[I didn’t really plan for this to be the topic of my second post—the first one to provide any actual content—but it turns out that I’ve already written to friends about this subject in several emails, so it’s fairly easy to merge those into a single post, et voilà. Almost by coincidence, I’m about to attend a two-day series of concerts that starts in a few hours. I can hardly wait!]
A structural introduction
There are two main historical traditions of music in India: the Carnatic style and the Hindustani style. Although I’ve been exposed to both, I feel more qualified by my experience to write about the Hindustani style.
Hindustani classical music is dominated by performances by individual artists, not by ensembles. These may be vocalists or instrumentalists. Each is accompanied by a percussionist on tabla (two hand drums) and they are backed by one or two real or recorded drone stringed instruments called tanpura. (The tanpura has four open strings that are sequentially plucked throughout the piece. In the Western sense, it follows that the whole piece will be in one key.) Vocalists are often also accompanied by a harmonium player (or rarely a violinist) who echoes the vocalist’s expressions.
Each piece performed is known as a raga or raag. Since most of the performance is improvisational, what is needed is enough structure to focus the playing over time without constraining the improvisation. Each raag has a name, which refers to its structure of notes. This structure is more than a scale and less than a melody. It’s not a key or a mode, because it often does not contain all of the notes of the octave. From a Western view, a raag is characterized by a subset of notes in a key. Most of these raags have de facto melodies associated with them, but this is not universal. But each set of notes does imply a mood, one which is often connected to a specific time of day and season.
Musicians have in their repertoire about 30-40 raags, but the true historical number of them is huge and not definitively curated. The audience will be familiar with just about all of these common raags, so when the performer announces which one is to be played, most people can call that raag to mind and know where the performance is headed, if not how it will get there.
The temporal structure of the piece is designed to reveal the melodic structure in the raag very gradually. To do this, the raag is presented in several parts, somewhat like movements, but more closely related in that they all involve the same harmonic structure defined by the raag. What makes these parts distinct is their rhythmic plan.
The first part, the alap, has no rhythm and therefore no tabla accompaniment. It is designed to reveal the harmonic structure of the raag in a tentative, highly exploratory way, often starting with only one note of the structure and adding other notes one or two at a time. The performer has a great deal of freedom in using these few notes to express the mood that is implicit in the structure as a whole. This discovery is facilitated by a great deal of bending of notes and gliding between them. In this genre, most instruments are designed to have properties similar to the human voice, so the abrupt transitions between individual pitches so ubiquitous in Western music are generally avoided. This very slow revealing of the raag can be intense and hypnotic, but it caused one Westerner to ask, “so, when do they finish tuning up and start to play?” If one is unfamiliar with the raag at first, the best way to appreciate the alap is to listen very, very closely and stay in the moment. Every sound, however subtle, was intended. Be patient and allow the raag to unfold to you like a flower.
This is a good place to digress and mention a feature of all stringed instruments in the genre. They are very resonant and very harmonically rich. In addition to the few plucked strings, there are many open drone strings that will resonate sympathetically at various notes. All of the strings are designed to buzz: they come to a bridge that has a very grazing front surface, not a sharp edge. This causes strings to buzz elaborately in a time-varying way, since vertical vibrations buzz more than horizontal vibrations, and the two modes are coupled. So all that buzzing you hear is intentional, not a flaw or error. The goal of all instrument design is to approach the qualities of the human voice, the queen and king of all musical instruments.
After the alap, the further sections of the raag will have a defined rhythm and therefore allow a tabla accompaniment. The tabla is capable of an extraordinary range of sounds, which are elicited by all ten fingers and other parts of the hands. This enables extremely intricate and rapid playing. The rhythmic segments, in increasing speed and prominence of percussion, may be a jor, a jhala, and/or a gat. Performers can choose from a huge number of time signatures, extending from two beats per measure to at least sixteen and there are even some time signatures that include half a beat. For the more complex taals, as they are called, a solo (of which there will be many) may be aided by their partner counting the beat visually with their fingers. Audience members may also be doing this during rhythmic sections of the performance. The finale of the raag usually consists of the repetition many times of the chosen melody of the raag, over and over, faster and faster, with more emphasis, exuberance, and triumph. The raag is being fully revealed and celebrated in all its glory.
A brief introduction to the form is found here on YouTube. Be aware that the way that the teacher is playing raag Yaman is the equivalent of “Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star” to make it easier to understand. For an example of how a modern master of the same instrument (the sitar) might interpret the same raag, try this. Listen very carefully in a quiet place, because the artist is coaxing entire phrases from each pluck of a string. The best way to get comfortable with this music is to listen at home or over headphones, where you can really focus and be absorbed in the music. The mobile environment typically drowns out the subtleties of this genre.
