The way different sounding music is made and heard in different parts of the world necessitates varying structures of sound from which the music is constructed. There are twenty-two śrutis, or micro-tones within the octave, or twenty-two divisions that Indian music draws from. This broad tonal availability offers great versatility in the construction of scales and use of passing tones; a large emotive vocabulary that is essential to the iconographic nature of Indian music.
Music in India began as a form of religious practice and exercise of devotion towards Hindu gods in the 2nd century B.C. Though separated geographically, two different forms of traditional Indian music developed from similar Hindu Vedic traditions for many centuries. The two forms digressed, however, when Islamic invasion brought Arab music and Muslim culture to Hindustani music and Northern India in the 12th century. Despite Islamic influence that diverged Hindustani music from its Southern counterpart, Carnatic music (after the South-Western region of Karnataka), essential similarities have sustained. The time-scale of Indian music is grand enough to encompass many influences while maintaining the essential elements of its tradition.
Differences between Hindustani and Carnatic music lie in their approach and differences in scale type. The Carnatic music uses the mela scale systems, and practice extends from an emphasis on theory. Hindustani musicians de-emphasize theory and instead utilizes practice as a means to developing ideas within the that scales. Despite the internal differences between Hindustani and Carnatic music, the similarities that have persisted are the crucial aspects so particular to Indian music. The raga is the most traditional form and still holds reverence to Hindu deities.
The raga most commonly an average of five to seven of these notes to create its scales (traditionally five tone minimum). Ragas are often lengthy musical compositions that feature a dominant stringed instrumentalist melodically. A drone background is maintained by additional stringed instruments, or tambura. Tabla rhythms support the tune with syncopated rhythms that progress through the raga into variations and cross-rhythms in contrast to the melody. Some forms substitute a vocalist for melodic phrasing, though others remain strictly instrumental. Improvisation is frequent and extends pieces melodically, though within certain parameters particular to the theme and feel of the raga.
In ragas, melody is constructed and heard as shape, ascending and descending movements whose selection of notes may vary between directions. Stylistic sensibility and specific ornamentation to particular notes is of great importance and a necessary melodic extension. “If such elements are missing when the raga is performed, the artist either is faulted for having performed it incorrectly or is said not to have performed that raga at all” (Wade, 67). Variation of the elements occur commonly between different ragas, though variations are strictly prohibited within a raga. Each and every component of a raga, even the smallest piece, contributes to the raga’s essence, which we will find to be of utmost importance and incomplete if not portrayed in its fullest.
Traditions of art and music speak descriptively, and are cultural experiences unique to their civilizations. The term raga (melody) references passion, emotion, sentiment, beauty, and charm (Abteilung, 35), characteristics that serve in describing the overtones of ragas in general. Ragas are expressive portrayals of sentiments – heroism, fury, wonder, love, mirth, compassion (Abteilung, 35) – known as rasas. As fundamental concepts, rasas were largely drawn upon by early Sanskrit drama and other art forms. Rasas were at some point associated with different ancient tonal modalities, and Indian musicians began to melodically capture their essence into raga form. Rasas became abstractly conceptualized, illustrated by rhythm and the scale systems of melodic progressions.
“The expression of quiet, dignified joy through Rag Hindol, seriousness through Rag Malkosh, or the gentle quietude of the morning through Rag Asavari is the musical expression of rasa” (Wade, 77). While all ragas are pleasing to the ear, rakti ragas are ragas that inspire a certain mood of feeling. Other ragas express universals that to all are commonly relevant and identifiable to the trained listener. There are groupings of ragas such as the Hindustani Mallar group with close contextual ties to the monsoon season. The focused abstractedness of the raga is essential to its essence and has been acutely captured through poetic verse.
“Megh-Mallar is a good, wise King. He dances well and enjoys the pleasures of life with gay abandon. Of a slightly dusky complexion with bright shining eyes, king Megh-Mallar is dressed handsomely, wearing a tiger skin, and adorned with various kinds of bring ornaments. He is in the company of beautiful maidens bedecked with jewels. The king dances with them to the resounding beat of drums and clapping. The dancing and music bring forth clouds of various colors in the sky. The moving clouds thicken to the accompaniment of thunder and lightning, which brings the rain” (Wade, 76).
Time – time of day, time of year – plays a considerable role in the way Indian music is heard and understood. The raga’s close relationship with time is reflected in many aspects of Indian music. Overall mood is created by rhythm and scale system appropriately to the time of day when the music is preformed or practiced. Radio broadcasts as scheduled for certain times of day in accordance with the material. Times of day are simplistic examples of rasas and sentiment, and show the importance of emotional incorporation within the practice Indian music.
