About this talk

Please join us to celebrate Professor Katherine Schofield in this Inaugural Professorial Lecture: If there is a heaven on earth: life, death, and the spaces between in South Asian music. The ghazal is a short, lyrical genre of poetry that has been widely embraced from Syria to Sumatra as a privileged form of emotional, artistic, and devotional expression. It originated in Arabic but made its main home further east in the Persianate world — in Iran, Central Asia, and the Indian subcontinent. With its lilting metres and musical rhymes, the ghazal lends itself irresistibly to being set to melody, and has long enjoyed a second life throughout India and Pakistan as a major song form set in the classical ragas. Moving backwards and forwards between the Mughal empire (1526–1858) and contemporary examples from India and Pakistan, in this lecture I will address the live musical performance of Persian and Urdu ghazals in two different, but ultimately linked, spaces: the secular mehfil — the intimate gathering for listening to elite music and poetry — and the majlis-i samā' ("assembly for spiritual listening") at the Sufi shrine. Building on work I published twenty years ago on the occupational liminality of professional musicians, I will argue that in both the mehfil and the majlis, music acts to create a liminal space-time, or barzakh, in which listeners believe the isthmus between heaven and earth, the dead and the living, momentarily becomes thin, creating a highly emotionally charged experience. Professor Schofield will be introduced by the Executive Dean for the Faculty of Arts & Humanities: Abigail Williams. The lecture will be followed by a drinks and nibbles reception.

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