Children who grow up in oral musical contexts such as the families of hereditary musical specialists commonly learn the body-language of music before they learn music itself. Throughout infancy and childhood they absorb the mannerisms of performance practice and the physical and social graces befitting of musicians. Learning music is accomplished by osmosis and imitation, largely without conscious intent. Children develop an unselfconscious musical confidence born of inherited or deeply-nurtured authority. Very little has been written about the processes of childhood music acquisition in the oral traditions of non-European cultures. There is a pressing need to study these processes before they are overwhelmed by the institutionalisation of music-teaching and globalisation.\n\nThis project will document and analyse oral music acquisition and transmission, conducting a detailed exploration of the processes by which children in diverse cultures become musicians, beginning with passive exposure in infancy and culminating in adolescent participation in public performance. We will consider our findings in the context of the belief, widely-held in such cultures, that these learning processes are intrinsic to the strength and depth of these highly-specialised traditions, which in all cases are central expressions of regional/national identity.\n\nWe are a team of five ethnomusicologists, each of whom specialises in particular geographic areas and ethnic groups. Being accomplished performers of musics from these areas will greatly facilitate our fieldwork. Each of us also has qualifications and experience in other relevant disciplines including music education, cognitive psychology, psychotherapy, film-making, popular music studies, music production, and broadcasting-perspectives which will contribute to the comprehensiveness of our study. \n\nWe will study musical childhoods amongst: Mande jeli (griot) musicians of Mali and Senegal; Langa and Manganiyar folk musicians of Rajasthan; hereditary accompanists in the art music tradition of North India; ashiq bards and classical mugam musicians of Azerbaijan; kharabatian musicians of Afghanistan; rumba musicians of Western Cuba; and the música llanera harp tradition of Venezuela, an oral tradition which both contrasts with and feeds into the more formal pedagogy of Venezuela's world-famous youth orchestras. We will observe and film the same children 'growing into music' over two years, making three fieldwork trips to each country.\n\nThese cultures have been chosen because they all have strong, relatively intact, oral traditions. They present fascinating differences with regard to the centrality of hereditary transmission, their positions on the continuum between art and folk music, the relative proportions of active transmission and passive acquisition, the balance between memorisation and improvisation, and the degree of mediation by musical literacy, institutionalisation, and globalisation.\n\nWe will produce:\n\n1. a collection of essays for the SOAS Musicology Series examining each musical culture in detail and investigating their commonalities.\n \n2. a series of five educational DVDs\n\n3. a film for television (with the collaboration of an award-winning documentary film-maker)\n \n4. a programme for BBC Radio 3's World Routes. \n\nWorkshops for schoolchildren, video-based talks and film-screenings will be hosted by the Asian Music Circuit and the October Gallery, and by institutions in our research countries, promoting awareness of these threatened oral traditions.\n\nOur work will benefit both academics and the wider public. It will address a crucial gap in the ethnomusicological literature and be of interest to scholars in the fields of music cognition and pedagogy, developmental studies, and anthropology. It will appeal to those with interests in world music, world culture, and the education of children, and will be of particular relevance to diasporic communities in the UK.

In partnership with the Asian Music Circuit (AMC), my AHRC Fellowship in the Creative & Performing Arts will develop a 5-year series of concerts in which some of South Asia's greatest musicians collaborate with their peers from Western contemporary art-music. AMC is the UK's leading promoter of Asian music; Viram Jasani, its CEO, is the UK's most experienced Hindustani musician & a respected colleague & friend to many of India's greatest musicians. I have learnt Hindustani sitar for 33 years & Western music all my life (born 1956). Germany's foremost new-music ensemble, Ensemble Modern, has performed my compositions, including in their 'Rasalila' 2006 project with leading Indian composer-performers (La Biennale di Venezia; ISCM World New Music Festival, Stuttgart; Frankfurt Book Fair 'Today's India'). I was consultant to 'Rasalila' 2003 & to Attenborough's Gandhi, 1982. My ethnomusicology PhD is on Thailand's art-music (SOAS 1993). The combined expertise of Jasani & myself, together with the structures & peer-review scrutiny of my AHRC Fellowship, will enable us to create situations in which world-leading Western & South-Asian musicians can collaborate in ways that were previously not possible. The resulting music will be of interest to major concert venues & festivals across Europe, South Asia, & beyond.\n\nThe two pilot projects are:\n1) Experiments with alaap improvisation & intelligent computer systems: with dhrupad singers Uday Bhawalkar & Amelia Cuni (www.udaybhawalkar.org; www.ameliacuni.de). Recent developments in artificial intelligence for music, particularly machine listening, unsupervised machine learning & computer models of creative practice, offer potential for an original & challenging engagement between technology & human performance. As 4 co-composers, we will work with Dr Michael Young, director of Goldsmiths Electronic Music Studios Research Group, which leads a major international initiative in this field (www.livealgorithms.org).\n2) Intercultural co-composition: Silkstone with Rajan & Sajan Mishra, two of India's greatest khyal singers. Neither I, nor Jasani, has yet heard an Indian-Western collaboration that - from our two contrasting perspectives - even approaches the power & fluency of such contemporary Indian music. Ensemble Modern's Rasalila (2001-2006+) was a big step; this project will be another if it can sustain the energy of Rajan Mishra's initial creative ideas during our discussions at AMC Summer School 2007.\n\nAll intercultural projects try to optimise synergies; this one develop new methodologies for doing so, drawing upon some well-tested principles of 'creative practice as research' and Social Anthropology. This methodology is based upon a 3-phase reflexive cycle: creation; critical feedback; then, reformulation of creative objectives/methods for the next creative phase. This 3-phase cycle revolves around 3 broad 'research questions', each with various ramifications. These pilot projects address three of these more specific questions (see 'Objectives'), so as to contribute to the larger endeavour of my Fellowship - Intercultural Composition: Arranging Marriages Between Western & South Asian Art Music. These pilots also:\na) Test whether musicians share compatible expectations & motivations suited to 'arranged marriages', major collaborative touring projects;\nb) Put initial methodologies into practice so as to test & adjust them, using 'action research' methods of Social Anthropology. As researcher, I am involved in the action of projects as co-composer & co-director, constantly adapting methodologies according to creative needs & discoveries.