Popular ragas were artistically represented visually through the ragmala, a painted depiction of the music’s essence. The ragmala serves as visual accompaniment to its specific raga. Through a feat of artistic sensitivity and skill, a painting is created to capture, mirror, or accentuate the inarticulate nature of the raga as an emotional provocateur. What is visually presented by a ragmala, therefore, must not largely deviate from what a raga itself embodies, so precisely put forward by F. W. Galpin:
“This picture of the Rag [raga] portrays, then, not the tune, which is ephemeral, but the sentiment, which is eternal. It is–would it be too much to say?–a turning from the illusions of this earth, from the things which take one shape or another, to the ‘I am That’ which is behind all shapes. But without looking so deep, the picture is a recognition of the truth that the quintessence of an art is not to be expressed by descriptive words, but only to be re-created, in that art or in another, and, if by words at all, only in poetry. It is not, therefore, merely a pictorial substitute for the suggestive titles and mottoes with which we deck instrumental pieces… It is rather a conscious dedication of mind and heart to the wonder that music is there to symbolize, to which they, quite simply, give the name of the deity to whom that particular wonder is an attribute” (Garratt, 318).
A ragmala offers visual accompaniment to the experience of listening, though to no significant extent does the visual aid contextualize the raga. Analytical listening remains a constant experience of sentiment and emotive response. Though the subject matter of ragas extend from themes of deities and representations of time of day, seasonal shifts, or weather patterns, certain Indian musicians moved passed such portrayals and the communication of rasas, and focused on eternal elements and spirituality.
Abhinavagupta began in the tenth century to incorporate rasas of salvation and purification into ragas. Personal fulfillment was made available to all, or to those who acknowledged changing ideologies. In the times of the Bhagavad-Gita, a common understanding was spread that any person, of any occupation or circumstance, who righteously embraces their life and actions, and lives their life devotionally and with intention, their destiny and enlightenment is fulfilled. Music emerged during this time as a powerful means towards religious enlightenment, and even more weight was placed on the importance of technique and execution.
Muttuswamy Dikshitar , Syama Sastri, and Tyagaraja, South Indian musicians of the eighteenth and nineteenth century, are worshipped for their proficiency and nada-brahman, or “God-Sound” (Abteilung, 36). Their devotion to Hinduism is expressed through their music; the simple act of practice, every note purposefully executed in homage to their gods and in light of their belief. It is said that the power of musicians such as Bangshi Das, who sing with extreme care and intent, yield the power of God’s voice. Bangshi Das once melted the cold heart of the ruthless Kenaram, who fell to his knees in repentance for countless acts of murder and robbery.
The value and power of sentiment in traditional music is conceptually abstract to the Western understanding of music. “It contributes considerably to the feeling of Indian musicians that ragas are very personal things. Indian musicians talk or write on and on about their favorite ragas. It is difficult to imagine Western musicians elaborating upon the subtleties of a Western scale or key to this extent. They are usually more concerned with completed compositions” (Wade, 71). Rasa within Indian music is identified by the trained listener with an acute sense of feeling and a developed ability to associate sound with mood, time, or place – for example, to connect the airy dissonance and slow droning of deep notes, with the fading light of evening time. The Western ear hears and interprets music as an entity contained within itself, and rarely imagines the possibility that it may embody a readily available non-musical idea. Indian music exists as something outside of mere practice, and through the act – for many practitioners and listeners alike – the result can become an expression of religious devotion or ulterior understanding.
Western musical discourse has much to do with underlying structure, and tonal trends, which have become its own foundation of understanding. The abstract qualities of Indian music are easily overlooked by the Western ear and such interpretation. Tonality as a Western understanding is heir to its centuries of musical protégé and classical tradition, which it has encompassed to substantiate its own realm of tonal comprehension and principles of diatonic harmony. As is any lesser known form subjected to the concepts of the well-established, Indian melodic structures have been compared with a marginalizing affect by the pretenses of Western music theory.
When foreign trade brought Western civilizations in contact with South Asia and the Indian sub-continent in the eighteenth century, many cultural differences were quickly observed and established. Upon introduction, “the reactions of Europeans to Indian music were generally negative” (Meyers, 276). As the East Indian Company spread throughout the continent and the British government became increasingly involved past the turn of the century, discrepancies based on cultural differences gained greater social implications. The interface of social interaction between the British and Indian culture became veiled by the pursuits of the empire, and India’s culture and economy were contextualized as degenerate. Colonial modalities, or the various ways by which the Raj went about politics and social interaction, ensured a maintained contextualization of the Raj’s purpose as a colonial power, and ensured continual justification to otherwise unfound explanations of imperial exploitation.
Indian culture at large was discredited during the colonial period, as the British were wholly uninterested in their lowly culture. Orientalist thought prescribed their understanding of Indian culture, distancing colonists from the many sustaining qualities of Indian tradition. Cultural chauvinism discredited Indian civilization, and portrayed the West as culturally superior. The British Raj even convinced many native Indians of their cultural inferiority; the tangibility of their material power gave some little reason to be convinced otherwise. Any establishment whose foundation is sound, self-sustaining, and self-augmenting, is justifiable its cause, and as notions are relative to truth, so too do objects become realigned in light of the righteousness of the establishment.
