About Indian Weddings and Silent Night

It's the season of weddings in India. We are witnessing a glittering, rich version from the rooftop terrace of our hotel. Some relative of the Maharaja of Udaipur is getting married. Musical sounds are floating up to us from where the guests are gathering to receive the bridegroom. Gradually distant band sounds start mingling with the music below: drums, trumpets and euphoniums are approaching from our left, getting louder and at times covering up the other music.

We can see the band now, a whole procession of instruments, lights and people accompanying the bridegroom who is arriving on a magnificently decorated elephant. A majestic scene, but the music sounds just as raunchy as at any ordinary Indian wedding. On the street below another small procession of uniformed musicians enters the already dense musical soundscape with its own strangely incoherent wedding band sound and disappears again around the next corner.

Another wedding procession announces itself with explosions from firecrackers, two glittering bridegrooms on horseback and huge musical clamour. This time there is no live band. Instead one of those loudspeaker-carts is pushed through the streets and blasts out similarly raunchy music with max reverb, in tandem with the live band still playing at the other wedding. I can't help but think of Charles Ives' music as I hear all this.

Cars, scooters, auto rickshaws are not deterred and squeeze past the procession, honking their way through the music-filled street. In the middle of all this, as if there was still room for more sounds, we suddenly hear electronic fragments of Silent Night. The source: a small passenger car. Every time the driver puts the car in reverse gear, this electronic signal is turned on, continuing the tune of Silent Night wherever it had stopped the last time he drove backwards. As the driver maneuvers the car back and forth, back and forth in a small alleyway, we are ear witnesses for several minutes to Silent Night being ripped into small, sonic shreds.

I imagine the reader who has just heard the words Indian Wedding and Silent Night - sound words threatening to tear us into cultural fragments, our ears divided by acoustic contradictions, sonic samples from around the world disturbing our cushioned and comfortable North American ears.