Recently, I was invited to take part in a discussion on the validity of astrology. Specifically, this was a Desi audience, so the particular brand of stellar stupidity that people leaned towards is so-called Vedic astrology. I say "so-called" because the oldest sources for it are two collections of texts called the Vedanga Jyothisha and the Brihat Parashara Horashastra (both ca. 700-600 BCE), which at best indicates that this might have been part of the original Vedanta when it was still an oral tradition or at least draws off of something taught therein. No real indication that the Vedas actually contained it until people appeared to start combining texts together a few centuries later. Even then, it was largely treated as an "auxiliary discipline" of learning often treated as valuable, but not crucial for an individual unless they sought an ascetic lifestyle. The term "Vedic Astrology" seems to be a more recent term coined during the early 1980s with the influx of Indian woo-woo self-help and Ayurvedic wishful thinking from the likes of Deepak Chopra.
As if it wasn't obvious from the mention of that second text, I happen to share my name (Parashar) with the person credited with authoring one of those two (and generally considered the more comprehensive) foundational texts. Apparently, some people still believe that because I'm apparently named after this person, I would also be a believer in the cosmological claptrap that is astrology. Because... the name makes the man...? That would imply that the guy I knew at my previous job named Scott Peterson must have murdered his wife and the guy I know in my current job who happens to be named Andrew Wakefield must be anti-vaccine... except that neither of those things are true. Apologies to Scott and Andrew for "outing" them as people who actually love their families and believe in actual medical facts. Well, that aside, the vast majority of Desis are believers, and that's largely attributable to how deeply entrenched it is in the culture. It isn't merely some newspaper entertainment page, but a core component of religion that births a bedrock industry that is viewed as being every bit as fundamental as electricity and water. In India, people aren't just talking horoscopes to pick up girls in a night club; corporate entities are having astrologers guide them; doctors refrain from providing care when the stars aren't right; a handful of courts and several rural panchayats (village governing chiefs) will not recognize marriages between people of incompatible birth horoscopes... this is no minor amusement for entertainment purposes -- people view horoscopes as a roadmap for life. In that light, I was somewhat eager to get into this discussion and seek out and demolish everything anybody had to offer to support this mark of shame unto the subcontinent.
A little too eager, it seems, as the pre-event commentary drove enough people to play the victim to drive the organizer to cancel. The truth hurts -- and therefore, people who reject truth as a matter of course are somehow automatically justified in hurling insults, while those who call a spade a spade are the hurtful ones. Sound familiar? I kind of expected some people to raise points about the history of astrology and how it is, at its most basic level, an early precursor to modern astronomy. People developed methods of calculating and predicting the apparent motion of celestial bodies through the sky and that set the stage for the real science of astronomy to follow. This much is true, and at best, it makes astrology a significant idea in the history of science not that that makes it science. Nonetheless, this argument never really showed up, so I was kind of surprised by that. Maybe people wanted to save that for the actual event.
So yesterday was the day associated with the festival of Karwa Chauth. The fourth day (hence "chauth") after the full moon following Dusshera. For my non-Hindu readers, I can summarize it as a day when women (by in large, married women) turn into Jesus. Okay, that's a bit extreme, but the simple form of it is that it is a ritual of willful self-sacrifice (in this case, fasting) for the imaginary benefit of someone else. It's profoundly nonsensical on the face of it and has no capacity whatsoever to be considered based in any way on reality. Well, there are so many things I could say about it. Many of the criticisms about it tend down the path of its inherent sexism because of the fact that only women really have to observe the fast with no reciprocal fasting on the part of the men. Some argue that it puts the role of the wife as a tool for the spiritual aid of the husband and not as an individual unto herself. Fortunately, it's not something observed in the part of India from which I hail, but that isn't the case with my wife. Nonetheless, nobody considers going through it in my house because it's an utter travesty.
In the modern era, it has been commercialized into a sort of Hindu Valentine's Day where fanciful images of romantic love are tied to the rituals. But just like Valentine's Day, none of those images have anything to do with how the day was originally defined. Valentine's Day, for instance, was originally a religious feast that celebrated the execution of a martyr. It only got connected with love in the High Middle Ages when courtly love was basically the primary M.O. of almost all literature of the age. That too, it only became the dominant mode of celebration in the post-industrial era. Karwa Chauth is much the same story. It's only associated with love because mythological literature and Bollywood tells us so. We associate Valentine's Day with love because Chaucer told us that's how it should be. We like diamonds because N.W. Ayer & Son told us we don't qualify as humans if we don't. We give out candy on Halloween because of commercialization of an older practice that involved bribing beggars for future prayers (at least, according to Shakespeare).
But commercialization and sexism aside, I have a problem with the whole vicarious sacrifice issue, as it seems to be a common thing. The whole premise of Karwa Chauth is the idea that by fasting from dawn to dusk, a woman can provide a divine blessing for health and longevity unto her husband or some other significant member of the opposite sex. Ummm... seriously?
