Heritage of Music

In the traditional culture of India, music envelops the entire life of man in a shell of melodic sound. Songs celebrate the seasonal rhythms in nature, and the song of the plowman and boatman, shepherd and camel driver add harmony to the pulse of work. This folk tradition has been a great source of India's musical tradition. But thought and conscious craftmanship have to refine spontaneity if music has to carry its classical tradition. A long evolution is needed before the tradition achieves maturity and yields variety. The vicissitudes of history have often hampered this kind of evolution. However, the Indian tradition is unique since it has a longer unbroken, though continuously evolving, tradition than perhaps any other system known today.

The Sources |The Scales | The Ragas | Rhythmic Patterns | Hindustani and Carnatic Music

The Sources

Right from the beginning, music in India has made gracious the vicissitudes of ordinary living. The evolution of Indian classical music begins with the Vedas, the sacred scriptures of the Hindus, which grew over many millenia from 5000 to 500 BC. There were songs of the people like Grama Geya or songs sung in villages, and Arana Gya, those sung in forests. These Vedic hymns were metrical, recited and rich in spontaneity and lyricism, but they lacked a conscious grammar, a conscious control of the lines of evolutionary growth. As the religious sensibility deepened, the stress was on singing rather than merely reciting or chanting. Thus, the hymns of the Rig Veda began to sprout wings as songs in the Sama Veda. These melodies proliferated over the course of time to envelop the entire life of man, from the cradle to the grave, in an entrancing shell of musical sound, touching with poetry the sacramental moments of marriage and its fruition in the form of progeny. They kept man in close touch with creation, for the Baramasa songs are on the cycle of the seasons, the relief that comes with the rains after summer's long rain of implacable heat, the rejuvenation of nature in spring. They helped him to transform his work into a joy, for the boatman, the shepherd and the camel driver all have their songs that pulse to the same rhythm as their work.

The Scales

But it took a long evolution to liberate the melody fully. For at first there were only three notes and they were sung rigidly in a descending order. After phases of long growth, the evolution unfolded in the direction of expanding the scale and transforming the sequence from mere scale singing to fascinatingly varied progressions up and down. The notes used for building up the melody increased from three to five and then to seven. Flats of sharps of five of the seven notes raised the spectrum to twelve fairly distinguishable notes. But the whole span was also more minutely divided into twenty-two microtonal steps of less than a semi-tone. Thus, even a specific flat or sharp note can be found in actual singing and playing in delicately shaded, aesthetically flavoured variations. These demand a fine ear and repeated hearing.

The Ragas

The ragas or melody-molds are structured scales derived from the total repertory of notes. All Indian classical music, vocal or instrumental, has to conform to one or the other raga. Each raga has an unmistakably characteristic though very subtly molded visage. This distinct personality is created in many ways. A raga should have at leat five notes; the upper limit is usually seven, occasionally nine and maybe even twelve in the case of some mixed ragas. Even when two ragas have the same notes, they may differ in the use of the sharps and falts or the more delicately shaded microtonal variants. Some note or notes may be dropped in ascent or descent. Specific notes may be selected for accenting, as a sort or gravitational center for the melodic elaboration. This feature is very characteristic of north Indian musical practice. Certain combinations may be built up as characteristic phrases that are signatures of the raga. Above all, the type of movement from one not to another may differ widely. This last, known as the gamak, is a very rich category, including shakes, trills, glides, swings, spiralling accents, and numerous other graces, as varied as the nature of the brush stroke in painting.

The permutations possible with all this variability are very large. But since the selection rule that musical evolution seems to have applied is that melodic molds should be aesthetically satifying, the number of ragas is about three hundred of which a hundred or so are common. Several attempts have been made to group the ragas in a relation of primaries and derivatives. However, the tradition relating ragas to specific seasons and even to specific periods of the day is really fascinating.

