Although the large sarangi used in contemporary classical music evolved only recently-around the 1850’s-hardly anything is known about the craftsmen...
JoinedApril 29, 2023
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Joep Bor is a, botanist, musicologist, and a specialist of Hindustani music. In 1990 he founded the World Music department at Rotterdam Conservatory (now called Codarts Rotterdam) and seven years later the Jazz, Pop & World Music department which he chaired until 2001. After this he was appointed director of research at Codarts and professor at Leiden University. In addition to about one hundred articles and book chapters on a wide range of topics, and entries in the leading music encyclopedias, Bor has written and co-edited seven books and six booklets. His monograph The Voice of the Sarangi was published by the National Centre for the Performing Arts in Bombay in 1987, and The Raga Guide (with four CDs) by Nimbus Records in 1999. It has received wide acclaim, three awards, and was reprinted several times. In 2003 Bor co-curated the exhibition Gloire des princes, louanges de dieux at the Paris Musée de la Musique, and five years later he was artistic advisor of the Amsterdam Concertgebouw for the Amsterdam India Festival. More recently, he was chief editor of Hindustani Music: Thirteenth to Twentieth Centuries, a 736-page book published by Manohar, New Delhi. Born in Amsterdam, Joep Bor grew up in a well-known family of violinists. He has lived more than seven years in India, carrying out botanical as well as musicological research. In 1968 he began studying sarangi with Pandit Ram Narayan. He had several other sarangi teachers, including Ustad Abdul Majid Khan (Bombay) and Pandit Hanuman Prasad Misra (Varanasi). But his main guru was the vocalist Pandit Dilip Chandra Vedi (New Delhi). Bor has a Masters of Science in Botany and a PhD in South Asian studies. At present he is completing a book called Ammani, the Celebrated Dancing Girl, 1838-1839.
In the prestigious New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, the sarangi is described as follows: “A bowed chordophone occurring...
