Indian Music

A Vast Ocean of Promise

Peggy Holroyde

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781351967631
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Historia
• Subtopic: Historia del mundo

In this book, first published in 1972, Indian music is given the comprehensive treatment it so richly deserves. The author brings a wealth of association with the country and its music into focus with a general introduction to the cultural and spiritual environment, and to the techniques, instruments and methods of the Indian musician.

Chapter One
The Hindu Background

'It is impossible to divorce Indian music from the whole structure of Indian culture and philosophy.'

DE ARNOLD BAKE

New Trends

Can we in the West ever really enjoy Indian classical music? This is not an idle or rhetorical question. Indians themselves are still genuinely surprised if a real and sincere interest is shown on our part. The unexpressed question is, 'How can this be?'. There is still the suspicion that we may be affecting an interest as a 'new generation' Westerner who has after all been told time enough that he should show some interest in the culture of the country he may be visiting–but how deep does our interest go? In the light of contemporary pop musicians taking to the sitar, can it be yet another gimmick, temporarily in fashion?

It has to be remembered again and again that Indians have, for a very long time, been used to the stranger from overseas coming to live among them and showing either apathy, or worse still, active dislike of their culture, pouring scorn on all their arts, music, dance and sculpture.

For every Cunningham and Curzon, for every Sir Thomas Woodruffe and Sir John Marshall (who ironically enough saved Sanchi for all time against Indian vandals of the day), or Faubian Bowers and William Archer to interpret her art, there have been thousands from the West who pass through the Indian subcontinent untouched. Kincaid has quoted passages in his Social History of India on British reactions at their most frank and truest (from private letters home) in which the 'caterwauling' of the music 'was enough to make one's hair stand on end'.

However, since political independence and the changing psychological climate among Indian artists and musicians themselves, a refreshingly assertive quality has become noticeable in relation to Western culture. It is an acknowledged fact throughout the newly emerging nations that once political freedom is attained, cultural ferment among the indigenous population reasserts itself. In fact, independence brings a subtle rediscovery of the roots of cultural identity. It is therefore all the more acute in a nation of such antiquity as India, with such a highly developed civilization as India's has been. Her national consciousness is now intensely concentrated, a very understandable characteristic which Westerners sometimes forget to take into account, especially English people who have themselves never suffered the decimating effect of alien rule in 1000 years. It is sometimes salutary as Westerners to ask ourselves what would have been the effect upon our culture and Christian civilization if we had lived through 300 years of Hindu rule with all its inevitable influences upon our processes of thought, education, religion and artistic expression, leaving aside our own personal psychology.

As old inferiority complexes abate so old arrogances die. Nowadays many Westerners in this generation are free and willing to take a new and more objective look at the creative spirit of other civilizations, exorcised as we are from old cultural insularities. Despite all the apparent antipathies and political convulsions which seem to pull the world further apart, there is a sense of deep currents running and swelling towards unification and wholeness, carving new channels of profound cultural significance into the rigid structures of the arts, social orders, economics, and even into the divisive and blinkered theologies of our institutionalized religions.

There is a cautious, almost unconscious, pull towards unity amid the diversity of mankind. Though this idea is politically new to the West, it is an ancient attitude within the Indian subcontinent, a quality of thought that impregnates the whole of Indian philosophy. It is the foundation-stone of the modern Indian secular state and it was the most passionate of Pandit Nehru's private themes which he endlessly and publicly expounded to his people.

Tolerance of other faiths and acceptance that there are diverse ways for diverse people towards the attainment of unity with the Divine, and the metaphysical vision that we are all fragmented parts of the whole, have given a cosmic direction to all Indian artistic and religious expression. It makes the contribution of the Indian mind to world civilization a valuable commodity at this particular historical juncture.

An Indian would find nothing alien in the thought expressed by Pierre Teilhard de Chardin that 'over the centuries an all-embracing plan seems in truth to be unfolding around us. Something is afoot in the universe, some issue is at stake, which cannot be better described than as a process of gestation and birth; the birth of the spiritual reality formed by the souls of men and by the matter which they bear along with them. Laboriously, through the medium, and by virtue of human activity, the new earth is gathering its forces, emerging and purifying itself.' This thought is astonishingly Hindu in concept.

History ana art and literature and philosophy do not begin and end at the Mediterranean as a great many school and university curricula would have us believe. The younger generation tripping over our heels has to live in a world which will make them well aware that this is not so, even though their education may have done them the disservice of leaving a pattern of exclusively Western thought in their minds. Out of political and economic necessity, Asians and Africans have had to learn far more about us, than we about them.

