Indian Classical Music is probably the best know, the most widely circulated, the foremost of non-western traditional types of music that has estabilshed itself in the world. Unlike most of the music of Asisa, Africa, America and Oceania, the professional art music of India has been extensively studied by musicologists, is often performed in public concerts in the West and has been object of many puplications and records of excellent quality.
Musicians Are celebrated as the violinist Yehudi Menuhin or, in another domain, Georges Harrison of the Beatles, or indeed the guitarist Jhoen MacLaughlin, have show through their various approaches the ways in which Indian music attracted them.
Over the years a number of Indian musicians have gained international recognition, for example Ravi Shankar (Sitar), the Dagar Brothers (dhrupad), Ali Akbar Khan (sarod), Ram Narayan (sarangi), Hariprasad Chaurasia (bansuri), Vilayat Khan (sitar), Bismillah Khan (shehnai), L.Subramanian (violin) and Shiv Kumar Sharma (santur). No less remarkable is the significant number of westerners who not only listen to, study, and learn Indian classical music, but who also sing and play in the tradition some reaching a very high level of attainment, even to the point giving conecerts in India.
Ravi Shankar.
Indian Music has a very long history which, if judging only from the writings, goes back to the second millenium B.C. with the Vedas, sacred hymns composed in pre-classical Sanskrit. Music theory, considered one of the four principal sciences derived from the Vedas, figures in amny writings, the oldest of which date from the fifth century B.C. Classical music, such as it has been bequeathed to us by oral transmission from master to disciple, is a highly sophisticated art, grounded in improvistion within a framework fixed by rules that are precise and complex.
As with any modal music, melodies are based on specific scales (contained within the concept of raga) anchored to a drone (the modal pole or more simply tonic) which is not heard (as it sometimes is in the other types of modal music and course in Western tonal music) but which is pre-eminently present from the start to the finish of every concept.
- The concept of Raga
The concept of raga lies as the heart of classical music. The raga is a particular musical musical framework, attributed to and corresponding to a period of the year (a season) or of the day (morning, midday, evening, night), or to an "ethos", a specific emotional atmosphere. this musical framework is defined by a specific modal sructure : ten or so fundamental modes (thaat), sometimes modified by minute intervallic variations (shrutis), articulated around the modal pole (the sa that serves as the anchor) and comprising two principal degrees of the scale (the vadi, the "speaker" and the samvadi, secondary central note). The type of melodic ascent (ahora) and descent (avaroha), the melodic formulae (pakad) and the particular ornaments (gamaka), the tempo (laya), are further elements that can identify the raga. There are very many raga, several hundreds of which are played today.
- The concept of Tala
Another aspect of Indian music is the rhythm (tala). Just as the melodic improvisation, the primary mark of the authentic artiste, is framed by the predefined architecture and layout of the pitches of the raga, so the rhythmic improvisation is held within a pre-etablished frame work, the Tala. There are a certain number of rhythmic structures (talas) that can built from binary amd ternary cells, from strong and weak beats and mesured rests. These structures are cyclical and each bears a name : tintal (4+4+4+4), dadra (3+3), rupak (3+2+2), karharava (4+4) etc. Of course, the art of variation, of syncopation, of a barely perceptible shifting before or after the beat, together with the creative imagination and the precision of the perormer are crucial. Each tala may be, in three different : slow (vilambit), moderato (madhya), and fast (drut).
