Ancient Indian Music Books Available Online

Books on Carnatic Music and those for / by / on musicians.
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vasanthakokilam
Posts: 10956
Joined: 03 Feb 2010, 00:01

Ancient Indian Music Books Available Online

Post by vasanthakokilam »

There are quite a few online copies ancient indian music books and commentary on those books. With google's attempt to digitize the entire world of books, a lot of these books are found at books.google.com. Archive.org also has a good selection of these books.

Reading or even glancing at some of the books and reading about ragas give us a sense of the ancientness of the very things that are in day to day use. And also how dynamic these ragas have been and their evolution which gives us some context in our own contemplation and interpretation of what is going on today or what has happened in the last century.

This thread is to collect some important ancient works on Indian music ( and the commentary on them by ancient and modern authors ). Quite a few of the books I see in Google Books is by Emmie Te Nijenhuis .That is quite a treasure. It will be good to find works done by other authors as well.

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Let us start with the much referred to work and one of the earliest ones:

'Dattilam'
https://ia600702.us.archive.org/8/items ... ttilam.pdf ( devanagari original )

https://books.google.com/books?id=WecUA ... am&f=false

(transliteration and translation: Dattilam: A Compendium of Ancient Indian Music, edited by Emmie te Nijenhuis )

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The Rāgas of Somanātha: Musical exemples. Part 2
By Emmie te Nijenhuis

https://books.google.com/books?id=E503A ... ar&f=false

(excerpts of some pages)
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Please add to this thread as you come across links to such books and commentaries

Lakshman
Posts: 14019
Joined: 10 Feb 2010, 18:52

Re: Ancient Indian Music Books Available Online

Post by Lakshman »

The digital books available on Google are not complete. Here is a site from where you can download books in many languages. Just click on Books.
http://musicresearchlibrary.net/omeka/

Lakshman
Posts: 14019
Joined: 10 Feb 2010, 18:52

Re: Ancient Indian Music Books Available Online

Post by Lakshman »


vasanthakokilam
Posts: 10956
Joined: 03 Feb 2010, 00:01

Re: Ancient Indian Music Books Available Online

Post by vasanthakokilam »

Thanks Lakshman. There are a lot of great books there.

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