What Is Music? Prof. Dr. Paolo Pacciolla Brings a GlobalPerspective on Sound, Humanity and Music to The Music School Bangalore
4 June 2026
26th September 2024 | The Music School Bangalore, Bangalore
What is music?
It seems like the simplest question a musician could be asked. And yet it is also, in many ways, the most profound, a question that philosophers, scientists, anthropologists, and artists have been wrestling with for thousands of years, across every culture and civilisation on earth, without ever arriving at a single, definitive answer.
On 26th September 2024, The Music School Bangalore (TMSB) invited one of the most uniquely qualified people in Bangalore to explore that question with its students, Prof. Dr. Paolo Pacciolla, an ethnomusicologist with a PhD from Durham University, UK, and a Diploma of Pianoforte.
The workshop, titled What Is Music?
Multiple Perspectives on Humanity's Organised Sounds, was unlike anything TMSB's students had experienced before. Not a masterclass in technique. Not a session on production or composition. But a deep, searching, intellectually rigorous exploration of music itself, what it is, what it does to human beings, and why every culture in the history of humanity has felt compelled to create it.
About Prof. Dr. Paolo Pacciolla
Prof. Dr. Paolo Pacciolla is an ethnomusicologist and musician whose research spans ethnomusicology, organology, iconography of music, history and archaeology of music and musical instruments, and religious studies. He is particularly interested in the ritual functions of music, musical instruments and dance, and in the relationship of music and images in India. His main ethnographic focus is on music in India, where he has carried out extensive field research on the language and ritual functions of drums and drumming. What makes Prof. Pacciolla a truly extraordinary figure in the world of music scholarship is the breadth of his practice. He is not only an academic, he is a working musician whose improvisational style spans instruments such as the piano, frame drums, Iranian daire and tombak, Indian pakhāvaj, and African musical bows. He also designs unique instruments and explores sound through unconventional objects.
He has authored two monographs on Indian musical thought and co-directed a research documentary on Indian music and ritual, bringing scholarly rigour and artistic sensitivity to every dimension of his work. His presence at Christ University has made him one of the most respected voices in Bangalore's academic music community, and his willingness to bring that perspective to TMSB's students was an exceptional opportunity.
The Workshop; Multiple Perspectives on Humanity's Organised Sounds
The title of the workshop was itself a provocation: What Is Music? Multiple Perspectives on Humanity's Organised Sounds. That framing, music as "humanity's organised sounds" , immediately opens the question beyond the Western classical tradition, beyond contemporary music, beyond any single genre or culture. It asks students to consider music not as a fixed thing with a settled definition, but as a human phenomenon that has taken radically different forms across time, culture, geography, and purpose. Prof. Pacciolla guided TMSB's students through exactly that breadth, drawing on his decades of ethnomusicological research to illuminate how different cultures have understood, created, and used music throughout human history.
What does music mean to a ritual community in Kerala?
How do West African musical traditions understand the relationship between rhythm, the body, and the spirit?
How does the Western classical tradition define music differently from the Indian classical tradition?
What happens when those definitions encounter each other, and what new musical possibilities emerge from that encounter?
These were the kinds of questions that filled the room at TMSB on 26th September 2024, and they were questions that Prof. Pacciolla was uniquely positioned to answer, having spent his career moving between musical traditions, research fields, and continents in search of a deeper understanding of what music fundamentally is.
Why This Workshop Mattered for TMSB Students
For students at a contemporary music institution focused on performance, production, composition, and audio engineering, a workshop on the philosophy and anthropology of music might seem unexpected. But it was precisely the kind of intellectual broadening that TMSB's approach to music education is built around.
The best musicians in the world are not simply technically accomplished. They are thinkers. They understand the tradition they are working within, and the traditions they are drawing from, consciously or not, every time they pick up an instrument or sit behind a console. They understand why music moves people, what it does to the human nervous system, how it functions as a form of communication that transcends language. Prof. Pacciolla's workshop gave TMSB's students a framework for thinking about music at that level of depth, a perspective that will inform their practice, their compositions, and their understanding of what they are doing every time they make music, for the rest of their careers.
A Conversation That Left Its Mark
Workshops of this kind, intellectually challenging, culturally expansive, and rooted in genuine scholarly expertise, are rare in contemporary music education. Most institutions focus, understandably, on the how of music. Prof. Pacciolla's workshop asked the why and the what. For the students who participated, it was an afternoon that opened doors in their thinking that may never fully close, a reminder that music is not just a craft or a career, but one of the most fundamental and mysterious expressions of what it means to be human. That is not a question with an easy answer. But it is a question worth spending a lifetime exploring. And for one afternoon in September 2024, The Music School Bangalore was the place where that exploration happened.
For more information about TMSB's programs and upcoming workshops,
visit www.themusicschoolbangalore.com or
call +91 7848828829