Reclaiming the mongrel: a practice based exploration of Irish and Indian musical sympathies

This research is an interdisciplinary investigation of the relationship between Irish Traditional and North Indian Classical music. It is an attempt to explore, in both a rigorous academic manner and through professional level musical composition and performance, sympathies and divergences in Indo-Irish hybrid music making. Grounded in ethnomusicological theory (Rice, 1994; Aubert, 2007), this research also utilises an arts practice approach, theorizing complex musical relationships through practice, analysis and the production of new hybrid musical works. This methodology draws upon the arts practice research concept of ‘critical meta-practice’ (Melrose, 2002) to employ musical skill sets to generate data and pursue research questions. This project also acts as a case study addressing the instability of the post-modern condition resulting from globalisation and interprets hybridization as one of its cultural consequences. This process has been provocatively characterized as cultural ‘mongrelisation’ (Stross, 1999). I understand mongrelisation within the frame of what cultural theorist Homi K. Bhabha has called the ‘Third Space’ (1994) which relates to the in-between state of individuals with multiple cultural identities. This ‘Third Space’ is an important area for the negotiation, construction and ‘enunciation’ (Bhabha, 1994) of cultural ideology. I wish to extend this concept in exploring the creative possibilities of Irish-Indian hybridization as a hybrid cultural product and apply theoretical applications of ‘Third Space’ and ‘mongrelisation’ to better theorize hybrid music in general.