Indian classical music

I went to a concert few weeks back, and I was talking to an uncle friend of mine who I made from seeing each other at concerts pretty often. I asked him about his son, who I saw at a concert about a year prior, he looked like he had grown so much since I last saw him I thought he was already in college. Turns out he's still in high school. Lol. Anyway, he was telling me his son is taking a music history class in his high school, and he was wondering if I wanted to go in and give a lecture about Hindustani music to his class. I was like "yes." He was saying that I could give a lecture similar to the ones I've given before concerts I organize, and I said "Yes." He was saying that way, people could have a better idea of what's going on with the music when they hear it, I said "Yes." he said "people need to understand this is not 'exotic' music, there's a lot of thought behind it!" and I said "Yes!" It was so crazy listening to an uncle saying a lot of the same things said in conversations I've had with other musicians about how people who've only heard "indian music" on Subway commercials respond to our music. At my own performances, I often get people coming up to me after a show asking about the music, or my instrument, and a lot of time we share cool experiences we've each had with Hindustani music. Sometimes though, more often than I would hope, I get someone (usually non-South Asian in my experience) telling me about their first exposure to 'sitar music' after hearing the Beatles, or going to a Raaavi Shaynkaaar concert, and how the music sounded so "foreign" and "alien." Seriously, those are real adjectives people have used to describe the music I was playing, right after they heard me play it. My point is, the feeling that Hindustani music sounds "exotic" is often frustrating when it's coming from someone who doesn't know much about the music other than it's not western music. It was cool sharing those feelings with someone of my parents generation.

So after the uncle was telling me about his son's class, I told him I'd love to do it. We exchanged numbers (which we should have done a long time ago, cause we've known each other for years!) and made plans. I just did the lecture demo today, and it was awesome, it went really well. It was a high school in an affluent suburb north of Chicago, I got lost a little looking for it cause it looked like it was an old mansion. They must have taken an old mansion and turned it into a high school or something, cause seriously, it looked like a mansion or a country club or something. The kids were all juniors and seniors I think, cause it was an advanced placement music theory class. Mostly white kids, one Asian girl, my uncle-buddy's son who played tabla with me, and maybe a few other kids of color I missed, but mostly white. I talked about history of music in South Asia, the different types of music in South Asia, about raags and taals, and had them count along to teen taal. Then played a little in Miyan Ki Todi. It was fun!

Afterwards, I was thinking about the fact that I was in an affluent burb in the north, that proly had a decent budget for their fine arts program—decent enough to afford two music theory classes. Hello. In my high school, band and orchestra were optional, and it was assumed you'd learn more in-depth music theory in college. But what about schools that don't have big fine arts programs? Do those kids have access to experiencing lectures like the one I gave today? I'd imagine not. I know there are programs out there to send artists and musicians in school to do just what I did today to schools that may not have the access to do it on their own. After today, I was thinking I should hook up with those programs and do this more often!

"Nowadays due to economic and political conditions the Indian people are mostly thinking about their daily lives, how to earn, how to live. Naturally, they are so engaged that they have no time for the sake of art-painting, sculpture or music. In the old days, men were not so busy earning due to a smaller population and the patronage of rajas and maharajas. Now there are no rajas or maharajas, who will patronize the artist? Suppose a painter works 1-2 years on a piece, his price is 4 lakhs of rupees, who will buy it except a raja or maharaja? At that time good musicians were helped by the state, “Please, stay in my state, play on and you teach these students.” The students didn’t need to pay a salary because the state provided for them. The guru just taught them, and the guru didn’t worry about food or anything; the state provided education for their families, everything. Now there are no states, the government ruined all the states. And what is the government doing now? Nothing! The public doesn’t have too much money, so the public can’t support the artist. Most people are engaged in many kinds of jobs. Some go to the office in the morning and after returning they do another job, so how will they get the time to spend with the music or any fine arts? It’s not possible. To become a good artist requires much time, a minimum 10-12 hours a day in your art. For instrumental music, the students need to learn vocal, and nowadays the students don’t learn vocal. They start, ‘sa ri ga ma pa dha ni’ and then learn one or two gats. Within 2-4 years, “Manilal-ji, I want to sit for an audition, please recommend my name.” How is it possible? I can’t say the future position of our real classical music, but it may be ruined. And the influences of Calcutta TV and commercial pop music-the young generation is less interested in classical music. Before there was TV or popular film music, the school students, the college students, boy and girls used to listen to classical music. Now every house has TV blasting and they don’t get the opportunity to listen to good music. This is my opinion, I can’t say about the position in the future…What about my son? My father taught me sitar and I had to learn because he wanted me to become a musician. But who will support my son, who will give him food-only playing sitar, no food? The government will not back him nor give him any money to practice sitar. Naturally, Subhashish may have to do some job."

