Sikh Sabad Kirtan as a Musical Construction of Memory

Protopapas, Janice Faye

Sikh Sabad Kirtan as a Musical Construction of Memory

dc.contributor.advisor	Provine, Robert C.	en_US
dc.contributor.author	Protopapas, Janice Faye	en_US
dc.contributor.department	Music	en_US
dc.contributor.publisher	Digital Repository at the University of Maryland	en_US
dc.contributor.publisher	University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)	en_US
dc.date.accessioned	2011-10-08T06:37:36Z
dc.date.available	2011-10-08T06:37:36Z
dc.date.issued	2011	en_US
dc.description.abstract	The performance of devotional music in India has been an active, sonic conduit where spiritual identities are shaped and forged, and both history and mythology lived out and remembered daily. For the followers of Sikhism, congregational hymn singing has been the vehicle through which text, melody and ritual act as repositories of memory, elevating memory to a place where historical and social events can be reenacted and memorialized on levels of spiritual significance. This dissertation investigates the musical process of Shabad Kirtan, Sikh hymn singing, in a Sikh musical service as a powerful vehicle to forge a sense of identification between individual and the group. As an intimate part of Sikh life from birth to death, the repertoire of Shabad Kirtan draws from a rich mosaic of classical and folk genres as well as performance styles, acting as a musical and cognitive archive. Through a detailed analysis of the Asa Di Var service, Shabad Kirtan is explored as a phenomenological experience where time, place and occasion interact as a meaningful unit through which the congregation creates and recreates themselves, invoking deep memories and emotional experiences. Supported by explanatory tables, diagrams and musical transcriptions, the sonic movements of the service show how the Divine Word as Shabad is not only embodied through the Guru Granth Sahib, but also encountered through the human enactment of the service, aurally, viscerally and phenomenologically.	en_US
dc.identifier.uri	http://hdl.handle.net/1903/12078
dc.rights	NOTICE: Recordings accompanying this record are available only to University of Maryland College Park faculty, staff, and students and cannot be reproduced, copied, distributed or performed publicly by any means without prior permission of the copyright holder.
dc.subject.pqcontrolled	Music	en_US
dc.subject.pqcontrolled	South Asian studies	en_US
dc.subject.pquncontrolled	Ethnomusicology	en_US
dc.subject.pquncontrolled	Gurmat Sangeet	en_US
dc.subject.pquncontrolled	Memory	en_US
dc.subject.pquncontrolled	Music	en_US
dc.subject.pquncontrolled	Shabad kirtan	en_US
dc.subject.pquncontrolled	Sikhism	en_US
dc.title	Sikh Sabad Kirtan as a Musical Construction of Memory	en_US
dc.type	Dissertation	en_US