Institutional Music Education: Northern Area

For many centuries, the master-disciple relationship has been the traditional form of training of classical musicians in the Indian subcontinent. This apprentice system - which continues today - has ensured the primarily oral transmission of musical knowledge through many generations of teachers and students (see 'The Classical Master-Disciple Tradition'). However, since the end of the nineteenth century, various government institutions such as schools and universities have grappled with ways of adapting traditional teaching ethods to institutional structures and systems. Oral processes of teaching and master-disciple relationships do not automatically lend themselves to classrooms, blackboards, and textbooks, but the adaptation of traditional teaching to the institutional ssetting has nevertheless become widespread. In North India, no one system of music education is dominant through the whole geographical region; educators and performers employ a variety of strategies and approaches in educating their music students. Most musicians regard the idealized traditional teaching system, featuring the master-disciple relationship, as the basic model from which music educators develop their teaching methods. Several key pre-independence figures were in fact influential in molding traditional pedagogy to the institutional setting. Their efforts coincided with general trends of modernization and Westernization that permeated the subcontinent. As in other learned and scholarly disciplines, India not surprisingly adopted Western models of mass education for the field of music. No less influential in this process of institutionalization was the increased publication throughout the early twentieth century of books on the theory and practice of music in languages other than Sanskrit.