Taken from an interview with Manilal Nag

I’ve been listening to a recording of Bilaskhani Todi by Shujaat Khan that a sitar buddy hooked me up with, and it's such a sad, sad raag. I think i’m slowly falling into a depression just listening to it... Lol, but its sooooo good. I tried looking up online what the notes and details of the raag are, and although online sources are hardly a source of learning compared to formally learning a raag from a teacher, here’s a general idea of what I found:

Ascending: S r g m g P d n S’

re, ga, da, and ni are komal (flat), and seems that playing ma to pa is not allowed. But again, I’d learn this raag formally before i tried playing it...

Descending: S’ n d P d m g r g r S

Same komal swars (notes) as in the ascending, but it also seems that pa to ma on the descending is also not allowed.

So if you wanted to try to play this raag on a western instrument, with C as your sa:

Ascending: C Db Eb F Eb G Ab Bb C

Descending: C Bb Ab G Ab F Eb Db Eb Db C

Cool.

I had dinner with my parents last night, and apparently, my mom played the dilruba for four years in high school. Crazy! She said that her final year, her teacher was encouraging her to go to college for music, but my mom thought it would be better for her “professionaly” to go into nursing, so she did. But that explains a bit about me, huh? I wonder if my mom picked the dilruba up today, what it would be like for her, if she’d be able to remember some of the stuff she learned in high school or not. That would be CRAZY, if I could have her teach me some of the music SHE learned. Hello! Can you tell I’m excited about the idea? :P

Here’s a picture I found on the web of a girl playing a dilruba. this is NOT my mom.

Wanna listen to some Nikhil Banerjee? I tripped over this nice little collection of some of his work. (You might have to rename the files to add ”.mp3” in order for them to play if you’re using windows…)

Also, check out this article by Shubha Mudgal where she vents about talent search shows popping up in India claiming to be “classical,” but selling an incorrect or washed out version of the classical music tradition, and how she sees that as being a problem for the dissemination of classical music to a new listening audience. I’ve never seen the shows she’s talking about, but she makes some good points. Go shubhaji.

I wonder if anyone’s ever done any extensive studies of how classical music has dealt with the political communal tension between south asian communities—if it has helped unify or divide in any way, or has been an impartial swede. I was sitting in maninder’s tabla class one day, and some dude started asking about how muslims and hindus “deal with each other” in the music, implying that the hindu/muslim tension that arose out of partition somehow translated to hindus and muslim tension between musicians and artists. Both maninder and I seemed to answer the same: that religion, and regional politics always seems to end up mute points when it came to music. Indian classical music has a long tradition of brahmin musicians taking muslims as their teachers, and vice-versa. Ravi Shankar, a hindu, received training that turned him into the amazing musician he is today from Ali Akbar Khan’s father, Allaudin Khan, a muslim man. And a series of the most memorable jugalbandis (duets) that have ever taken place have been with Ravi Shankar on sitar and Ali Akbar Khan on sarod, between a hindu and a muslim. Although these examples highlight religious harmony more than the geographic, political harmony so many of us are wishing for, it does speak a bit about how music has the power to make some political differences seem petty, through showing equality of ourselves as people, regardless of the differences in what we claim ourselves to be.

