Jayson Beaster-Jones is an Assistant Professor of Music in the Global Arts Studies Program at the University of California, Merced. His first book, Bollywood Sounds: The Cosmopolitan Mediations of Hindi Film Song (Oxford University Press), analyzes Indian films songs in their historical, social, commercial, and cinematic contexts. The book argues that film song composers, arrangers, and musicians have long deployed cosmopolitan production aesthetics that keep the genre relevant for the changing tastes of Indian audiences.

The music of Indian films is remarkably heterogeneous. From the first moments of the genre, music directors and the arrangers that work with them have incorporated instruments and stylistic features of manifold sources from inside and outside of India to create a distinctly cosmopolitan musical form that has had enduring popularity in India and abroad. Musical ideas and practices from many Indian traditions, including classical and semi-classical, regional folk, and devotional genres have been fused with sounds and practices from a diverse set of international genres, including flamenco, samba, jazz, rock, and electronic dance musics. Despite the diversity of source materials, however, many songs are readily identifiable as film songs, even to casual listeners, on the basis of their orchestration, vocal timbres of playback singers, sonic textures, and studio production practices. One general way to describe this “filmi” sound is in terms of what I call “stylistic mediation.” By stylistic mediation, I mean the production of a musical representation wherein material from one set of musical conventions is framed according to the values of different set of conventions, yet retains some aspects of its original content that points back to its previous usages. In this presentation, I will unpack this notion of stylistic mediation and trace the practice through seventy years of Hindi film songs.

Beaster-Jones’s current book project, entitled Music as Merchandise: Music Commodities, Markets, and Values in India, examines music retail stores as sites of cultural production in contemporary India, focusing upon the economic and social values that are produced as music is sold in retail contexts. He has also published in the journals Ethnomusicology, Popular Music, and South Asian Popular Culture in addition to contributing chapters to edited volumes.