A few days back, my wife posed a rhetorical question. She asked why it was necessary for girls to leave their homes after marriage and enter the homes of their in-laws, while the same was not explicitly required of the men they married. Considering the readership of this site is predominantly in the U.S., this may sound like a bit of an odd question, but it makes sense within the context of the pervading "old-fashioned" culture of India. It is actually an in-built component of the definition of marriage over their, even if "entering" someone else's home is more of a paper entry. It's something that even as the younger generation are starting to become more and more Westernized (at least in the urban parts of the country), and 99 out of every 100 Bollywood films espouses idealistic love-conquers-all romance that flies in the face of outdated parochial cultural attitudes about marriage and raising children... and yet these tinges remain.
It's a bit funny when I hear the anti-gay crowd here in the U.S. talk about preserving "traditional marriage", and I think back to how we define that in India. Really, the "traditional marriage" in India is closer to that which marriage actually was in ancient times. It wasn't originally a union between lovers; it was a union between tribes, where young able-bodied humans (where able-bodied for a man meant he could fight well enough to kill your enemies and able-bodied for a woman meant she was hot enough to bed frequently) were the units of trade to cement contracts. This is still reflected in India today where the culture views "marriage" as "marrying an entire family" rather than something between two people. The local community including neighbors and distant relatives you've probably never met and friends, family doctors, and lawyers all expressing some vested interest in the success of someone's marriage, regardless of whether it really has anything to do with them or not. Even to this day, we have a tendency to use the word "alliance" rather than fiance/fiancee.
One of my music theory professors once commented on a common "complaint" he tended to receive from many of his students. The complaint was that after learning a little bit about music -- even a single semester of theoretical training, they could no longer listen to music of any kind in the same way. They could no longer listen to some pop tune or a symphony without ending up analyzing it to some degree. To which, he replied, and I agree -- "well, that's a good thing!" It means they're appreciating it on a higher level than ever before.
Think of all the creationists who chastise scientifically literate people that they have no sense of wonder; no appreciation for the awesomeness of "God's creation." Real scientists have a far superior sense of awe at the universe than any creationist because they actually understand it rather than simply bask in the mystery. They take greater awe in it than any creationist ever could because they are able to connect what they see with the naked eye with everything from the microscopic dance of superposed quantum fields all the way up to the bright and brief lives of supermassive stars in galaxies hundreds of thousands of light years across knowing that's only a fraction of the way. Not only is there more that they see (or for that matter, can see because it's not all a mystery), but the dazzling visions that flood their minds are things that are actually there!
I take the same viewpoint on music, because people who actually understand music have the ability to not merely let it wash over them like some ethereal experience, but they also pick up on the way the composer created those effects. Why does this tune sound sad? Why does this tune sound ominous? Why is this riff catchy? The deeper you study, the more details you pick up on. And then the real genius of the musicians actually comes into view. That doesn't happen when you don't have the knowledge. Knowledge is power.
Those who have read through any of my previous posts, any of my articles or papers I wrote in college on the subject, or for that matter, my much older and very disorganized rant on thePolygoners -- a site which I have not updated in well over a year (the next update will probably only come when I can unfreeze the research on my simplified modular BRDF equations) -- know my stance on tradition. It's inexcusable, indefensible, and has no place in society. If I were ever to form a religion of my own, I would definitely put into its "commandments" the edict that tradition is a sin. So it should come as no surprise, then, that I can offer no assent whatsoever to any notions that exist within the classical music circles on the weight of tradition in music.
If you haven't read my stance on it, then let me just make it clear here once more : Tradition is simply a flowery word that people use to justify what it actually is -- NOT THINKING FOR ONESELF. I'm not at all sorry to say this, and it will never really be possible to overstate this.
Specifically as it applies to music, I can offer no agreement to the idea that tradition should be a filter of any kind nor should it inform any systematic concentration of boundaries. This is ridiculous, and ultimately limiting to what should be an art form. The weight of tradition is pretty well-cemented in Indian culture, to the point where it bleeds into everything and poisons the waters of life in every corner. So it's no surprise that tradition has its talons gripping onto something like music.
Indian classical music has a history of not really being passed down in quite as systematic and theoretical a fashion as Western music often is. One of the things that makes this difficult is the nature of how the music is expressed. On a technical level, you can essay it with terminology of microtonal inflections, 22-tone just temperament, linear and non-linear glissandos, etc. It so happens, though that people in India haven't really put that down to such a degree of formality, and approach the teaching in a hands-on sort of way where demonstration becomes the tool of choice. Which in a lot of ways, is strange to me, especially for Carnatic music, which is extremely technical and is generally attended by very technically knowledgeable audiences. Nonetheless, we don't tend to learn how to evoke the characteristics of raga X by going over the properties of raga X and going over development of those properties... rather, we hear phrases performed by our gurus, and how they present both in freeform melodic essay of a raga (i.e. alapana) and in song, and draw patterns off of those that we pick up from these sources. What this leaves in is a lineage of style, because we tend to learn a raga the way our guru taught us, and with the same example sources.
