AMERICAN ANTHROPOLOGIST

VISUAL ANTHROPOLOGYFilm Review

Alapana: Four Views of Movement in Karnataka MusicLara Pearson, dir. 13 mins. Produced and distributed by Lara Pearson, 2011.

Matt Rahaim

University of Minnesota

In India, as elsewhere, music is typically construed as a mat-ter of sound. This has become a commonsense idea overthe last century, as urban elites have come to spend moretime with sound recordings than with people making music.Conventional Indian music notation deals in pitch sequences(even more so than the staff notation used in Europe and theMiddle East), obscuring the subtleties of melodic motion.But in practice, musicking always involves physical move-ment: angling the laryngeal cartilages, striking a gong, slidinga finger along a string.

Lara Pearson’s short, engrossing film foregrounds therole of movement in the performance of Karnataka music,the highly cultivated raga-based music of South India. She di-rects our attention to not only the obvious sound-generatingmechanics of fingers and strings but also the subtle, silent mo-tions of the hands, arms, and head that are precisely co-timedwith melodic action. In the course of improvising melody,just as in improvising speech, singers of Indian classical musicroutinely move their hands in elaborate ways, parallel to themovement of the voice. This gestural action can be quitemystifying to people accustomed to thinking of music as amere sonic product, and indeed, early concert reviews byIndian critics accustomed to phonographs were shocked byhow much their favorite singers moved in person (Weidman2003:464). But Alapana, the fruit of Pearson’s long musicalapprenticeship in raga music, presents this motion as per-fectly ordinary. Using a range of subtle visual effects andanimations, Pearson demonstrates in just 13 minutes whatis ordinarily obvious only to seasoned aficionados of liveperformance: movement is an integral part of musicking.

The “Four Views of Movement” divide the film into fourshort segments. The first, “Music as Shape,” begins with thedrone of an electronic tanpura and long shots of Srirangam,a major Vaisnava pilgrimage center in Tamil Nadu. It thencuts back and forth between spectrographs depicting thecomplex timbre of a violin and street scenes punctuated byautorickshaw horns and bicycle bells. As the violin beginsarticulating more complex melodic gestures, the sound ofthe street fades. Our attention instead turns to an interiorspace: T. K. V. Ramanujacharlu, a master musician, teach-ing a violin lesson. The spectrograph is likewise replaced

AMERICAN ANTHROPOLOGIST, Vol. 116, No. 2, pp. 431–432, ISSN 0002-7294, online ISSN 1548-1433. C© 2014 by the American Anthropological

Association. All rights reserved. DOI: 10.1111/aman.12104

by an animated melograph: a moving trace of pitch againsttime. The pitch trace is exceptionally legible, and its scalecalls to mind the curvaceous notation of Gregorian neumesand Japanese Shyomyo notation. This compelling curvaceousmotion effectively displaces the comfortable notes-and-scales analytic that novices often fall back on when hearingraga music.

The next section, “Music as Gesture,” shows usRamanujacharlu teaching a voice lesson to a young student.Here, we no longer explicitly see the melographic trace butinstead are led to notice the trajectories of his hand in space.This is achieved by a special visual effect: the frame closesaround the teacher’s right hand, the colors are inverted,and white trails articulate the trajectories of his gestural ac-tion. The teacher gently leads his student to apprehend themelodic phrases he is teaching her, and Pearson likewisegently shows us what to look for. She first shows us an un-processed shot of the lesson and then zooms in highlightingthe trajectory of the hands with the trailing effect beforereturning us to the medium shot. In the next section, “TheDance of the Hand,” we are shown a close-up of Ramanu-jacharlu’s left hand on the neck of his violin as he preparesfor a concert. After a minute or so, the screen splits, andour view is augmented by a ghostly inverted picture of thehand, showing plainly the complex actions of the hand, piv-oting and swinging gracefully, clearly involving much morethan the point of contact between the finger and the vio-lin. Again, Pearson returns us to an unprocessed mediumshot so that we can enjoy this new way of seeing. Then,we see Ramanujacharlu sitting in the train station, silentlygoing over notation of the pieces he is going to play whilemarking metric cycles with his hand. Finally, “The Bodyin Performance” shows Ramanujacharlu performing live onstage. Here, Pearson highlights the motions of his head ashe plays violin, which, like his hand gestures, are intimatelyco-timed with the audible melodic gestures he articulates.Again, we see that, yes, he has been doing that all along,even if we hadn’t noticed at first.

Pearson leads us to see all of this with no explicit com-mentary. This is likely what the accompanying materialsmean by its “sensuous rather than didactic narrative style.”The visual rhetoric of the film, marked by noisy, quotidianscenes of street life, might strengthen the sense that thisfilm is intended as detached ethnographic depiction, simply

432 American Anthropologist • Vol. 116, No. 2 • June 2014

FIGURE 1. The split screen shows both the sensuality of the actual hand and the schematic isolation of the movement. (Photo courtesy of Lara Pearson)

showing what is already the case. But reading Alapana asa work of realism would obscure the great analytic powerof this film. Pearson gently and persuasively disciplines theviewer to apperceive melody in ways that are no more com-monsense, or less sophisticated, than hearing a sequence ofdiscrete notes. But there is more than one way to learn fromthis film. In particular, there is an ambiguity between ki-nesic and visual ways of knowing melody. The melographsand visual effects, especially when projected on a screen,encourage us to “visualize” melody in two dimensions: tosee the motion of the hands or head as a specifically visualrepresentation of sound and to apprehend melodic actionas a detached observer might apprehend a graph depictingoil viscosity at various temperatures. It may, viewed in thisway, merely replace an understanding of music as soundwith an understanding of music as sound and light, as thoughsensation, rather than perception, were crucially at issue.But the film also invites a mode of apprehension in which theviewer reaches out with bodily sympathy to the performer(Merleau-Ponty 1964:33–34)—feeling the sliding of a vio-linist’s fingers along the neck of a violin or the movementof the hands in the air as though it were her own teachersitting in front of her. This intercorporeal sympathy is animportant part of face-to-face Indian music instruction, andPearson gives us ample opportunity to feel melodic motion

in this way. The lesson shots are filmed over the shoulderof an advanced student sitting a meter or so in front of theteacher. While this angle prevents us from observing thegestures of the student, it invites us to sing along as a stu-dent might, inhabiting the melodic and gestural world of theteacher.

Alapana is available for free online and rewards re-peated viewing.1 It could serve as an excellent brief intro-duction to Indian classical music in undergraduate surveysof South Asia. It could also fruitfully be shown alongsidereadings in nonverbal communication, embodied cognition,the transmission of gesture, musical practice, or anthropolo-gies of the body.

NOTE1. http://www.vimeo.com/78104757.

REFERENCES CITEDMerleau-Ponty, Maurice

1964 L’Œil et l’esprit [Eye and mind]. Paris: Gallimard.Weidman, Amanda

2003 Guru and Gramophone: Fantasies of Fidelity and ModernTechnologies of the Real. Public Culture 15(3):453–476.