Sonic Entanglements, Visual Records and the Gandhāran Nexus
Sonic Entanglements, Visual Records and the Gandhāran Nexus
Visual representations of music-making from ancient Gandhāra—a region in today’s north-western Pakistan and eastern Afghanistan—bear witness to the early dissemination of music instruments and iconographic practices, as part of the intellectual and artistic exchanges along Eurasian trade routes during the early centuries of the Common Era. At the intersection of cultural spheres—Buddhist, Hellenistic and Zoroastrian; Indian and Persian; Kuṣāṇa, Parthian and Indo-Scythian—Gandhāran musical culture offers one perfect, albeit challenging, example of a nexus of transcultural expression. The entangled organological and iconographical histories embedded in Gandhāran artefacts lend themselves to transcultural analysis, and to the understanding of pre-modern processes of musical globalisation, encounter, exchange and hybridisation or entanglement. Since the Gandhāran world partakes in the networks of the Silk Roads as both a ‘receiver’ and ‘transmitter’ of culture, it seems to display cultural cosmopolitanism par excellence: a nexus of both centripetal and centrifugal transcultural music-iconographical and organological negotiations.
Keywords: music iconography, organology, transcultural commerce, pre-modern Eurasia, musical routes
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