This, by itself, is not so bad, though, because it still leaves room for a variety of artists to sally forth carrying a variety of different style lineages. The difficulty lies in how new ground is covered. New ground and new exploration is done through the active study, in-depth analysis, as well as new compositions, and absorption of what other people do. There are definitely artists who do this, particularly the major scholars of music like Prof. S. Ramanathan and Prof. S.R. Janakiraman, but there are relatively few who attain any sort of major acceptance on that basis (often, one has to attain popularity separately from that). The weight of tradition and also benediction unto your guru and the fact that even those who do develop their own schools of thought are typically raised into music through a path that involves strict adherence to the way they are taught. Irrespective of the potential to use that knowledge and advance further, there is a ballast there which is difficult to shed because it is so deeply ingrained in how one came to understand music in the first place.
In terms of the damage done by tradition, this is comparatively less significant, because artists are the ones affected, and artists are the ones capable of attaining the knowledge to break those shackles. It is much more of a problem when it is the weight of tradition which blocks change, and it makes for some results which are, to put it mildly, disgraceful.
Picking up where I left off on the point of bhakthi in music, I felt I had to address first the connection between the music and performance and the the devotion to the imaginary divine. The vocalist, Vijay Siva, had a counterpoint to my gripes as I addressed them in part 4a. The point was that we cannot escape the fact that the music of India exists very much because of the religion, and that it owes its very existence to Hinduism. I don't really deny that point in the sense that religion and the various aspects of Hinduism are precisely why Indian music is the way it is. That is a different thing from saying that its merits exist in the frame of religion, or that devotion to the religion is an integral component to the music. Indeed, one cannot escape the fact that so much of the lyrical content is devotional, but that doesn't mean music itself must be.
I'll admit that I've been writing these to a certain extent keeping in mind that a majority of the audience will be people unfamiliar with any of the characteristics of Indian classical music in general. The average person outside the community knows Indian music only in two forms -- wildly famous personalities like Ravi Shankar, or Bollywood dance numbers. Both of these hold their attraction generally on account of the aura of being exotic and unusual... well, and in the latter case, the opportunity to ogle sexy starlets. Many otherwise don't really know what makes Indian music the way it is, or even the difference between a tambura and a sitar. For the most part, the explosion of interest in Hindustani music in the west during the 1960s was made up of hippies who, under the influence of irresponsibly high quantities of experimental drugs, found themselves entranced by the timbral qualities of instruments like the sitar and tabla. That has changed somewhat over the past few decades where most any student of music in any system has at least a cursory understanding of it on a theoretical level, even if seriously outdated.
There is a common sentiment throughout most of the world that Indian music has a deeply meditative quality to it that delivers a sort of religious experience. Even if you ignore the qualitative aspects of it, it is hard to ignore that the lyrical content is almost entirely made up of devotional music, with perhaps padams and javalis being the only real exceptions which are inherently non-devotional in form. This gets into another point on Indian classical music, which, for me, inspires a fairly heated rant; that is the notion that bhakti (devotion) is somehow an essential, and even of primal importance to the music. Not merely the performance, but to the appreciation thereof. I find this not merely ridiculous, but tremendously insulting... and by insulting, I mean to say that it is an insult to humankind itself.
I suppose I'm a little bit more free to speak on such a matter in that I'm not a practicing artist. When a practicing Carnatic vocalist, namely T.M. Krishna, expounded the same sentiments, it raised quite a controversy. By contrast, when Sanjay Subrahmanyam (who also doesn't really buy into this belief) was asked to comment, he is left with little recourse but to dodge the question.*
I suppose the first point that makes me fume with anger is this idea that it is only through devotion to the divine that one can truly come to understand the beauty of the music. There are countless occasions on which a member of the audience will comment to an artist that some particular song brought to his/her mind, the very image of "the Lord." Fine. That person may well have such a deep devotion that the level of artistry evoked such imagery in their minds. But is it fair to say that that was the true measure of quality? Is it fair to presume that because the artist's rendering of a song had that effect on that particular person, that the artist as well shared in that same feeling of bhakti? What if someone else in the audience had a similar experience with respect to a different deity? What if a non-believer in the audience was moved to tears, when none of the believers were? What if the artist(s) themselves were non-believers, or at least followers of a different religion?