Rhythmic Patterns

The singing and playing in Indian music can be slow, medium or fast and this determines the tempo. This is an easy concept to grasp. However, north Indian music has explored the possibilites of the slow tempo perhaps more fully than the south Indian and it accelerated in minimal gradations. In south Indian music, the medium tempo is precisely the double of the slow, and the fast precisely the double of the medium.

Indian rhythms are apt to be difficult for foreigners to grasp. This is because a single cycle of rhythm or bar can be built out of units of different duration. The total duration for the cycle can be divided in various ways. When the cycles are repeated in the continuous singing or playing, the pattern of accenting may vary even if the total duration of the rhythm-schemes is the same, and the cycle itself may be long. But one clear punctutation for the listening ear is available in the returning beat (sam), usually but not always the first, which the most emphatic in the cycle. The variations by the singer or solo instrumentatlist create drama, for they tax to the full the alertness and skill of the accompanying percussionist. The delay creates suspense, and the precision of the arrival at the sam after extended variations provides an explosive climax.

Equipped with melody and rhythm, music has undergone a magnificent evolution in India. In its sweep it has united earth and sky. Originating in religious worship, it has become a spiritual discipline, a path or realization quite independent of the burden of the lyric. Singing by itself thus becomes a spiritual exploration, in addition to being an aesthetic one. The harmony of pure being and dynamic becoming, of the transcendent and the immanent, of eternity and time, is a fundamental doctrine in the Indian tradition.

In the initial elaboration of the raga as free melody, the singer contemplates the beatitude of timeless existence; in the later rhythm-bound movements, he senses the excitement of the rhythm of cosmic evolution. Indian music has no absolute pitch. For each occasion of singing, a drone furnishes a frame, a sustained tonal center. The tonic, heard continuously before, throughout and at the conclusion of the recital, expresses the timeless, eternal background of things. The singing itself is an interlude--liike the interlude of the world in the eternal existence--which builds up tonal space through melodic elaboration spanning the lower and upper tetrachords and tonal time through the organization of time. And since each singer is in a profound sense a composer, he too becomes a creator.

Hindustani and Carnatic Music

Though the early treatises know of no distinction between the north Indian or Hindustani and the south Indian or Carnatic systems, a divergent evolution was initiated when history begean to irrigate the north with cultural streams from Persia. Amir Khusrau, the Persian aristocrat and humanist of the 13th century who made India his home, was a great pioneer. The cultural interaction gained momentum with the establishment of the Mughal empire and like the architecture and painting of the north, music too has richly assimilated influences from Persian traditions. Thus, today the northern and southern systems are distinct species though of the same genus. The happy effect of the divergent evolution has been a richer heritage of musical forms which one can now proceed to relish, starting first with the forms of the north.

The dhrupad, whose form was first shaped by Raja Mansingh Tomar of Gwalior and developed by Swami Haridas and his disciple Tansen who was a luminary of Akbar's court, conserves the antique liturgical stateliness in its style. It begins with a free melodic elaboration or alap and goes on to a rhythm bound lyric whose first two sections traverse progressively the lower, middle, and upper octabes while the last two sections can be regarded as the complex development of the same musical material. There are only a few practitioner of this style today.

The dhamar is a transitional form pointing in the direction of further evolution. For though it is ver much like the dhrupad, its lyrics are mostly based on the romantic episodes in the life of Lord Krishna and this in turn has made its style more uspple and sensuous, with greater use of gamak.

These qualities of suppleness and sensuousness, with swifter and wider appeal than the gravity, discipline, and stateliness of the dhrupad, reach their fullest expression in the khayal. The word itself means imagination and the elaboration of the khayal is decorated with all possible imaginative graces. The structure is considerably relaxed. It is rarely that singing begins with the alap (free melodic elaboration); more often the alap is done in the melodic elaboration of the phrases of the composition itself. There is an extensive exploration of all possible resources of gamak.

Daiviya Sangeet | Heritage of Music | Bhajans and Scripture