I started thinking about this after reading this article about a visually challenged Pakistani girl who mastered Dhrupad, with the desire to use music to bring Indian and Oakistan closer together.

”Music in the real sense of the term has tremendous significance in the lives of human beings even in the present day set up. Music has a soothing effect and is highly effective in releasing tensions, stress and strain... Moreover, music has an ennobling quality. It helps to foster peace of mind and harmony among people. It helps to transcend communal barriers. You will agree that most of the luminaries of Hindustani classical music happen to be Muslims. Where would you find such an example of communal harmony?" Pt. Debu Chaudhuri

There are a couple vocal concerts coming to town in the next month or so, and I’ve been trying to take that as an opportunity to learn more about the vocal style of Indian classical music. In the classical world, it’s understood that all instrumental music was initially made and performed with the intention of emulating human vocal music—so the vocal style is like the queen-supreme. So it's probably important that I know SOMETHING about it.

When I first started listening to classical music, vocal songs always turned me off. It seemed to me that I needed a lot more patience to sit and listen to a 60 minute vocal rendition of a raag than an instrumental rendition. But that was probably just cause I was more familiar with how instrumental compositions approached the music, and because of that, it engaged me more. After learning to listen to instrumental music and being able to somewhat see how songs are being broken up as I’m listening to them (reading the inserts that come with the CDs help TREMENDOSLY), I’ve started revisiting some vocal CDs that my boy Ajit hooked me up with back in the day, and some other CDs I’ve recently purchased, to take another listen.

I’ve been doing some reading on the net, and although personal testimonials on the net can never be taken as golden information, it's at least provided a start. Here’s a nice little doc on musicalnirvana.com, and another short article on a site who’s purpose I’m still not sure of. Here’s what I’ve gathered from them.

• Dhrupad music is the oldest of vocal music, who’s history often gets traced back to the legendary Tansen in Akbar’s mughal court in the 16th century. It’s key characteristics include the sung lyrics, and the adherence to rhythm and melody, or taal and raag.
• Khayal was developed sometime later. Either from different gharanas (schools of music) taking a different approach to the music, or folk music developing into a more intricate classical system. It's more improvisational in nature, and includes more of an emphasis on decorations of notes in melodies and ornamentation.
• Whereas Dhrupad puts a strong emphasis on text and lyrics, Khayal keeps the actual content of the lyrics as secondary to the way they are used to express the nuances of the raag. Lyrical syllables that have no dictionary meaning are often used, and when lyrics are used, they are not kept as the main emphasis of the performance.
• Khayal is more improvisiational, and therefore allows more room for ornamentation development within a composition.

This in-dept history of Indian classical music has been providing my latest distraction at work. If you’re interested at all in the development of classical music starting from about 3000 years ago, that sites a helluva start.

The other day I came in to work, and there was a flyer on my desk. A nice looking print on a brand new, fresh sheet of paper. There was a copy of this flyer on every desk in my office, and after looking at its contents closer, I realized there was proly a copy of it on every desk in my whole building, since it was distributed by my building’s management. What was the flyer about? Recycling. Probably about 6000 brand new sheets of paper wasted to promote recycling. Does anyone else see anything backwards about that? Wouldn’t e-mail, or one poster per floor, have been more effective considering the point of the message? Or hell, be wasteful, but at least be wasteful on post-consumer product and use already recycled paper or something. It's amazing how sometimes people with the best intentions could be totally absent-minded about some things.

Okay, two words. “Holy”, “Crap.” I went to the Kushal Das show yesterday afternoon with Avani, and it was freaking awesome. Kushal Uncle (no relation, just a term of endearment) was WAILING on the sitar. It was very humbling to see such an amazing performance. You realize even though you may have come so far in your own musical talents, you have yet so far to go.

Maninder ended up never making it out to the show cause his parents were in town, and when I was talking to the artists after the show I totally forgot to send some of his love their way. Oooof, so my bad. But after the show Avani and I got a bite to eat at this Armenian restaurant off Michigan, and then called it a night. But maaaan, what a great show!