I find it an egregious insult to say that without sharing in the very same bhakti, it is impossible to deliver a quality performance or to even enjoy a heartfelt performance. I have seen all too many an article on this topic from the faithful which asserts that devotion to the divine is inextricable from music. If that were really true, there could never be a non-believer who contributes to the field of music. Similarly, one would have to say that it is sacrilegious of a Muslim to sing a song about Hindu deities or their respective folklore. Oh wait, that actually happens... quite often, in fact. There's a simple reason why this is the case -- musicians actually care about music. I figured this would go without saying, but apparently not. How did figures like Jon B. Higgins or George Harrison attain any sort of proficiency in Indian styles of music or classical instruments without having a deep devotion to Hindu gods, or at least converting? It's because they took it seriously as an art form on its own irrespective of its origin or content.
The characteristics of ragas, the various pitch effects (or gamakas), the interplay of rhythm, the overall flow and structure of a song, the purity with which it's rendered, and the inventiveness of a performer to devise intricate tunes and variations from there... none of these are religious qualities in any way. Similarly, we associate a lot of ragas with the divine in ways that have absolutely no extrinsic justification. Rather, people simply decided by fiat, for example that Shiva was fond of a particular raga, so it is called Sankarabharanam (ornament of Shiva). Does this mean, for instance, that Mozart carried a deep Shiva-bhakti? Most of his symphonies, save for #25 and #40 are effectively in Sankarabharanam**. Symphonies #25 and #40, by the way, are in Natabhairavi**. I know the system he applied is completely different, but the point here is to illustrate the absurdity of associating a tune or scale with a deity and asserting that this is a necessary association.
The main reason I bring this video of Prof. S. R. Janakiraman to your attention is not just to bring up technical details about the ragas, but to point out that the details are strictly technical. The qualities of the raga lie in those technical details, and it is through the knowledge of these aspects that one is able to bring out those qualities.
Say that I wanted to do an RTP in a rare raga. For the sake of discussion, I'll choose the 14th melakartha raga -- Vakulabharanam. At no point in my decision to do so am I necessarily expressing a motivation deep down in my heart towards worship of the supposed mother of Tirupathi Balaji. If I was to do such a thing, it would be out of interest and curiosity in trying to explore an area rarely covered and see what I can find out. To be sure, we have to at least acknowledge that the raga Vakulabharanam (Basant Mukhari in Hindustani) is not really Indian in origin. Its history traces back to a Persian scale named Hijaz.
I feel that to address all the aspects of this particular gripe I have will take more than one post, so I'm going to divide this up and cover more in a later posting. Whatever you want to believe about the sort of religious experiences you might have, what cannot be escaped is the fact that devotion is a very personal thing. There is no other person in the world who is going to share exactly your particular flavor of bhakti. Delivering a performance that is provocative to your feelings of devotion says nothing about the devotion of the performer. For all you know, that person's devotion may simply be towards a faithful reproduction of the qualities of the raga... it may be a devotion to his teacher and his teacher's particular style... or it may just be that he/she is more knowledgeable about music than you are and is demonstrating that gap through imaginative and well-thought-out tunes that elucidate the feel or bhaavam of the raga very very well. That is the first point I want to get across. It is not devotion to any imaginary divine being that matters, but devotion to the search for knowledge and depth of understanding of the system of music that makes all the difference. It is through that knowledge that not only can one individual artist come to achieve mastery, but also a rasika (fan of music) among the audience can truly appreciate all the qualities of it.
And conversely, if you are so dyed-in-the-wool with your faith that you see a god when some musicians are singing/playing, you're obviously too preoccupied with your god on the brain to pay attention to the fact that there's still more music being made.
... to be cont'd.
* For the readers out there who don't know Tamil, aside from the joke he referenced from the drama series, the main point is that he replied by saying that he's not equipped to answer such a question, and that he has never had any sort philosophical understanding to even attempt it.
** The raga Sankarabharanam has a scale which is equivalent to the Ionian or Major scale, albeit in just temperament. Natabhairavi, similarly, is equivalent to the Aeolian or Minor scale.
Given parts 1 and 2, I feel like I've provided enough of a background on the systems of Indian classical music to begin with the actual topical rants I had intended to put out. While I haven't really provided a thorough or complete explanation of anything, it was only intended to set the stage for people who are otherwise unfamiliar to have some understanding of why and in what context I bring up the topics I will be covering.
The first of the topics I want to get on is the question of importance of sahityas (lyrics) in Indian music. This is also somewhat of a significant topic for me as a would-be instrumentalist (once upon a time), an atheist (insofar as so much of Indian classical music is devotional), and as part of a musical family where most of the people in my family are vocalists. Almost 20 years ago, my father also published an article on the very same topic, and he approached it from his perspective as a vocalist, but one who had also studied violin originally. I have some expectation that I will exhibit only a slight divergence from his viewpoint, but that view has also expanded on his part. In any case, while I'm not going to go in the same format as he did in his article (where he simply takes the presentation of opposing arguments), but I am going to be fairly even-handed in the conclusions I draw.
