The winner of the 2025 Jerome Roche Prize is Peter Asimov. The panel is amazed by his subtle insight and thought-provoking conclusion in his winning article, ‘The Melakartas and the ‘République Modale’: Naturalizing Indian Scales in French Musical Modernism’. The Student Committee Representative, Günseli Naz Ferel, interviewed our prize winner and discussed his article, musical journey, and advice for other early career researchers.
Peter Asimov is Assistant Professor of Music at the University of Cambridge and a Fellow and Director of Studies in Music, Magdalene College, following postdoctoral fellowships at Cambridge and the Université libre de Bruxelles. He completed his PhD at Clare College, Cambridge with a thesis entitled ‘Comparative Philology, French Music, and the Composition of Indo-Europeanism from Fétis to Messiaen.’
Once again, congratulations on receiving the Jerome Roche Prize for 2025. Would you mind recapping the subject of your article ‘The Melakartas and the ‘République Modale’: Naturalizing Indian Scales in French Musical Modernism’?
Thank you for the kind words, and for the invitation to be interviewed. The Roche is such an honour—past winners include so many scholars whose work has inspired me for many years. I tussled a lot with the melakartas article, and it feels tremendously affirming to be recognised for it in this way.
My article tries to do too many different things; I suspect different readers will have different takeaways. For me, the article makes interventions at, say, three levels of scale:
- At the most grandiose level, it charts the history of a humble musical form—scales, known as melakartas—tracing their glorious malleability as they are ushered across space and time, corralled through distinct epistemic contexts and ideological regimes: from their abstract formalist, codification in the music treatises of Southern India, via their (mis)apprehension as a tool of racial classification by British colonial ethnographers and French philologists, culminating in their formalist re-abstraction in music treatises of twentieth-century France. In this way, it contributes to a ‘global’ turn in music studies, joining up spheres of the history of music theory long kept separate.
- In the context of more canonical ‘Western Art Music’ studies, it is an intervention against the persistent binary opposition of ‘exoticism’ vs. ‘authenticity’. Underpinned by an Edward Saidian conviction in the constructedness of orientalist discourse in art and science alike, I refute the long-held teleological assumption that ‘superficial exoticism’ yields, through knowledge accumulation over time, to more objective representation by revealing that what have been interpreted as ‘authentic’ Indian modes in French music were in reality a byproduct of philology’s representational regime—no less contingent, in the event, than exoticism, and mediated by many of the same colonial, racializing prerogatives.
- At a micro-specialist level, the article sheds unexpected light on a specific question regarding the source of French composer Olivier Messiaen’s ‘modes of limited transposition’—an influential set of scales that he invented around 1930. While his modes have rightly been understood as extrapolations of the whole-tone and octatonic scales made popular by composers like Debussy, Boulanger, and Stravinsky, the systematic, permutational approach he brought to bear in codifying these scales as he did may be traced to epistemic techniques of South Asian śastra that accompanied the melakartas on their travels.
If only I’d thought to lay it out so plainly in the article itself!
Can you tell me a bit about your academic journey and how you came to be interested in French musicology and musical modernism — especially in relation to questions of colonialism, cultural translation, and the global circulation of musical ideas?
It’s a bit silly: I was seduced, as many seem to be, by Messiaen’s harmonies, and wanted to immerse myself in them; hence my interest in French modernism. I think I was fortunate in that, rather than studying music as an undergraduate, I studied comparative literature, with a focus on French and Sanskrit (that’s another story…), also gaining exposure to post-structural and postcolonial ways of thinking that resonated with me and shape my approach. I graduated without any particular intention to pursue Sanskrit; but I suspect that as I returned to university to undertake postgraduate research on Messiaen’s sources of information on musical modes and seized upon the importance of the Indo-European hypothesis for earlier generations of French composers, I may have been more primed than some to pursue that line of enquiry. On the back of the article, I’ve actually been asked to do a translation of an excerpt from Govinda’s Saṃgraha-Cūḍā-Maṇi, where he details the melakarta system in tidy verses of jargon; it’s been a fun and challenging task to return to Sanskrit after more than a decade!
Your article focuses on the Melakarta system’s influence in early 20th-century France — do you think this moment had any lasting impact on how Western music theory thinks about non-Western scales today?
Well, you’ll still hear plenty of musicians and audiences get excited about ‘Indian scales’ or ‘Arabic scales’ or ‘Afro-Brazilian rhythms’ or other such simplifications. It’s embedded in how many of us often think about musical cultures, as amalgamations of formal elements from which one mixes and matches—especially in a culture of Western Art Music that now prides itself on omnivory. As musicologists, though, I think we are certainly more attuned to the epistemic limits of our terminology. Categories like ‘pitch’ and ‘rhythm’ that once seemed self-evident are increasingly understood as culturally situated abstractions. (And Western music theory does not have a monopoly over such abstractions, for that matter, although it has a recent and violent history of weaponizing them as a tool of power/knowledge.)
