This book is intended, not only for an academic readership, but also for those who simply want to discover something about the musical practices of musicians in the Himalayan region of Uttarakhand. Consequently, I have included some descriptive material that is widely available elsewhere. This is for the benefit of those who are less familiar with musicology and for those who may not have travelled to Uttarakhand before. Writing for two different audiences inevitably requires compromise regarding the tone of the language and the technically specific terminology that must be used. I hope these compromises do not alienate either readership. As with any book, it is limited in scope to those practitioners whom I have met and to those experiences that I have had. Nonetheless, I hope these stories will encourage the reader to reflect on the way sound and music are influenced by the geography in which they are made.

Some segments of this book have appeared in earlier journal publications. They are presented here either with significant modifications that take an account of recent field research, or with adaptations that create better coherence within the narrative of this book. They appear with permission of the editors.

Chapter 1 is a significantly revised version of an article published in the journal Asian Music in 1997/98. All the musical examples are new and are presented in a manner that is more inclined towards the South Asian context. The ideas in this earlier paper have been significantly expanded to provide more detailed citations as well as more coherent musical examples. In addition, further information related to military history and contemporary media has been included. Chapter 5 is an article originally published in 2012 in the European Bulletin of Himalayan Research titled ‘Flutes, Sprites and Mountainous Geographies’.