of Arts and Aesthetics, Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi, and Visiting Fellow at the Centre for Advanced Study, Jadavpur University, Kolkata. In 2012-2013, she was Fellow at the Institute of Advanced Studies, Nantes, France. In 2014 she was Artist in Residence at Smith College and the Five Colleges Inc. In 2024 she received the Sangam House-ISRO Writers’ Residency She is adviser to the Kabir Project, has recorded a CD for them and also translated the poetry included in the booklets brought out by the project.

She studied Sociology at the Delhi School of Economics, and has worked as a Research Associate with the Administrative Staff of India (Hyderabad) and the Centre for Women’s Development Studies (Delhi). She has been Editor, Social Sciences with Orient Blackswan publishers (Delhi), where she now continues to work as an Editorial Consultant.

She has been on the advisory boards of several institutions such as The School of Arts and Aesthetics, JNU (Delhi); Deer Park Institute ( Bir, Himachal Pradesh); the Adivasi Academy (Tejgadh, Gujarat); the Kabir Project, Maatrika (Delhi), among others.