belong, there is a separate music department in the charge of Professor
P.Sambamurti, to whom more than to anybody else, music at the
educational level owes its expansion in South India today; this depart-
ment conducts a two-year diploma course in vocal, violin and vina.
Recently at the Patna University a more expanded and graded course
in music has been started and one of our leading musicologists, Sri
Robindra Lo1 Roy, is in charge there.
There is provision for postgraduate research work in music in the
Madras University, and year after year scholarships are offered to
music graduates to pursue further the study of a chosen subject in the
theory, art, or history of music and present a thesis for the master of
literature degree in music; the department has even brought forth a
doctor of literature in music. Similar facilities for higher musical studies
are not available at any other Indian university. Recently the Benares
Hindu University opened a music college under the principalship of
a leading North Indian vocalist, but the research work to the credit
of this college is wholly the work, partly a labour of love, of Mr. Alain
Danielou. Musical research represents the high watermark of the study
of music in colleges and universities ; unfortunately, however, the re-
sults so far achieved have not shown high worth; the same set themes
are tackled with the angle on the title changed every time; obvious
aspects are dealt with at length; there is no sense of the problems either
on the technical or the historical side. The contributions to higher
musical research continue to come more from amateur scholars and
the sum total of the annual output of this research is so limited that,
I, conducting the only music research journal in all India or that part
of Asia, am not able to collect sufficient material for a consolidated
annual issue of that journal. Let me take only one department of this
music research, the most basic one, namely the collection, collation,
edition and interpretation of the vast number of Sanskrit treatises that
were written on Indian music; this is a work in which, today among
Indians, there is none barring my humble self and among non-Indians,
none barring Alain Danielou, who is seriously interested. This work
takes the larger aspect of the more general question of the Sanskrit
manuscripts in India, Europe and America, which, by the way, has
primarily occasioned my present visit to Europe. Here again the work
is to be so comprehensively planned and so systematically carried out
that only large-scale assistance of the State and Unesco can achieve
the needed result.
There are no music publishers as such in our country; authors of
works on music have either to venture on their own responsibility or
singke
(singke)
#1