My first point here is that music, no matter the region from which it originates, is ultimately a pattern. There is no real specificity to it to say that it communicates a very particular message or carries a well-defined baggage in its output. It is simply a pattern, and any piece can be recognized based on some characteristic of its pattern. If I play for you : A-A-A-F-- , you'd probably recognize it instantly as the opening to Beethoven's 5th symphony. But then, why would you? Beethoven's 5th begins with G-G-G-Eb--. Regardless, the relative shape of the pattern is still the same; it's merely shifted up a step, and you recognize that pattern.
Given that, it is very hard to say that lyrics are significant to a pattern, except in one key factor -- the presence of N syllables in the lyrics means that one needs to parse rhythm in N units, and that offers room for at least N distinct notes in a phrase. Obviously, it gets more complicated than that, but coming from an instrumentalist's point of view, that is how we distinguish performances of songs which have otherwise similar progressions. Some songs, you might find, are actually melodically identical (even all the way through!), but because the lyrics are different, we subdivide rhythm differently. It's also a way to differentiate between when we improvise in the form of neraval (improvised tunes set to the song lyrics) and swaram (improvised tunes using the swara/solfeggio syllables). Where the latter has us parsing rhythm according to the format and pace that the performer sets, the former needs to follow the lyrical pattern.
I find that Carnatic music puts some weight on this aspect quite a lot more than a lot of other systems. As mentioned in Part 1, it's a very vocally conceived form of music as it follows the exposition of an individual voice. Even while I was studying violin, I was always taught to sing something before learning to play it. It wasn't just because singing is higher priority, but also because a violinist is equipped to be an accompanist to a singer, and needs to be prepared to have some idea in his/her head as to how a vocalist would approach something (i.e. you have to think like a singer).
Some people take the position that a dedication to sahitya-bhaavam (lit. "the form of lyrics") is not valuable in instrumental performance. The pair of brother violinists simply known as Ganesh & Kumaresh apply this sort of idea to the extreme that when the performance is strictly instrumental, that sahitya-bhaavam is entirely non-existent.
Personally, I don't completely agree with this, because of the fact that it is a form of music which is vocally conceived for one. Secondly, many of these songs have been written with the lyrics in mind and can be distinguished by that parsing which is endemic to the poetry. A differently structured poem can yield a differently structured song, even if the tunes are similar. In a concert I attended a few weeks ago, the elder of the two brothers (Ganesh on the left in the video) raised an example where he played a short few lines in the raga Suddha Hindolam. Immediately, we all recognized the tune as the song "Manasuloni"... to which he laughed and said "I didn't play that. I played 'Thunai Purindarul'." Indeed the first few phrases are melodically identical (though not the rest of the song), but it is worth noting that he did parse the rhythm as if there were more syllables. "Ma-na-su-lo-ni" has 5 syllables. "Thu-nai-Pu-rin-da-rul" has 6 syllables, and if we had paid attention to the rhythm, we all might have caught it. Instead, it so happens that Manasuloni is the more popular and famous of the two songs, so when we heard the pattern, that was the song that crossed our minds first.
The counterpoint to this is that he also played it in such a way that the difference between the songs was there. I should also mention that it leaves out the importance of a instrumentalist's role as accompaniment to vocalists. While it is difficult to do this with many instruments (e.g. flute, because it is too pure or nadaswaram because it is too loud), an instrument like a violin is perfectly suited to that sort of a role, and it is why it is the single most favored accompaniment instrument (the formal word is "pakhavadhyam").
I will say, though, that I applaud Ganesh and Kumaresh for their compositions in a new format they've termed as Ragapravaanam ("formatted melody"), where it is essentially a song with no lyrics. That is something that is perfectly valid from a musical standpoint, and I don't see any reason to consider it any less Carnatic or Hindustani simply on the basis of that. True, we already have the form of Thillana and Tarana, which technically have no words (or only a small section of lyrics in the case of Thillana), but they also have a well-defined focus on rhythm which already separates them from other songs. At the same time, I don't quite see the point of the other format they've created called Kriti-darpanam ("kriti mirroring"). "Kriti" is another existing song and lyrical format, which is pretty much the most common in concerts. The idea of their Kriti-darpanam is to have a song without lyrics that sounds very similar to existing songs which do have lyrics. Well, if you're going to go that close to existing songs which already have lyrics, why not just play those songs? I can only really see this format as a vehicle to get their viewpoint about importance of lyrics across to listeners.
My favorite violinist ever, M.S. Gopalakakrishnan (or MSG) exemplifies the power of the violin to levels unimaginable. His style of playing is one that stresses the ability to make as close-to-vocal inflections and effects and clearly enunciate every tone as it would be done by a singer. More importantly, when playing as pakhavadhyam, he adapts his style to that of the lead performer.
