Last Rites: Self-Representation and Counter-Canon Practices in Classical Music through Radhe Radhe

Abstract

To commemorate the centenary of the 1913 Paris premiere of The Rite of Spring, the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill organised The Rite of Spring at 100. As part of this, the Carolina Performing Arts (CPA) commissioned new pieces interpreting and responding to The Rite. Among these was Radhe Radhe: Rites of Holi, created by the Indian-American composer-scholar and pianist Vijay Iyer, performed by the International Contemporary Ensemble and accompanied by a film about Holi (the annual Hindu harvest festival) assembled by filmmaker Prashant Bhargava. Radhe Radhe eventually took the form of a performance document mediated between live music and film, as well as culturally divergent notions of ‘ritual’.This article will consider Bhargava’s film and Iyer’s score, along with documentation of live chamber performances of the piece and ask: how does ‘western’ classical music represent itself in the 21st century? In what ways is self-representation performed in an intercultural collaboration such as Radhe Radhe that destabilises the dominant whiteness of the classical music canon by reimagining its soundscape in reference to a canonical work such as The Rite? I propose that Radhe Radhe—and Iyer’s score in particular—echoes as a sonic postcolonial ur-text through its engagement with Holi. As an instance of the Deleuzian simulacrum, it represents a radical departure from the cultural politics of ‘everyday colonial racism’ (Levitz, 2017: 163) surrounding the 1913 Rite by employing a collaborative vocabulary that resists the hegemonic performance traditions of western classical music.