Cool Stuff: Arabic and Indian Music

     This week's class has been focused on Arabic and Indian music. I have been interested in the cultural aspects of India such as religion, but I have never looked deeper into the music of India. I find it to be very interesting, and I quite enjoy the art of it. It is very intricate and extravagant. For this blog, I am going to ask three questions about India broadly, and two of these in specific will be asking about the music of India. I hope you all enjoy, and find this just as interesting as I do.


My first question: What genres of music is popular in India?

    When I first googled this, I don't really know why but I expected only a few results to pop up, but actually there are over 37 popular genres in India! After thinking about this for a minute though, this made sense because India is a country of 1.35 billion people (OR 17.7% of the entire world population)! Thats a lot of people! Which in return means a lot of diversity. So for this blog, I picked one of thirty seven popular genres to dig deeper into: Hindustani classical music. There is a youtube video below that can describe and explain the music much better than I ever could, so I will leave that where it lies BUT I can however explain why I chose this form of Indian music! I found the history and evolution of it very interesting and unique compared to other popular genres of music in India. 

Population based stats were found on.... WorldOMeter.

My second question is : What instruments are used to create Hindustani music?

        - Sitar                                  -Shehnai
     - Drone                               - Tabla 
          - Sarod                               - Tambura 
                                                                                 - Sarangi 
    The instrument I found most interesting of these are the tabla drums. I just love the diversity of sound that one single drum can make! I also enjoy watching the hand movements that the instrumentalists make in order to create different sounds for the music. 
    
This information was gathered from Britannica.

The last question I had is what is the homeless situation in India like? 

    Of the 1.35 billion people that reside in India, 1.8 million people are considered to be homeless. These people are displaced by the economic gap between the wealthy and the poor or less fortunate. Once someone in India becomes homeless it is incredibly hard to recover economically. Homelessness is a danger to anyone safety and wellbeing but especially the women and children that face these hardships. The indian government is continuously working on programs to pull more and more people out of these harsh situation. It is estimated that 44 people each day are freed from homelessness. 
This information was gathered from The Boregen Project.


Comments

  1. faith sidesNovember 8, 2020 at 11:55 AM

    This was a great blog Cameron! It had a lot of information in here that I had no idea about, but now I do because of you haha. I find it really tragic how there are so many homeless people out there, especially children but I do it is great how some people are actually willing to help them get out of that situation.

    ReplyDelete
  2. Grace MontgomeryNovember 9, 2020 at 12:15 PM

    Hey! This is such a great blog! I thought that your questions were very interesting. I loved that one of them had to deal with homelessness because that is not something that had even crossed my mind. It is insane the amount of individuals that are homeless in India, it is reliving to know that at least 44 a day are over coming homelessness however I wish that number could be a lot larger.

    ReplyDelete
  3. Sierra StilesNovember 9, 2020 at 6:06 PM

    This was a really informative blog! The video was amazing and I'm glad it was included as well as the list of instruments that are used in typical Hindustani music! Also, while the last paragraph was sad, it did end on a good note with 44 people a day escaping homelessness.

    ReplyDelete
  4. Gracie Crocker :)November 11, 2020 at 11:56 AM

    I like how you stated questions and then answered them. My favorite bit was about the instruments and how they were used! I did a little section in my blog about something like this too! Really good blog grace :)

    ReplyDelete
  5. EmorieNovember 11, 2020 at 2:37 PM

    I really liked how you looked up the popular genres, and then solely focused on one genre. The drums are definitely beautiful, and have so many unique tones and sounds to it. What really popped out to me was your last question. I have never thought about the homeless situation, and I am glad you brought light to the subject.

    ReplyDelete

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