Singing the Wind: Four Essays on Muttusvāmi Dīkṣitar

Muttusv"ami D$ık]sitar was one of the three canonical composers of Carnatic music at the end of the eighteenth century and the first three decades of the nineteenth. A devotee of the Tantric school of ®Sr$ıvidy"a, he composed over 400 astonishing and innovative kritis, most of them addressed to a god or goddess in the great Tamil temples. He liked to compose in sets of eight or more songs, meant to be heard as a whole. Singing the Wind, published in the 250th anniversary year of D$ık]sitar’s birth, offers close readings of or listenings to four select compositions, their cultural matrix, the verbal text that is sung, and the musical structures and patterns they contain. These essays offer a wide-angle cultural-historical perspective on D$ık]sitar’s massive corpus, as seen through the prism of the four remarkable compositions examined in this book.