Exploring a single raag
The four links in this section are all examples of one raag, a very famous one called Rageshri. (I promise you won’t get tired of it; you’ll be humming it later.) However the total length of these examples is longer than you may have time for in a single session. Feel free to jump forward whenever you wish, but consider coming back to focus on a complete performance at a later time.
The initial link below drops you into the middle of a performance of Rageshri on sitar by Shahid Parvez, where the “theme” of the raag has been revealed already and the artists are now playing with variations of it. My purpose in placing this first is to burn that theme into your memory via a movement that repeats it explicitly, even though this is out of order. The performer, Shahid Parvez, is a small Puckish guy who might be the best sitar player of the post-Ravi Shankar generation. He’s not just technically proficient, but deeply musical and soulful. I’ve been fortunate to sit six feet from him at house concerts. The tabla player is the famous and exuberant Hindole Majumdar.
The second link is a short, start-to-finish performance of the same raag by the same artist. In this rendition, the theme is revealed more quickly than is typical. Often the first “movement” (alap) is a 20 minute game of hide and seek. Vijay Ghate is my favorite tabla player, although Hindole Majumdar is arguably more well known.
The third link is Rageshri performed by Shiv Kumar Sharma, who was the god of the santoor, a hammered dulcimer that he revived from obscurity and made sublime. The hammers are finely serrated underneath, which is how the strings can be made to trill so gently.
I was also lucky to find a short performance of raag Rageshri on the shehnai by Bismillah Khan. The shehnai is a sort of wicked-extroverted oboe. It is often heard at traditional weddings, although in that case it would be playing folk or Bollywood tunes.
The voice
I mentioned above that the voice is considered the to be the supreme instrument, the one against which all others are compared. Here is my favorite vocalist, Dattatreya Velankar, singing Raag Bibhas. All Hindustani vocalists have tremendous control, but Velankar is also blessed with a warm voice that never sounds strained. As I write this, I am looking forward to hearing him live in just a few hours.
Next is a typical performance by the Gundecha brothers, in this case singing the raag, Bhupali. The Gundechas have revived a very old vocal style (2+ millennia?) called dhrupad singing. You could vaguely relate it to Gregorian chant, in the sense that it is religious and it is sung in an ancient language, Sanskrit in this case. It is also similarly hypnotic.
Searching for more
If this buffet has whetted your appetite, YouTube is full of all kinds of examples, and so are the online music sources. Consider making a Spotify or Pandora station centered on one of these artists. Including the musicians above, some of my favorite artists are:
- Shahid Parvez — sitar
- Nikhil Bannerjee — sitar
- Shiv Kumar Sharma — santoor
- Bismillah Khan — shehnai
- Hariprasad Chaurasia — flute
- Mohan Bhatt — “Mohan Veena” (he invented a modified guitar)
- Dattatreya Velankar — vocal
- Gundecha brothers — dhrupad vocals
- Zakir Hussein — tabla
Hear them live
Because India has over a billion people, the “top talent” is as skilled as any Western superstar. Yet you may be able to hear them live in very intimate settings. House concerts are … well just imagine listening to Joni Mitchell sing for several hours in a big living room. On the other hand, attending a weekend-long festival that features multiple artists is a great way to broaden your exposure in a short time.
In the Boston area, we are blessed with quite a few opportunities to hear this type of music live. The centerpiece is the annual music conference sponsored by LearnQuest Academy of Music on Easter weekend. Held at Regis College in Weston, there are typically two performers on Friday evening and six to eight on each of the following days, starting before noon and continuing into the evening. Each concert is about 60-90 minutes long. LearnQuest draws many world-class artists from India, who stay as guests in homes in the Boston area.
If you get on the LearnQuest mailing list, you will not only get advanced notice of the conference, but you will also learn of smaller house concerts throughout the year. I have seen and heard some of these amazing artists in settings with only forty people, where the musicians are only six to ten feet away. Plus, the conferences and house concerts are catered by local Indian restaurants so that, along with all of the women wearing traditional clothing and many people speaking Hindi, Tamil, etc., the aromas and tastes provide a total immersion in South Asian culture.
As you contemplate attending such an event, you might experience a moment of doubt: will you feel out of place? But remember, music is the universal human language of the heart. We all sigh the same, we smile the same, our feet tap to the same rhythm, and we all get chills from the soaring triumphs of musical expression. You will be welcomed and you will feel at home.
I hope this introduction provides you with a pathway to appreciate one of the oldest, largest, and greatest musical traditions of our world. Perhaps I’ll see you at the concerts.