However, at the artistic and cultural level an inevitable process of change is going on which brings us closer, certainly, to the Indian mind whether we like it or not. In the specific area of the arts rigidity of form in music and painting has, for instance, been shattered by our own protaganists: in music by Schoenberg, Stravinsky, Stockhausen, Boulez and John Cage and musique concrète (first proposed by Pierre Schaeffer the French composer in 1950); and in the pictorial arts by Cèzanne, Picasso and Pollock, and more recently still by the School of Abstract Expressionism, and 'minimal' art. Well known musicians such as Rubbra and Hoist were first in the field over a decade ago specifically to experiment with modes of music outside the Western system. Since those early days a tide appears to be flowing in from the East, most especially from India. A diverse group of musicians have therefore cared to introduce Indian themes to foreign audiences: Oliver Messiaen and Benjamin Britten (Curlew River and The Burning Fiery Furnace); the indefatigable Yehudi Menuhin who as long-time President of the Asian Music Circle in London has been most active in promoting a meeting of minds between Asian and Western musicians; Julian Bream, the classical guitar player (who has visited many parts of India and collaborated with Ali Akbar Khan, India's most famous contemporary sarod player); Pierre Boulez, Larry Adler and Dave Brubeck, the jazz musician; and coming to the younger generation of popular music, George Harrison of the Beatles, who has most seriously undertaken a study of Indian philosophy as well as the music. There are many of the most intelligent and musically experimental pop groups who have turned to India also; Mike Heron and Robin Williamson complete with Eastern themes, shehnais and sitars in the Incredible String Band; Quintessence; Pink Floyd; The Who; Love; Davy Graham, the folk guitar player; Third Ear Band; and of course Indo-Jazz Fusions with John Mayer and Joe Harriott. The exiled Greek composer Mikis Theodorakis, uses sitars for his musical score of the film of Euripides' Trojan Women because, as he comments, Trojans were Asians. Experiments in Europe by Barney Wilen of France, Manfred Schoff of Germany and Irene Sweitzer of Switzerland are still going on; the intellectual and rhythmic reverberations are creating wholly unforeseen consequences among the young, and not only there. Films, television and radio programmes (certainly in Britain) now introduce Indian music without a hair's being turned. This would have been inconceivable even ten years ago. My husband made one of the first television programmes on Indian music in 1957; it was given a very late night showing on BBC television as being of minority interest.

Nowadays we have the familiar spectacle of kirtans being sung by young English students at the experimental art centre, the Round House, in London, to several thousand people and Hare Krishna Mantra has made the list of the top twenty pop tunes. Interest in Indian music has shown phenomenal growth in USA campuses. California has its own Kinnara Music School, pioneered by Pandit Ravi Shankar who also appeared at the definitive Woodstock Festival. Indian musicians of all kinds and calibres spend three or four months teaching in and touring America, and American students by the score can be seen boarding Bombay planes in dhotis and kurtas, carrying sitars and sarods and tablas. One may pour scorn on such antics, many older people regarding them as trendy occupations. However, in the last few years, instead of proving ephemeral the interest shows every sign of growing in depth and spreading through the whole classical field. The Edinburgh Festival has brought Ravi Shankar, Ali Akbar, Vilayat Khan, Bismillah Khan and Palghat Mani Iyer, the great South Indian mridangam player, to European audiences. Other younger players such as Ashish Khan, the sarod player, and Debabrata Chaudhuri have successfully aroused attention throughout Europe and America. Subbulakshmi (dubbed the Indian Callas) has sell-out audiences wherever she goes, whether in America, the UK, France, Germany or Italy. Nazakat and Salamat Ali, Pakistan's leading vocalists, leave a wake of responding young people transported by the soft touch and astonishing range of their voices.

A few years ago audiences would not have known what a raag was. Who knows what fusions the future may hold? Indeed, who does when Ravi Shankar has in 1971 composed four ragas–Khamaj, Sindhi Bhairavi, Adāna and Raag Mānj Khamāj–to be linked as a Concerto for Sitar with the London Symphony Orchestra playing with him under the direction of Andre Previn.

Who indeed would have thought at the end of the war that the staid city of Bath in the west of England would, within a few years, find itself playing host to the thrumming resonances of South Indian veenas and the commanding percussion of the magnificent mridangam–sounds that ricocheted off the fluted columns of that most august of Guildhalls with its memories of portly eighteenth-century kings, dainty minuets and the baroque mannerisms of dandies such as Beau Brummel. I doubt if the streets of Bath, secure in their own harmonies of golden stone and yellow-green light, have ever before been subjected to this bubbling rush of Malayalam, nor the fine shades of fragmented tones which Indian musicians can conjure into such full resonant sounds, floating and wallowing like the large, lazy turtles in the waters of their holy city of Brindaban. This India in Bath was one of those cultural frictions that sets off chemical reactions of which Yehudi Menuhin is so especially and sensitively aware.

Speaking at a UNESCO Conference on Eastern and Western systems which was held in Paris in 1958, he said then that the need of our time was to get under each other's skin, to understand the part of truth that is in each individual. 'The leaves of the tree have their own life but as the leaves of the tree are a part of the whole so we also are part of a unity.' This again speaks to the theme which motivates all Indian thought.

