The body as musical archive: Sustaining the embodied knowledge of the Lucknow-Shahjahanpur Gharana through translations between sarod, sitar and cello

The Lucknow-Shahjahanpur Gharana is a lineage of musicians who made important contributions to the instrumental form within the tradition of Hindustani music. Sarod player, Ustad Irfan Muhammad Khan is the last remaining hereditary musician of this lineage. This research contributes to sustaining the embodied musical knowledge of the gharana and challenges dominant narratives that have contributed to its marginalisation. The knowledge of the gharana is presented, as it is encountered and refined in the body, through addressing the question of what is retained and what changes as it is translated between the modes of sarod, sitar and cello playing. Instead of centring recordings, a body-centred approach to practice-led music research and archiving musical knowledge is presented. By challenging sound-centric definitions of music, a model is devised, which divides embodied musical knowledge into seven categories: sounding, kinetic, mechanical, temporal, social, spatial and linguistic. Learning the repertoire and performance style of the gharana on sitar and then translating it to the cello is the key process within the method, learning to inhabit. This process led to a new way of playing cello that draws from both sitar and sarod technique. Characteristics specific to the performance style and repertoire of the gharana are revealed, corroborating its importance to deeper understanding of the wider tradition of Hindustani music. The findings of this research reveal the benefits of drawing on somatic perspectives in music research. Exploring the entanglement between the historic threads of the tradition and the practice and positionality of the researcher have led to deeper insight and more refined practice. This research offers an alternative framework for music studies that is less sound-centric and reflects a wayfaring, rather than a culture-bound, view of the world.