Saving ancient sounds in a digital era
Anthropologist dedicated to world music
Regula Burckhardt Qureshi sits cross-legged on the floor outside her University of Alberta office: not the posture you might expect of a 73-yearold academic, but for Qureshi, a normal pose.
For almost 50 years, the Swiss-born musician and anthropologist has dedicated herself to the study, preservation, and performance of the music of northern India, and to exploring global connections between music and social culture.
Flanking her is a global collection of folk instruments — thumb pianos, drums, lutes, round clay flutes, a South American guitar made from an armadillo, coarse fur intact.
Qureshi holds her antique sarangi. Larger than a violin, smaller than a cello, the sarangi is a stringed instrument played with a bow. Shaped from the trunk of a single Indian rosewood tree, it features a goatskin drum and 37 goatgut strings. For Qureshi, the reality of hand-crafted instruments is vital.
“Everything is moving more and more toward representation,” she says. “The instrument isn’t there at all, only sound on the Internet. It’s all digital. The substance is all gone. We only know that at one point in the food chain of music, there was somebody making a sound with their hands.”
This month, the international Society for Ethnomusicology gave Qureshi a special award, lauding her as Canada’s most illustrious ethnomusicologist, praising her ability to “integrate the sonic and the social.”
Her journey — from Swiss schoolgirl to the founder of the U of A’s Canadian Centre for Ethnomusicology — was serendipitous. Born in Basel in 1939, she grew up in a prosperous family, playing the piano, absorbing Bach and Mozart and Schubert. She switched instruments at 14, when her grandfather, an accomplished amateur musician, gave her a cello he could no longer play because his arthritis.
In 1958, the year she finished high school, her father accepted a diplomatic posting in Washington, D.C. She came with him to America to study cello at Philadelphia’s Curtis Institute under the tutelage of the great Leonard Rose, who also taught Yo Yo Ma.
“My dad wanted me to be a music scholar. I wanted music! I didn’t want dry academics.”
Yet the conversation of music students bored her. She wanted to discuss not only music, but literature, philosophy, politics. Her roommate, who was dating a law student from the University of Pennsylvania, invited her on a double date with her boyfriend’s roommate, Saleem Qureshi, a PhD student in political science.
“A blind date? A double date? These were things that didn’t exist in Europe. The double date was a fiasco. They had decided to go to the Ice Capades. That was definitely not my thing. I thought it was vulgar. Saleem wasn’t impressed — and he certainly wasn’t impressed with me.”
A second meeting, over lunch in New York, changed things. “We started talking, and we’ve never stopped.”
They married in 1959 and moved to Edmonton in 1963. He joined the political science faculty; she, the Edmonton Symphony Orchestra. In 1965, they first travelled to Lucknow, India. When she asked about Indian music, she was shown the sitar and veena, but they were plucked, guitar-like. Not her thing.
“Then I saw a man, with matted hair, all dishevelled. He sat on the floor, playing this thing with a bow, and I said, ‘I’ll play that.’ ”
It was the sarangi, traditionally played to accompany the singing of Indian geishas, known as tawaifs, high- class courtesans who offered wealthy men conversation, music, dance, and sometimes more. Instead of being daunted by the instrument’s reputation, Qureshi was intrigued. It took time to adapt to Indian musical idioms. She was used to making her cello sound crisp and clean. But the sarangi has a languorous sound, where the player slides and smears the note.
“I asked my teacher, ‘Why do you want to do that?’ He looked at me with these piercing eyes, and said, ‘Because it’s beautiful!’ Well, it wasn’t to me.”
She persevered, become the first woman to master an instrument traditionally played only by men. “When I first learned the sarangi, I sounded really horrible. My mother said, ‘It’s terrible, like someone is strangling a cat.’ I was really bad. But I was driven.”
The British had already tried to stamp out the tawaifs and their salons — and the new Indian government, keen to modernize, was finishing the job.
Qureshi wanted to capture the stories and skill of the great sarangi masters and tawaif singers, to explore the relationship between social history and music. She went back to school, earning a PhD in anthropology.
Then she convinced the U of A to appoint her its first professor of ethnomusicology. Multicultural Edmonton, she says, is a fabulous place for world music. The Canadian Centre of Ethnomusicology, which she founded in 1992, and where she still serves as director, also benefits from partnership with folkwaysAlive! and the Smithsonian Center for Folklife and Cultural Heritage, a legacy of the university’s relationship with pioneer ethnomusicologist Moses Asch and his son Michael, one of Qureshi’s former professors.
Ethnomusicologists must always be sensitive not to appropriate or misrepresent the traditions they study. Qureshi strives, instead, to give voice to let people speak and play for themselves, thereby introducing their music to new audiences. “A lot of ethnomusicology now is about listening, rather than talking.”
And today, digital technology is giving new life to old instruments and ancient musics, allowing people around the world to download these sounds for the first time, allowing musicians to connect directly with new audiences.
“It’s globalization,” she says, savouring the Internet irony. “The global marketplace has made this possible.”