Voice in the Drum

Richard K. Wolf is Professor of Music and South Asian Studies at Harvard University and editor of Theorizing the Local: Music, Practice, and Experience in South Asia and Beyond.

"As can be expected from Richard K. Wolf, The Voice in the Drum is an erudite and masterful contribution to South Asian ethnomusicology. But it is more: a deep contribution to experimental writing, full of nuanced engagement with why the poetics and politics of representation is critical to contemporary music ethnography."--Steven Feld, Distinguished Professor of Anthropology and Music, University of New Mexico "Emerging afresh from numerous fields of cultural anthropology, including ethnology, ethnomusicology, humanistic anthropology, linguistics, the anthropology of religion, visual anthropology, and others, The Voice in the Drum contributes new insights and creates innovative methodologies much needed in today's growing anthropological and empathic understandings of the performance of emotion in South Asian Islam."--American Anthropologist "The Voice in the Drum, by Richard Wolf, Professor of Music and South Asian Studies at Harvard, is a completely unique development in ethnomusicology. By skillfully drawing out his research interests through the character of Muharram Ali, Wolf manages to draw the reader into a historical drama of idealism and naivete falling apart." --Leonardo Reviews "Innovative and richly detailed." --American Ethnologist "No one else has conducted such multi-local research on traditions like this, and he has done a masterful job of relating these otherwise disparate traditions by highlighting their affinities, especially in terms of the ways in which their performers conceive of the drums as speaking in one manner or another. The result is a remarkable and unique scholarly opus."--Peter Manuel, author of East Indian Music in the West Indies: Tan-singing, Chutney, and the Making of Indo-Caribbean Culture