Thank you for the fascinating anecdotes and your lively narration, warts-and-all ! Carrying the mridangam on the head for 20 blocks in NYC must have been trying and tiring !
I don't have anything remotely interesting to narrate... but I am very familiar with the career and work of one of the people you mention -- Harold Powers -- as regards Indian classical music and Carnatic music in particular. Also in general with the course of Musicology/Ethnomusicology in the US while I was at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor.
Bob Brown (Wesleyan/Berkeley/San Diego), Robert Garfias (Seattle/Irvine), William Malm (Ann Arbor) got started at UCLA under the guidance of Mantle Hood who introduced the concept of "bi-musicality" similar to "bi/multi-lingualism", and established the first Ethnomusicology department in a US university. Seemingly, the special emphasis on not just the study but also authentic performance of non-Western musical traditions in US universities began with Prof.Hood's espousal of bi-musicality. The specific emphasis on gamelan was because he himself studied under the Dutch musicologist Jaap Kunst (the Dutch --> Batavia connection !!! ) -- witness the numerous gamelan ensembles in music departments in the US.
One of Bob Brown's signal contribution was to break free of this "ethnomusicology" moniker and simply refer to it as "World Music". Introducing it at Wesleyan must have taken immense dedication and perseverance, since US universities are more resistant to curriculum change and more bureaucratic in process than even South Block/North Block in Delhi.
Prof.T.Viswanathan arrived in UCLA in 1958 on a Fulbright fellowship and renewed his association with Bob Brown and met others like Prof.Malm who he talked about during his visits to Ann Arbor. He also mentioned playing on a gamelan ensemble himself. By the way, one of his students at Wesleyan Joseph Getter has written a thesis about Carnatic music history in the US entitled "Saraswati's journey". I remember him referring to a Carnatic musician of sorts in the LA area in still earlier times.
The 1950s were indeed a heady time, it seems -- with the Western seaboard innovating with new departments than starchier East coast departments. For example, Swami Agehananda Bharati, showed up around 55/56 in UW, Seattle, reinventing himself as a "kultur-kreis" scholar/anthropologist and seemed to have had a fun time studying/teaching all kinds of stuff before he landed up at Syracuse in the East -- he refers to the city as "just to the right of Louis XIV"
Reverting back to Harold Powers -- he was without a doubt the most perceptive and distinctive scholar of Carnatic music outside South Indian circles from a serious academic/musicological viewpoint -- and yes, that indeed includes North India too which is such a shame. A classic in this regard is his entry on Indian music and on the subject of Mode in the New Grove Dictionary of music. His PhD thesis "The Background of the South Indian Raga System" is a seminal work and also several articles in journals like Asian Music are very thought provoking on the subject of Raga nomenclature, steering clear of just bland/dry taxonomies which have had a solid run in S.Indian musicology !
Powers' trajectory was different: he came to India to study Carnatic music in 1952 itself and left in 1954. He studied under various people including Musiri Subramania Iyer (a few varnams), Prof.Sambamurti, P.Balakrishnan, CSIyer and his daughter Smt.Vidya Shankar, V.Ranganayaki etc and interacted with GNB, Veena Doraiswami Iyengar etc.
But most importantly and intensively under Rangaramanuja Iyengar for close to a year, and from whose KritiManiMalai he learnt several pieces ! He was very close to RRI and his daughter Smt.Padma Varadan and in my interactions with him and Padma mami, I learnt the extent to which he imbibed the Carnatic music tradition.
Needless to say, he gave performances in India during the course and towards the end of his studies -- here's a photo of him at Tiruvayyaru in Jan 1953 which was referred to and reported in a Jan 1956 article in the Swadesamitran.
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