Music and Musical Thought in Early India

Lewis Rowell

• Publisher: University of Chicago Press
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9780226730349
• Topic: Mezzi di comunicazione e arti performative
• Subtopic: Musica

Offering a broad perspective of the philosophy, theory, and aesthetics of early Indian music and musical ideology, this study makes a unique contribution to our knowledge of the ancient foundations of India's musical culture. Lewis Rowell reconstructs the tunings, scales, modes, rhythms, gestures, formal patterns, and genres of Indian music from Vedic times to the thirteenth century, presenting not so much a history as a thematic analysis and interpretation of India's magnificent musical heritage.In Indian culture, music forms an integral part of a broad framework of ideas that includes philosophy, cosmology, religion, literature, and science. Rowell works with the known theoretical treatises and the oral tradition in an effort to place the technical details of musical practice in their full cultural context. Many quotations from the original Sanskrit appear here in English translation for the first time, and the necessary technical information is presented in terms accessible to the nonspecialist. These features, combined with Rowell's glossary of Sanskrit terms and extensive bibliography, make Music and Musical Thought in Early India an excellent introduction for the general reader and an indispensable reference for ethnomusicologists, historical musicologists, music theorists, and Indologists.

ONE

INTRODUCTION

1.1 MUSIC AND MUSICAL THOUGHT IN EARLY INDIA

Let us begin with the five keywords of my title. By India I mean the entire subcontinent of South Asia, including Pakistan and Bangladesh, before partition. By “early” I mean as early as possible, including the historical eras often identified as “ancient” and “medieval,” with the middle of the thirteenth century as a convenient terminus ad quem. I shall have frequent occasion to refer to an important musical document from that century—the Saṅgītaratnākara (The mine of musical jewels) of Śārṅgadeva, a monumental synthesis of the many musical doctrines expounded by the authors of the previous millennium. My account thus ends before the successive waves of Persian culture made their full impact on the music of northern India and thereby encouraged the development of separate musical traditions in the North and South. I shall suggest some early evidence for this separation, but it is not among my main themes. Similarly, I shall point out many of the roots of modern Indian musical concepts and practices, but the main emphasis must remain on what Indian music was (insofar as that can be determined), not what it now is.

By “music” and “musical” I mean not only the phenomena that we ordinarily regard as music in the West but also the entire structure of ideas surrounding and informing the practice of music. When we recall that the ancient Greek concept of mousike was held to encompass all of the domains of the nine Muses—from poetry, song, and dance, to history and even astronomy—we should be prepared to encounter a complex structure of ideas with multiple dimensions and many interconnections. The standard Sanskrit word for music is saṅgīta—the exact equivalent of the Latin concentus. The most precise, if not the most elegant, translation is “concerted song.” Our investigation, however, must extend to genres that would not ordinarily be considered to be a part of the realm of gīta (song). These include not only the various traditions and styles of sacred chant but also composite genres, especially the theater, in which what we call “music” is an integral part of a composite artform, and within which it is not always possible to separate what is music from what is not. But the word gīta provides the semantic core of the idea of music and conveys the quintessential humanism of the ancient Indian concept: musical sound is, first of all, vocal sound. The most powerful and generally accepted ontological conception of music is rooted in a profound cultural metaphor, in which the emanation of vocal sound from deep within the human body has been linked with the process of creation as a “bringing forth” of the divine substance that lies at the heart of our innermost being.

By musical thought I mean the complete ideology of music—including, but not limited to, those technical compartments within which music has been organized into notes, scales, rhythms, forms, and the like, and extending to larger philosophical questions of being, knowledge, and value. I shall outline traditional Indian answers to such questions as, What is musical sound? What does it mean? How is music transmitted? and What cultural values does music represent? The separate chapters will help to channel these questions into a systematic organization, but at the same time they conceal the essential relatedness of all Indian musical thought.