Your article traces how the Melakarta system entered early 20th-century French music not just as an exotic influence, but through deeper structures of thought shaped by comparative philology and the Indo-European hypothesis. Do you think this moment has had a lasting impact on how Western music theory continues to conceptualize and engage with non-Western scales today?
Actually, I would like to go even further than you do in your phrasing: I would suggest that the opposition between surface imitation and a so-called ‘deeper structure’ in musical borrowings is, itself, a legacy of comparative philological thinking, which mediates (distorts) our conception of language relations by distinguishing between ‘deep’ etymological connections between words over ‘surface’ borrowings, and privileging the former. I’m not sure whether the Indo-European hypothesis is on most musicologists’ minds anymore (it was already considered dubious in the early twentieth century, and more strenuously refuted in the aftermath of World War Two, except for as a narrow means of charting certain types of language relations). But I do think the philological opposition of surface and depth continues to resonate in our frameworks of music theory, yes. In some analytical contexts, these metaphors might be hermeneutically germane (Holly Watkins has studied the importance of metaphors of depth in German art music, for example). But they remain metaphors.
Did you have any personal or professional challenges that you encountered undertaking this kind of research?
The biggest challenge I had was publishing it! I had worked out the conceptual heart of the article in a few conference papers over 2018–19, and finally wrote it up during the second lockdown of 2020 (having submitted my PhD during the first lockdown). But, as you can see from the copyright date, it only came out in 2025 (three jobs and two house moves later). The delay is not down to any single factor, and nobody is to blame (except, at the last hurdle, the Cambridge University Press cyber-attackers), but it was a protracted and stressful process for me as a diffident early career scholar with little experience under my belt, especially during years of professional instability when having publications out seemed urgent. I am grateful to numerous anonymous but exceptionally generous peer reviewers who helped strengthen earlier drafts—however difficult it was to reconcile their disparate interests and advice! —and to the Editors who supported it and welcomed it into the JRMA.
What has your academic path been like up to this point, and what kinds of projects or questions are you currently exploring? And as someone further along in the field, do you have any advice for early career researchers navigating their own paths?
Since completing my PhD in 2020, I’ve had postdocs in Belgium and in the U.K. and am now an Assistant Professor at Cambridge, on a fixed-term contract while a senior colleague pursues a major research project. My Leverhulme Trust–funded project centred on the music of Yvonne Loriod, best remembered as a virtuoso pianist (and second wife of Olivier Messiaen), but who it turns out was also a composer—work that has led me into new and unforeseen areas of performance studies, feminist musicology, music analysis, and even some practice-led research, as I’ve had to learn about the ‘prepared piano’. It’s been a refreshing change of pace to my doctoral work and has the potential, I hope, to overturn some of our narratives of French modernism in quite different ways to the melakartas article. With any luck, some of these findings will be published in the coming months and years. I’m also embarking on an ambitious new project about rhythm’s transdisciplinary intellectual history, which actually emerged in a roundabout way from my interest in the history of philology.
As for advice: I may be further along in the field, but my career is not particularly stable or permanent, so I’m not sure I have any authority here. Over the years, it feels like I’ve received every piece of advice and its opposite. But here are two things that have helped me:
First: set boundaries. Reflect early and often about what fulfils you in academic work (is it the act of research in general? your specific subject? teaching? management?) and the compromises you are willing to make in order to pursue academic work (would you accept a job working on someone else’s project? would you accept a teaching-only or research-only job? would you move abroad? what wage would you accept? what familial or community connections do you value?) and be true to yourself and the boundaries you set. It is unrealistic to expect you will not have to persevere through some difficulties and make compromises, but, despite what some may have you believe, there is no moral high ground in making unwanted sacrifices for a job that ultimately leaves you unfulfilled!
Secondly: be lucky (and make your own luck). We know that success as an academic is not entirely meritocratic; the scarcity of professional opportunities in music scholarship means that every appointment includes a good dose of ‘right place, right time’—which also means, right topic or right career stage for what the right institution happens to be seeking at the right moment, when the right funding becomes available. The stars have to align. But that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t take proactive measures to place yourself in the best possible position to succeed when opportunity strikes. Be curious and open-minded. Make meaningful connections with colleagues, in person when possible, and gain experience describing your work to different interlocutors. Don’t disparage anybody’s research, even when it might make you feel clever to do so; seek to understand what about it seems important or appealing to them, and to others. It takes all sorts. Read everything you can, and attend seminars beyond and irrespective of what you imagine to be your area of interest, even if you don’t always take notes—it all seeps in. And respond to emails promptly.
Günseli Naz Ferel & Yihan Jin