In the video linked above (embedding disabled) of MSG and his daughter, Dr. M. Narmada on violin, you can hear rather distinctly how every note he plays stands out on its own and is clearly "shaped" such that its tonal inflection is clearly present. Part of that lies in his characteristic bowing technique and the way he accelerates the bow to create a sort of "rounded" sound out of the instrument. Yet he will functionally violate that in some instances. If a song contains, for instance, a thick double-k sound in the lyrics somewhere, he will deliberately scratch his bowing on those points -- the reason being that a "double-k" when vocalized has that same sort of scratchy character to it. In essence, he pronounces the words on his instrument. In the same video linked above, around the 6:50 mark, he does a few heavily stylized expressions which emulate recited spoken vocalizations.
Where I think I differ from the people who do put a lot of weight on the importance of sahitya is this -- the meaning is not that significant. The classical counterpoint to the people who value lyrics is the case that when we really look at a measure of how much people really understand the depth of a raga, for instance, the exposition of that is in raga alapana, which has no words to it in the first place. It's simply pure freeform melodic improvisation with no constraints. A complete exposition of the capacities of an artist with a particular raga would lie in ragam-thanam-pallavi, and while the pallavi section of that contains words, it only really contains a single line of poetry (and it's not rare to take that line from an existing song), which is hardly enough to convey a whole lot of meaningful content. For that very reason, it doesn't really matter to me a great deal if someone writes beautiful lyrics about a god or about an eggplant.
Secondly, I highly disagree with the practice in Indian classical music with associating a song with its lyricist. Regularly, we tend to say that the "composer" of a song is actually the person who wrote the poetry, and not necessarily the person who set it to music. In many cases, these may well be the same person, but this is not always true. Some 1500 Carnatic songs are attributed to a legendary 16th century female poet named Meera Bai, when in fact many of them are set to tunes in ragas which did not even exist in her time. In reality, she composed the poetry, and dozens and dozens of people after her have set these poems to music, and indeed many of the same poems have been set to several tunes. It is also not uncommon for the original composer to write his own tune, but someone else comes along and sets that poem to a different tune... and yet, the poet is the one credited with the song.
In the video above, Thanjavur S. Kalyanaraman is performing a tune he wrote in the raga Sumanesa Ranjani. Yet, the composer is apparently Subramanya Bharati (commonly referred to as 'Bharatiyar'). Well, Bharatiyar wrote the poem, and he also did set it to music in a completely different raga (Mohana Kalyani, or so I'm told), but this tuning in Sumanesa Ranjani is entirely SKR's. I cannot, for the life of me, figure out why that task of setting the lyrics to music is secondary to the actual drafting of lyrics. True, poetry, especially in South India, is intimately tied together with music and many feel that the default mode of performance for a poem is to sing it rather than merely recite it. I also get that we classify a lot of forms based not on musical format, but on poetry format (e.g. bhajans, ghazals, qawwalis, etc). When all is said and done, however, we are talking about music here, and music does not lie in words alone.
Because of this, I also don't put a lot of importance on understanding of Hindu mythology for people to really "get" Indian classical music. "Getting" the poetry thereof, sure... but who says that that's what good Indian classical music is all about? Having a rudimentary understanding of characteristics of Hinduism as a religion and how it differs from others is certainly meaningful in elucidating why Indian music is the way it is; I elaborated on this somewhat in Part 1. If you're really interested in the significance of a certain set of lyrics, then, yes, having a background in the mythology and the stories does help. The bhajans written by Meera Bai are written in praise of Krishna, and make passing references to certain events which lie in the collected stories of the deity. Being able to catch those references is something that could only really be done by someone who knows the stories, to be sure. My contention is that you don't need to have that knowledge to be able to appreciate the tune, the rhythm, the performance, the structure, the quality of support from accompanists, etc. There is a big difference in what I might be looking for if I was going to a musical concert as opposed to, say, a dance drama or a harikatha performance, where it pays to have some context. Sure, you may have some greater understanding than someone who is simply listening to the music, and not to the lyrics, but I don't accept the idea that such an appreciation should take a higher precedence in a musical rendering. The flipside of this is that a lot of Indian classical music performances tend to involve the audience to a great deal, and the audience often needs to have some depth of knowledge about music itself to really appreciate the finer points of the performance. In fact, they often do, depending on what level of concert you're talking about. Many times, when I've seen friends of mine go to a Carnatic concert for the first time, they are surprised by how audience members are keeping track of complex rhythmic cycles, or engaged in discussion with the artists. This behavior varies widely, of course. There are singers like Aruna Sairam whose performances can be considered "beginner-friendly" vs. people like Sanjay Subramaniam who goes so deep on a theoretical level that you'd pretty much need to be a musician yourself to follow anything he does.
As a student of music, I suppose it is natural for me to put some weight on tunes over lyrics. Some part of it also comes from the fact that India has so many languages that you're going to hear lyrics in languages you don't understand. Then of course, there's the fact that I'm an atheist, and a lot of devotional songs are going to have lyrical content that I simply don't care about. I simply have to say, though, that if you care so much about the lyrics, it begs the question of why you're listening to music as opposed to going to some poetry slam or dedicating your time to harikatha essays. Forgive me for giving a damn about music when I'm listening to... well... music.
