Nabokov, Nicolas [Nikolay]

Nagano, Kent (George)

(b Morro Bay, CA, 22 Nov 1951). American conductor. Born to Japanese-American parents, he received piano lessons from his mother; he also learnt the clarinet and the koto. He studied at Oxford, at the University of California, Santa Cruz (BA, 1974), with Grosvenor Cooper, at San Francisco State University (MM, 1976), where he studied conducting with Laszlo Varga and the piano with Goodwin Sammel, and at the University of Toronto (1977–9). During this time he also became répétiteur and assistant conductor for Caldwell's Opera Company of Boston and conducted chamber opera in San Francisco and ballet in Oakland. He was invited to become music director of the Berkeley SO in 1978, and thus began his long association with Messiaen. Over two decades he turned the Berkeley orchestra into a progressive force in northern California music-making. In December 1983 he was Ozawa's assistant for the première of Messiaen's only opera, Saint François d'Assise, in Paris. The next year he joined the faculty at the Tanglewood Music Center, made his début with the Boston SO, and became director of the Ojai Music Festival. He was the first winner (with Hugh Wolff) of the Affiliate Artist's Seaver Conducting Award and was appointed principal guest conductor for the Ensemble Intercontemporain (1986–9). He became music director of the Lyons Opéra in 1989, and was associate principal guest conductor of the LSO (1990–98) and music director of the Hallé Orchestra (1992–2000). In 2000 he took up the post of chief conductor of the Deutsches Sinfonieorchester.

Nagano excels at complex scores and has been praised for his technique, if not always for his warmth, especially in performances of Messiaen and Mahler. In Lyons he performed and recorded rare repertory, including Poulenc's Dialogues des Carmélites, Martinů's Les trois souhaits, Prokofiev's The Love for Three Oranges (which was named Gramophone magazine's Record of the Year in 1990) and the first recording of Strauss's Salomé with the original French text by Oscar Wilde. His exuberant and graceful movement on the podium is reminiscent of his mentor, Ozawa; and, like Ozawa, he conducts without a baton. He revived the status of the Hallé Orchestra as well, but his expensive programming, with its emphasis on contemporary works, led to empty seats in the new Bridgewater Hall and was blamed for the near-bankruptcy of the orchestra in 1998. In 2000 Nagano was replaced as the Hallé's musical director by Mark Elder.

JOSÉ BOWEN

Nagārā [nagārā, nagara, naqqāra, naghārā etc.].

South Asian names for Naqqāra; the Arabic spelling is retained only in Urdu. Often, but not always, played in pairs, kettledrums have been the leading instrument of military bands and of the ceremonial band naubat, naubatkhāna or naqqārakhāna of courts, shrines and temples in South Asia since the Middle Ages. They are also widespread in this area as folk and Ādivāsī instruments, to accompany dancing, hunting etc; both folk and court nagārā are closely associated with oboes and horns. In Nepal the nagārā, a large kettledrum with metal body, is found mainly in temples and princely palaces. Very large pairs are still to be seen at the ancient palaces of Kathmandu and Bhaktapur but they are now used only rarely. The Newari people of Nepal called the instrument jornagārā or dohranagārā.

Kettledrums probably reached India after the Arab conquest of Sind, in 712 ce, together with the other Arab military instruments, the oboe and trumpet. With the establishment of Muslim Turko-Afghan rule under the Delhi Sultanate from 1192, the name naqqāra was adopted in India, often in an Indo-Aryan form as nagārā, nagārā etc. While it continued to function as an important military drum throughout the Muslim period, the nagārā soon became important also as a leading instrument of the palace ceremonial band Naqqārakhāna, or naubat. The naqqāra/nagārā was played in pairs of a treble and bass drum. Although the term may in South Asia be generic for such paired kettledrums, it is clear that in the late medieval and early Mughal periods, as indicated by the Ā’īn-i-ākbarī, it denoted higher-pitched pairs of such drums, played alongside lower-pitched or tenor pairs known as kuvargah or damāmā, and with the large, single, bass kettledrums depicted in Mughal painting. In these sources one leading drum-pair is often depicted in the centre of the band, frequently placed on a richly embroidered cushion.

In the late Mughal and early modern periods the nagārā may be seen depicted in other court music scenes also, accompanying female dancers. The nagārā survives in modern times in a few, much reduced naubat bands found mainly at Muslim shrines (dargāh) such as those at Ajmer in Rajasthan and Mundra in Cutch.

The court nagārā as it survives today consists of two hemispherical metal bowls (somewhat pointed at the base) – the smaller on the right (jil, jhil, from the Arabo-Persian zir), and the larger on the left (dhāma). The single skins are braced with X-lacing, divided by crosslacing in the centre. Tuning is variously effected by heat, the pouring in of water through a small hole in the base, and, in the case of the bass left-hand drum, by an interior resinous tuning-load stuck under the skin. The drums are either placed on their sides, with the two heads facing inwards, or with the right almost horizontal; they are struck with two sticks, short and thick with tapering heads. Though precise pitch is neither possible nor desired, the relationship between the drumheads appears to be of a 4th or 5th (the left at the dominant or subdominant below the right). The timbre difference is very noticeable, the right having a tight, metallic tone and the left a dark, dull thud.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Abu’l Fazl: Ā’īn-i-ākbarī (c1590), trans. H. Blochmann in The Imperial Musicians (Calcutta, 1873, 2/1927), 680ff; trans. H.S. Jarrett, rev. Sarkar in Sangīt Bibliotheca Indica, cclxx (Calcutta, 1948), 260ff

J. Levy: disc notes, Music from the Shrines of Ajmer and Mundra, Tangent TGM 105 (1970); reissued as TSCD911 (1995)

R. Stewart: The Tabla in Perspective (diss., UCLA, 1974)

B.C. Deva: Musical Instruments of India: their History and Development (Calcutta, 1978), 78ff

A. Dick: ‘The Earlier History of the Shawm in India’, GSJ, xxxvii (1984), 80–98

ALASTAIR DICK