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Question for Today
Who is Deben Bhattacharya? And why is he not in the New Grove?
"Neither a musician nor an educator, I record and collect unwritten music primarily for my own pleasure but also to share it with those who are not fortunate enough to have had the opportunity to hear it directly from the mouth of a Bedouin singer in the caravan, sadly enough, all too rare these days. An ancient Sanskrit scholar defines music as the root of joy, for me that joy becomes even more meaningful when shared with others." — Deben Bhattacharya
Tags: music, quotes
Posted 09 November 2006 at 09:33.
A graduate student in music and anthropology writing a dissertation about music in Moravia, the eastern third of the Czech Republic. At some point, the Czech Republic's "second city" (that would be Brno) captured my attention, and I've since been blogging about events, arts, music, and other stuff—basically whatever interests me in and around the cityscape. I'm not living in Brno now, but I keep up with the cultural pulse from afar as best I can.
Comments:
By the way, this is not a trick question. Bhattacharya created many recording compilations, probably most in the 1950s and 1960s, and he also made some films. There are a lot of these, and it seems that he is an important figure in ethnomusicology but the world seems to have forgotten about him and only rarely remembers the recordings (and even less often the films) that he made.
12:33 PM, November 11, 2006
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