In order to highlight a little more the differences between Hindustani and Carnatic music, I feel it is necessary to illustrate through audio samples. Well, in this case, I'll use some video, but this should at least give you some ideas.
I'm starting off with some samples of the raga Madhuvanti. I chose this one to begin with because it is one that is actually quite similar across both systems, and yet in spite of that, you can still hear the difference across the two styles. Madhuvanti was originally a Hindustani raga, and went over to the Carnatic system maintaining a lot of its original character. Also, I should note that this raga has the same name in both systems, which is not often the case. It's more common for the two systems to maintain different names, especially if the ragas were originally Carnatic, or if both systems developed the ragas independently. For instance, Malkauns in the North is called Hindolam in the South. Kalavati in the North is called Valachi/Valaji in the South. It's also all the more confusing because, for instance, Hindustani has a raga called Thodi, which has no relation whatsoever to the Carnatic Todi, and is in fact closer to the Carnatic raga Subhapantuvarali.
Because of the quantity of content I'm likely to use (and also because some of these videos have embedding disabled), I'm giving you direct links to the videos rather than embedding them inline.
As a third point of comparison, I offer a rendition of a song in Madhuvanti by Voleti Venkateswarulu. Now while he is technically a Carnatic vocalist, it is worth noting that his style of rendering here has a hefty Hindustani flair to it, and so it's really a performance that blurs the line between the schools -- http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wnPQjcnBBzE
First big difference you'll probably notice is the pacing. Particularly when it comes to the pitch bends. They feel a great deal more linear and drawn out in the Hindustani style. One of the things about pitch effects in Hindustani music is that it is generally not limited to a minimum or maximum speed, which allows you to glissando very fast in high speed progressions or very slowly in slow progressions. This is also what gives Hindustani music that characteristically "meditative" or "hypnotic" quality that people often describe it as having. By contrast, the Carnatic performance keeps its pitch effects within a certain pace, which means that it can't generally get any slower than some X speed. This means that if you are going at a slower pace than X, you have to hold some notes dead still and perform your glissando after some delay. This does mean you may lose some "hypnotic" quality, but you also have the ability to highlight the shape of the pitch effects. This is why Carnatic music, by its nature, needs and has a wider variety of pitch effects than Hindustani in order to sharply define the character of a raga (what is called "bhaavam").
A finer detail worth noting is that the improvisation in the Hindustani performance is far more free-form. The vocalists are throwing out fairly arbitrary* phrases and coming back to the primary song theme when the time cycle comes back around (and part of the role of a Tabla player is to keep time so that the performer knows when that is if necessary). In both the Carnatic performances, even the one which blurs the borderlines, the vocalists are keeping in time with the structure and rhythmic parsing of the song lyrics (which is significantly more complex).
A common sentiment I see in textbooks is to analyze this difference to mean that Hindustani music offers a far greater improvisational aspect than Carnatic. I have to disagree with this to point out the fact that what is really happening is that Carnatic music has a different set of variables it is working with, so it improvises in multiple axes. What that means is that it can appear as if there is less overall improvisation in one aspect because you're dealing with multiple scales. Moreover, this is the level of pre-composed songs. Both systems have forms of performance which are meant to be more free-form by nature and that's where you see the real levels of what performers are capable of.
By extension, I can look at samples of the percussion solos in both systems.
Now both of these performances are completely improvised on-the-spot, but fairly short. I have been to performances where Raja Rao has done percussion solos as long as 45 minutes. I think it should be fairly easy to see that the complexity of calculations in the Carnatic counterpart is several notches more complex. Does this automatically mean that each of these Carnatic percussionists is superior to Zakir Hussain? Not necessarily. The real point here is that many of the types of calculations performed in the tani avarthanam are simply not even allowed for a tabla player. Syncopation across count boundaries and using gaps and overlaying entirely different beat cycles inside the same root cycle is something you just can't do in Hindustani music, but in Carnatic, it's all but a requirement. A Tabla player simply isn't at liberty to do those same types of things. Also, it is worth noting that percussion solos are comparatively new in Hindustani music. While they've been around in Carnatic music for at least 4-5 centuries, it didn't really exist in Hindustani music until Ravi Shankar and Alla Rakha brought it in, so perhaps there is time for it to develop still.
Again, the point is that for the same reason that I can't say that Hindustani is weaker on improvisation because its rhythmic complexity is held back, it is also unfair to say that Carnatic music is weaker on improvisation because it has more knobs to tweak in order to improvise on the melodic level.
* 'Arbitrary' here means that the phrases have no direct connection to the song itself and are purely germane to the raga and tala. There's a certain "feel" aspect to them being appropriate, but that is also heavily dependent on what other phrases were done recently.
