Music

 Music & Dances of Kathmandu valley.

Newar civilization climaxed under the Malla kings (13th – 18th centuries), whose adversary kingdoms of Kathmandu, Patan, and Bhaktapur contended in architectural, artistic and cultural splendor; several rulers themselves exceeded expectations as performers, artists, arrangers,, poets and art patrons. Newer autonomy was brought to a sudden end by Prithvi Narayan Shah of Gorkha, who conquered the Valley in 1768-9. Until to day, the Newars maintain many parts of their way of life, including an elaborate round of urban rituals in which music and dance play a large part.

Contemporary weights definitely guarantee that Newar society in undergoing rapid change and decline, but in 1987 a survey of Bhaktapur (70,000 inhabitants) identified 220 music and dance groups still functioning.

Execution in Newar culture fills in as an assortment of custom and amusement capacities, establishing intimate connections between ritual, space, time, and society, and between the material and otherworldly realms: each genre is performed at specific ritual occasions, in specific places (temple, monastery, street, public square, river crossing, paddy field, cremation ground), a ritually determined times (according to the lunar and solar calendars), and by specific cases and associations, in honor of one or more specific gods, goddesses, Boddhisattvas, etc.

|A Universal feature is the worship of the god of music and dance, Nasadyo, by all Newar communities. He resides in shrines and in musical instruments. Offerings to him, accompanied by special music, must precede and conclude any music or dance performance, or any period of musical apprenticeship.

Newar music and dance are almost exclusively performed by men. Apart from the Jugi tailor-musician caste, performers are not musicians of dancers by profession. Some genres or instruments are restricted to members of a particular caste, but performance may require intercaste co-operation, as for example when Jugis are required to provide melodic accompaniment on Shawns for Jyapu farmers drums or dance performances. Many performance types are organized by societies (guthi). Thus a particular guthi may be responsible for providing daily music at a particular temple; a land holding, sometimes a royal donation, would have provided the guthi with income for the maintenance of instruments, copying of song-books and other expenses, but these holdings have now been abolished by the central government, and the surviving music guthis are impoverished.