The comparison of Indian music to Western tonality was made in a similar vein during the eighteen and nineteenth centuries. Discursively, micro-tones were translated into numerical approximations (into cents or ratio divisions of the octave), then re-evaluated as tonal equivalents [i.e. G#+31 (cents)]. While such mathematical approximations remained equally abstract, delineation from perfect pitch of individual notes (i.e. micro-tonal passing tones and other variability created by the imperfection of tuning by ear and vibrato technique), which occurred within many scale systems, excluded Indian music from the scientific principals of harmony as it exists in nature. For musicologists such as John Keeble, who published The Theory of Harmonics: or, and illustration of the Grecian Harmonica in 1784, Indian music would be quickly discredited, for he “[located] music in mathematics, in phenomena which in turn can be ‘objectively’ measured and systematized,” and defined it therefore as natural law, and thus “the embodying principle for both truth and progress” (Leppert, 73).
Keeble’s grounds of scientific perfection were resounding with the common Hegelian understanding of late eighteenth century Europe. In accordance with Hegelianism, in that all history is in constant motion towards perfection and the utopian society, an inclination towards balance was only natural for those of such belief. Science was considered the peak of all rationality and truth, and anomalies from the patterns of nature, from which their logic was procured, were automatically discredited. “One issue seems certain: his desire to link what he sees as the germ of future Western music with a culturally and historically specific paradigm of the European Enlightenment” (Leppert, 73). Just like Keeble, the colonial hegemonic, who preferred classical paintings to the painterly and airy fairy rococo style, found systems of external or implied truth, as means to their ends.
Jean-Philippe Rameau, whose methodology was similar to that of Keeble – mathematically founded – is a good example through which shines the difference between the philosophies of Easter and Western approach. Rameau writes:
“However much progress music may have made until our time, it appears that the more sensitive the ear has become to the marvelous effects of this art, the less inquisitive the mind has been about its true principles. One might say that reason has lost its rights, while experience has acquired a certain authority. (Leppert, 75).
And furthermore:
The surviving writings of the Ancients show us clearly that reason alone enabled them to discover most of the properties of music. Although experience still obliges us to accept the greater part of their rules, we neglect today all the advantages to be derived from the use of reason in favor of purely practical experience” (Leppert, 75).
Rameau makes a clear distinction between reason and experience. He closely ties reason with music’s formulae, or its ‘true principles.’ He neglects the possibility that these ‘true principles,’ and thus reason, the processes of the mind, may have anything to do with the experience of listening to music.
The Western understanding of music has evolved since the eighteenth century to encompass a medium of worldly genres. During the eighteenth century and throughout the Colonial period, contrast in the musical understandings of Eastern and Western traditions captures the difference in approach of two distinct traditional methodologies. Reason and experience seem to have taken opposite sides of an argument throughout this discussion, and the comparison between Indian and Western cultural traditions has exemplified well the perspectives of each approach.
Works Cited
Garratt, G. T. The Legacy of India. 7th ed. London: Oxford UP, 1967.
Leppert, Richard, and Susan McClary. Music and Society. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1987.
Myers, Helen. Ethnomusicology: Historical and Regional Studies. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1993.
Nijenhuis, Emmie T. Indian Music: History and Structure. Leiden, Netherlands: E.J. Brill, 1974.
Prajnanananda, Swami. Historical Development of Indian Music. Calcutta: Firma K. L. Mukhopadhyay, 1960.
Wade, Bonnie C. Music in India: the Classical Traditions. Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1979.
TOPIC PROPOSAL
written May 1st, 2006
Indian music strangely translates into Western conceptualizations. Melodically, tones translate to numerical approximations (varying divisions of the octave), allowing comparisons to be made between two separate spheres of tonal music. Tonality as a Western understanding is heir to its centuries of musical protégé and classical tradition, which it has encompassed to substantiate its own realm of tonal comprehension. As is any lesser known form subjected to the concepts of the well-established, Indian melodic structures have been often ethnomusicologically evaluated with the marginalizing pretenses of Western music theory.
Though similarities or patterns may exist in the material pieces of varying forms of music, these forms are inherently of different type. It is the underlying elements that create feel, like intonation or phrasing, that define a world genre of music. In melodic analysis of Indian intervals, correlations are made with western equivalents, though only after rounding off an excess of cents from the Indian intervals. Although the intervals almost replicate their Western counterparts, should these chords be deemed equivalent?
Relating dissimilar though theoretically or provisionally likened entities, has occurred throughout the history of South Asia, and in times affected political history and nations of people. Cultural differences exist, and the implications of inferences, like those of orientalist thought, overlook cultural particularities and are thus diminutive to millenia of ethnic background. It seems an urge to domesticize foreign elements in hopes of comprehension, inference, and manipulation.
Though is it possible for one to describe the elements of a cultural experience, such as music, in terms other than ones’ own cultural upbringing? Was orientalist thought a convenient justification for the British to exploit an inferior race, or were their notions of superiority engrained in their being?
Works Cited
Bryce, Winifred. Women’s Folk-Songs of Rajputana. New Delhi: Publications Division, 1961.
McIntosh, Solveig. Hidden Faces of Ancient Indian Song. Burlington, VT.: Ashgate Company, 2005.
Nijenhuis, Emmie T. Indian Music: History and Structure. Leiden, Netherlands: E.J. Brill, 1974.
Prasad, Onkar. Santal Music. New Delhi: Inter-India Publications, 1985.
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