[INDOLOGY] Classical Indian musical theory

[Tejas Aralere]

Dear Martin,

Being trained in sitar and South Indian and Western classical violin, this
is quite exciting for me personally! Lots of great resources already given
here. I’d just add the few below:

https://www.dukeupress.edu/singing-the-classical-voicing-the-modern

This was an excellent book that we used in an Ethnomusicology course on
Indian music at William and Mary with Prof. Max Katz, who specializes in
Hindustani Classical music. Easy to read and excellent research.

On Carnatic violin specifically, there’s Lakshmi Devnath’s “An Incurable
Romantic” (2014) which documents one of the most important Classical
Carnatic Violinists, Lalgudi Jayaraman’s life.

Also, since they’re a violinist, they might be interested in listening to
Carnatic violin too. Lalgudi Jayaraman (and his children now), M.S.
Gopalakrishnan and his daughter M. Narmada, L. Subramanian, and T.N.
Krishnan are kind of the old standards of South Indian violin. T.N.
Krishnan’s sister N. Rajam is a renowned Hindustani violinist and music
professor at Benares Hindu University. Before them there was T. Chowdiah,
or Piteel (fiddle) Chowdiah who famously played a 7-string violin in
Carnatic classical style. There are YouTube audio and videos of all these
performers, each with their distinct style of playing. Most modern Carnatic
violinists adhere the styles of Krishnan, Lalgudi, and Gopalakrishnan.
There are also the Mysore Brothers Manjunath and Nagaraj, who are quite
good.

Also, there’s this western classical style quartet that performs South
Indian Carnatic Kritis quite beautifully:

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=-g5BqZVxNog&pp=ygUVbWFkcmFzIHN0cmluZyBxdWFydGV0

For Carnatic Veena, which really is the gold standard of being able to
render vocal composition on a stringed instrument, there are lots of
excellent artists, but S. Balachander is really the connoisseur’s choice.
He began learning sitar at a young age but decided that the instrument
wasn’t capable of rendering rāga ālāpana the way he wanted, and switched to
the South Indian Veena and revolutionized the way it’s played. There’s a
good book by Vikram Sampath about him. A more popular modern Veena
performer is E. Gayathri and the absolutely astounding young man Ramana
Balachandhran, who is a bit like a Mozart on Veena.

This is an excellent book on the 72 Melakarta ragas with western notation
included and brief explanation for each. It goes without saying, of course,
that the precise performance of the ragas and the gamakas involved in each
has to be learned by listening and oral tradition.

https://www.exoticindiaart.com/book/details/ragas-in-carnatic-music-idk982/

This might have been mentioned in the preceding chain, but
https://www.karnatik.com is one of the oldest online resources for our
music and has grown quite a bit over the years. I’d use it often for
finding the sahitya for various kritis and also for the Hindustani -
Carnatic Raga conversion table. While the Carnatic melakarta system is
older and traces Ragas to the 72 foundational scales, Hindustani’s 10 thaat
ragas were set in the early 20th century by Bhatkande who wanted a distinct
but similarly standardized system of raga classification. His system became
the standard for north Indian music as it is taught in Indian Universities.
Here too, there is some cross-pollination of ragas, though they change
names, and some ragas are much more popular in Carnatic or Hindustani
repertoires, and thus are played in that style even when performed in a
classical Carnatic concert. So for example, Raga Bihāg is way more popular
in Hindustani music, so when it is performed in Carnatic concerts, the
gamaka and sancāra (rāga exploration) maintains the Hindustani style. All
Indian instrumental music originated from attempting to mimic the singer’s
voice, so the lyrics for compositions are almost always written by various
Bhakti tradition poets. This even when rendering the composition on an
instrument, the musician must know the lyrics and articulate the phrasing
of the notes to pronounce the words of the song. While Hindustāni music’s
*gat* compositions often don’t have lyrics, Carnatic compositions always
have lyrical portions.

Lastly, there’s the book called the “Grammar of Carnatic Music” by K.G.
Vijayakrishnan which is theoretically dense but I really appreciate because
it’s really important for thinking about how grouping notes into phrases
that not only are accurate for the raga being performed, but is
meaningfully arranged. Over the years, musicologists have compared the raga
system to jazz and Blues scales, and there have been lots of really great
collabs, but all Indian musicologists and scholars will tell you, rightly
so, that the rāga is distinct from a musical scale or mode because of the
importance of microtones (the accepted number of these differs between
theoreticians and was subject to great debate for centuries) and movements
between notes.

Aside from that, it’s interesting to note that the violin’s adoption in
south India around the early 19th century by Bālaswāmi Dikshitar (brother
of famous Carnatic composer Muthuswami Dikshitar) came around the same time
that the British were trying to criminalize the tawaif system and thus
labeled sārangi players disreputable since they were often low caste
(despite being prodigious musicians). So the adoption of the violin for
Carnatic music to do essentially the same thing as the sārangi, that is
accompany a vocalist in concert, seems to have been a purposeful choice by
the Brahmin Dīkshitar. Unlike the other early Carnatic composers like
Purandara Dāsa and Tyāgarāja who wrote in Kannada and Telugu, respectively,
Dīkshitar wrote almost exclusively in Sanskrit. Dīkshitar’s choice flew in
the face of the the entire point of these earlier Bhakti tradition
composers who were pushing back against Brahmanical orthodoxy and their
discriminatory rules and practices by making the knowledge in the Sanskrit
texts available to non-elites through colloquial languages. As we see so
often, even in Indian music, we can’t escape the Brahminization of
practices that began in protest against them.

I’ll write again if I think of anything else. Happy listening to your
friend! Forgive me for missing some diacriticals since I’m typing on my
iPhone.

-Tejas

Tejas S. Aralere, Ph.D.

Assistant Professor of Classics and Humanities

University of New Hampshire

www.tsaralere.com
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On Sun, Jun 23, 2024 at 4:47 AM Martin Gansten via INDOLOGY <
indology at list.indology.info> wrote:

> A professional Baroque violinist, not an Indologist and so not on this
> list, has asked me for introductions to classical Indian musical theory,
> including the concept of rāga, especially as found in Carnatic music.
> Both primary texts (in translation) and secondary sources are welcome,
> and the period corresponding to the Baroque (17th to 18th century) would
> be of special interest.
>
> This question is entirely outside my field of knowledge, and I would
> appreciate any suggestions from knowledgeable colleagues. If there are
> particular recordings that might be helpful, and perhaps go with a
> particular text/book (by design or serendipity), that would be useful too.
>
> Thanks in advance for any help,
> Martin Gansten
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> INDOLOGY mailing list
> INDOLOGY at list.indology.info
> https://list.indology.info/mailman/listinfo/indology
>
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