Allyn Miner

Allyn Miner specializes in the history of North Indian music based on Sanskrit, Hindi, and Urdu sources. She has a PhD in Indian Musicology from Banaras Hindu University and a PhD in Sanskrit from the University of Pennsylvania. She spent eleven years in Varanasi, India, where she studied sitar performance with Thakur Raj Bhan Singh and musicology with Professor Prem Lata Sharma. She returned to the United States, became a lecturer at the University of Pennsylvania and continued performance study, eventually becoming a disciple of Ustad Ali Akbar Khan. Allyn taught courses on sitar and Performing Arts in South Asia at the University of Pennsylvania until 2017. Her book Sitar and Sarod in the 18th and 19th Centuries is a definitive study of the early history of the sitar. Her Sangītopanişatsāroddhāra is a translation of a fourteenth-century Sanskrit musicological text. The Minqār-i Musiqār is a translation of the 1912 Urdu work by Hazrat Inayat Khan. She continues to do research and publish on North Indian music, and performs and teaches the sitar. She has an avid interest in Irish traditional music and plays fiddle, concertina, and banjo.