BN Goswamy
Among the British Library’s extraordinary collection of materials relating to the history of Indian music in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries lie dozens of European accounts of the nautch intimate musical parties at which troupes of high-status North Indian courtesans would sing, dance, recite poetry, and match wits with the assembled company, often to mark special occasions. Note on a performance at the British Library (2018)
A nautch troupe. From the Skinner album in the British Library, London.
Having read, and sometimes written on, many accounts of Europeans, including Englishmen, who came and lived in India in the 18th century, I was often struck by how little interest, serious interest I mean, they took in Indian music. This, despite some visual evidence that has survived showing men like the British General, Sir David Ochterlony, and the Swiss engineer/adventurer, Antoine Polier, seated more or less Indian fashion on the floor, watching dancin
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Simultaneously, Beethoven also started taking an interest in non-European music. The poet Franz Grillparzer reports that at a soirée in which the composer Georg Joseph Vogler was improvising upon a tune that he had purportedly collected from Africa during his voyage in the late 1790s, Beethoven listened to him carefully, even as others drifted away after a while. Later, Beethoven made a rare excursion into non-European musical exoticism in the Dance of the Dervishes from his music to the play, The Ruins of Athens (1811). The French composer Camille Saint-Saëns, who regularly spent long periods in North Africa, and took inspiration from some of its music, thought that Beethoven could not have composed the dance without having any authentic example in front of him.