Folk Music in the Caste System of Nepal

Extract

Twelve years ago during the IFMC conference at Copenhagen, Arnold Bake gave an excellent paper on Nepalese folk music, which unfortunately appeared in the Journal of the IFMC only as a short summary. But even this brief summary shows the very complicated situation arising from the fact that in Nepal two communities, the Nevari and the Nepali, have lived together for two hundred years, each preserving more or less intact its own language and separate musical tradition as well as its own hierarchy of castes. These castes, because of their social separation, continue to keep pure their separate traditions. Hence, one cannot understand the different styles of Nepalese music in their cultural context without taking into account the caste system and its effect on the music.