A few preliminary observations on the distinctive patterns of Indian thought will set the stage for the more detailed discussions in chapter 2. Readers familiar with the surgical dichotomies of ancient Western thinking, in which the search for truth proceeds by separating everything that a thing is from everything that it is not, and eventually penetrating to the core of a concept when no further divisions are possible, will encounter different habits of thought. Inquiry is open-ended in the Indian tradition, and the process of making categories is infinite—at least in theory. Every statement that can be made blurs a finer distinction, and ultimate truth or reality lies beyond the reach of human experience or inference—except perhaps in those moments of suprasensible illumination vouchsafed to the yogin. Indian musical thought has thus been channeled into elaborate taxonomic structures within which subcategories unfold in profusion, subcategories that often are not mutually exclusive and which thereby encourage a certain amount of ambiguity.

Truth is revealed, not achieved. It is manifested by authoritative teachings and carried forward by a tradition of literary scholarship. Knowledge of it is always imperfect. Within such a framework of belief, the literature of music has taken on a prescriptive tone, and musical doctrines require no other justification than their prior existence in an authoritative treatise. If apparent contradictions appear, they are the result of our limited knowledge or of accidents of the transmission process. They are to be understood, not discarded and replaced by new teachings. Such is the reasoning behind the Indian commentarial tradition and the continuous probing for meaning in imperfectly preserved texts.

Musical writings have taken on a life of their own as a result of the many scribal copyings and recopyings over the centuries. It is not fanciful to regard these texts as living organisms—organisms manifesting the typically Indian play of images and plurality of forms that mask the underlying unity. Indian musical scholarship has also been likened to the course of a mighty river (one of the cherished analogies of Indian thought), accepting tributary streams, turning away from dry channels, and mingling separate waters in a central confluence of ideas—disciplining and accepting certain contributions while rejecting others outright. The analogy has no doubt been overworked, and this centrist imagery can cause us to overlook or undervalue the revitalizing force of new musical contributions, as in the movement referred to as deśī—an infusion of various provincial musical traditions between ca. A.D. 500 and 1000, an infusion which greatly expanded the boundaries of the ancient musical system and altered the future course of Indian music in far-reaching ways.

Whatever the imperfections of the concept, I shall present the outlines of such a central tradition as documented in Indian literature from late Vedic times to the thirteenth century, a tradition that proved flexible enough to accommodate the mystical doctrines of Tantra (as in Mataṅga’s Bṛhaddeśī) and the elaborate transcendental philosophy of Kashmir Shaivism (as expounded by the commentator Abhinavagupta).¹ Most of the evidence is from literature, oral as well as written: unlike European music, for which systems of musical notation have existed for more than three thousand years, the music of India has never been recorded in more than a skeletal script. Music, like other branches of learning, is not something to be acquired by reading books or studying scores; it is learned from a master teacher, a guru. The sole purpose of a notation is to remind us of what we have already learned. Paradoxically, this reliance upon a tradition of oral instruction has narrowed the boundaries within which innovation is acceptable. While there is still much to be learned from reconstructing the notations in early musical texts, it must be accepted that knowledge of what the music of early India was like must rest on two sources—the textual evidence and Indian music as it is heard today.

From Vedic times to the thirteenth century is indeed a long time, and certain historical problems must be acknowledged: with the aid of hostile nature and historical accident, Indian scholarship has managed to cover its tracks so successfully that the step-by-step development of music and musical ideas can be perceived only as recorded in the few scattered monuments of musical literature that have survived. And each such document as it has come down to us is itself a tangle of various historical layers and a mixture of quotations, glosses, and commentary in which the precise sequence of contributions is often impossible to determine. As Prem Lata Sharma has observed, “‘history’ in the context of Indian culture has to be viewed as a complex phenomenon comprised of concurrences and overlappings rather than a simple linear phenomenon.”²

Students of early Indian intellectual history have learned to accept the price that has to be paid for this inescapable lack of “simple linearity.” What it means for the present study is that the advance of musical ideology must often be presented in an admittedly discontinuous format, in the form of successive snapshots instead of the more accurate form of a series of motion picture frames in extremely slow motion. Or to change the metaphor, I shall have to argue across the gaps in the fossil record and run the risk that the resulting narrative may appear more discontinuous than it in fact was. I shall, for example, attempt to trace the evolution of the Indian idea of musical sound—from early metaphoric concepts and primitive acoustical speculations to the refined arguments and subtle distinctions of the later philosophical schools—but the approach must be to present the various manifestations and clarifications of a single, complex idea...