I happen to be a student of the classical music of South India, referred to as Carnatic Music. Most people outside of India, when they think of Indian music, the name Ravi Shankar comes to mind. Well, nowadays at least one other Indian composer has a load of fame outside India (that being A.R. Rahman ever since Slumdog), but he's not really a "classical" composer per se. Ravi Shankar, otoh, is a student of the North Indian, or Hindustani, style of classical music, which holds a lot of differences from Southern India's school of thought on music.
Although the basic elements are the same -- still Sa-Ri-Ga-Ma, and so on -- the main differences lie in handling and what sorts of elements are prioritized. Now for those unfamiliar, I mention the Sa-Ri-Ga-Ma-Pa-Dha-Ni earlier as they are our swarasthana syllables. Basically, the equivalent of solfeggio syllables (Do-Re-Mi-Fa-So-La-Ti). Now Indian music utilizes a system of Just temperament rather than Equal temperament, and there are up to 22 pitches per octave. Just as we have flatted and sharped versions of pitches in the scale, Indian music has sharped, flatted, double-sharp/flatted of its notes. I could go on for several dozens of pages on the theoretical aspects of how the scales are formed, but that would be a separate topic.
The main difference between Hindustani music and Carnatic music lies in rhythm. Hindustani music is actually incredibly simple in these regards, with its most common rhythmic cycles being either Ektaal (12 beats divided into 6 pairs or 4 triplets) and Teentaal (16 beats divided into 4 quadruplets). Hindustani has only about 9 common talas (rhythm cycles), while Carnatic music has 35 "common" talas. The longest Hindustani tala is one of 28 counts, while the longest of Carnatic talas is one of 128 counts. Though in both cases, the most common talas are the ones used in the majority of songs, and more complex ones are reserved for exhaustive expositions of complexity by performers -- for example, a Ragam-Tanam-Pallavi, which involves 3 segments of improvisation (one melodic, one rhythmic, and one both which relies on a simple improvised stanza of poetry). In Hindustani music, among the most complex rhythmic calculations involve dealing with phrases at multiple speeds, while Carnatic music may do alternative parsings of rhythms with offsets, multiplications, overlays, etc. Conversely, this means that Hindustani music has to focus almost all of its improvisational aspect on development of melodic variations, while Carnatic does a fair split between plays on melody and on rhythm.
Take for instance a simple phrase like --
G - - - M - - - P - - - D - - - N - - - S - - - N - - - P - - -
This can be reparsed very simply at double the rate like so --
G - G - M - M - P - P - D - D - N - N - S - S - N - N - P - P -
But a more complex parsing might use a delay and an offset to syncopate across boundaries to come out something like this -- G - - M - M - P - - - D - D - N - - - S - S - N - - N - P - - -
Notice that the speed up and slowdown puts you ahead a fraction of a beat, so you end up with a fifth lining up with a beat boundary of the original calculation -- this is also generally considered a good note to line up on since the fifth is a strong interval no matter what system of music you are playing. These are the sorts of calculations a performer will do on the spot when improvising these sorts of phrases and variations.
Now, a lot of the differences that people notice between Indian classical music and Western music have little to do with these details, but they tend to notice more the drawn-out pitch bends and the smooth glissandos and the tonal inflections and vibratos everywhere that carry an exotic flair to them. A lot of this has to do with the fact that pitch is generally implied in Indian music, rather than being explicit. In a raga, you have more than just a raw up and down scale of notes (and the scale may be different going up than when going down), you also have characteristic inflections on those notes and rules thereof. Those pitch effects are really what define the character of a specific raga as opposed to another even if two ragas might otherwise have identical raw pitches on their scales.
One of the big corollaries I see here is the difference in philosophies of religion. Hinduism and its offshoots like Buddhism and so on are very introspective personal religions. It lays out a plurality of basics and explicitly demands personal individual interpretation of religion. It doesn't involve massive groups having unified opinions (or at least, it shouldn't in theory), but rather one individual at a time. As a result, the musical form, which consists very predominantly of devotional music, is clearly conceived in the form of individual voices and how much can be done with an individual voice. It's also why improvisation and the well-thought-out application of tonal inflection and variation is not only significant, but downright essential to the music. The analogy is that what does one person on their own have to lift the name of god on high? Their own voice, and their own style of singing.
Conversely, in a lot of Western religions, you have many people gathering together in unison all singing the same identical praises, and by corollary, you see Western music have an emphasis on harmony and the layering of multiple voices in multiple ranges. It's also one of the reasons why pitches need be absolute such that an A below middle C is explicitly defined as 440 Hz and so on -- so that certain "ground truth" expectations about where voices fit in a harmonic layout can be guaranteed to be met.
Well, I could go into more detail, and I very much intend to as I continue this series of posts. I am also intending to cover a particular peeve I have on the subject, but I felt that for readers who might come to view this blog, not all of them are certain to have the background knowledge to get where my rant is coming from, so I figured I'd start off with an introductory post.