The old, constricted view of the occidental musician that real music only exists in the West, is no longer true. But it is no use our being emotional and rushing into a sense of oneness with the rest of humanity without understanding the fundamentals of our differences and misunderstandings. The heart has to be harnessed to the mind, A musician such as Bismillah Khan, with his shehnai, can appeal straight to the heart and to our emotions because of his distilled discipline. All the sad-sweet atmosphere of the hills of India, the pathos and melancholy, like the northern colouring of a Grieg piano concerto, inextricably mixed with the surprising gaiety of India and as syncopated as a Bach air, speak plainly enough in his renditions to anyone. But an even more agonizing sense of beauty, as acute as it is ever felt in India's tragic and beautiful land, can come by the tough intellectual knowledge of what Indian music is about.

The process of educating our ears to accept alien principles of sound has been long, hard work. Pandit Ravi Shankar deserves our thanks during years when he was much criticized in his homeland for having become 'too Westernized', when in the fifties he spearheaded a concentrated movement of Indian musicians to the West. I remember concerts in those days when our audiences were slow to respond numerically or appreciatively. But he has done a lasting service to India by his perseverance and steadiness in withstanding criticism from his own countrymen, so breaking through our subconscious inhibitions, our ignorance and misconceptions.

Does this mean then that music is becoming truly international, with a common language that communicates directly across national and cultural boundaries, or that it can be assimilated instinctively if you happen to have an ear for music? I think not. As one who was totally ignorant of the music but was pulled instinctively by force of emotion across the boundaries before even learning the mechanics, I still feel too much is taken for granted in the explanation of the music by the Indian performer and that neither of our two traditions has recognized sufficiently the force of the differences which our respective traditions and cultures drive between us.

Certainly, Ravi Shankar has expressed concern that many of our classical musicians are so entrenched in their principles that they judge every other kind of music by their own ingrained Western yardsticks. Few still dare to take the universality of view that Menuhin achieves.

Among young students there may be more natural empathy for India's music due to the cultural shift in present-day attitudes, but confusion abounds for the ordinary concert-goer who has come out of curiosity or because of a prevalence of Asian friends (and one has to remember the overnight transformation of Britain into a multiracial society with concentrated Asian settlement and its eventual concomitant influence on school text books and curriculums).

The average music-lover, being no musicologist, and therefore wary of all the frightening technicalities that bespatter the pages of books written about musical systems, will possibly wonder what hit him. There is indeed for this reason alone a compelling need for interpretation of this new musical language.

Did that singer really 'gargle'? What was that evocative melody that made such a lingering sense of the musical scale in the slow introduction but which seemed to disappear in a cacophony of repetitive sound towards the climax? How could that fantastic percussion ever be differentiated, broken down into its component parts? Why do we sense a magnetic pull in the long passages of seemingly unbroken sound despite the fact that the music seems to flow irresistibly onwards without recognizable shape, rhythmic form or tangible pause? Constant listening (and there are many long-playing records now available), some support along the way and the desire for understanding can brush away the bewilderment until the melody becomes recognizable and the listener finds himself singing as an harmonic accompaniment the refrain from the Skye Boat Song against the melodic line of Raga Lajwanti! It can be done.

The irony is that to the trained musician, Indian music is no longer as strange as it was. More consonance can be recognized and the melody is more acceptable than some of the most recent tonal experiments which are being carried on by avant-garde musicians such as John Cage and others in the United States and by Nono, Berio, Peter Maxwell-Davies, Penderecki and Xenakis in Europe.

The traditional diatonic scales (the major and the minor scales as opposed to the chromatic scale which runs consecutively through the twelve tones of the piano keyboard octave) and the fixed system of harmonics which has been in use since the tempered scale evolved centuries ago, are now deliberately being shattered by Stockhausen, and others, since Schoenberg and Stravinsky startled the musical world with their unorthodoxes. Chordal harmonies are thrown overboard. The result is a far more angular dissonance–a 'thin-ness' of sound, an assault upon the ear–than any Indian raag could purvey. The assault on our conventional expectations of musical sound gathered momentum with 'serialization' (the process of using the twelve-tone scale in serial order or tone-rows of melodic sequence chosen in certain arbitrary orders or used up in simultaneous chords before a new row of notes may be started). In avant-garde free-chance improvisations, random gatherings of sound from musicians in experimental combination create an indeterminacy like the throwing of dice (specifically used by John Cage) and an increasing fragmentation-an acoustic phenomena in fact–with silence as part of the musical interval used in composition. The final coup de grâce has been dealt by electronic 'happenings'–high-frequency oscillations and tape-jugglings, such as those undertaken, admittedly with controlled mathematical principles by Cage and Lejaren Hiller in the Experimental Music Studio and the Department of Computer Science of the University of Illinois, Urbana, in America (Nonesuch Recording Stereo L 71224, Polydor Records, London), and Le Groupe de Récherches Musicales du Service de la Recherche de la R.T.F. (French disque BAM LD 070(M), 133 Boulevard Raspail, Paris VI^e).

Some of these electronically controlled sounds, in extrem...