Indian Music
Indian music is most unlike that concept of
music in the West. It is very difficult for a Westerner to appreciate
it without a lengthy introduction and much time spend in listening.
The two main forms of Indian music are the
southern Carnatic and the northern Hindustani traditions. The
basic difficulty is that there is no harmony in the Western
sense. The music has two basic elements, the tala and the raga.
Tala is the rhythm and is characterised by the number of beats.
Teental is a tala of 16 beats. The audience follows the tala
by clapping at the appropriate beat which in teental is at one,
five and 13. There is no clap at the beat of nine since that
is the Khali or ‘empty section’ indicated by a wave
of the hand.
Just as tala is the rhythm, so is raga the
melody; just as there are a number of basic talas so there are
many set ragas. The classical Indian music group consists of
three musicians is impossible since there is not the harmony
that a Western orchestra provides-each musician selects their
own tala and raga. The players then zoom off in their chosen
directions, as dictated by the tala and the raga selected, and,
to the audience’s delight, meet every one in a while before
again diverging.
Yehudi Menuhin, who has devoted much time
and energy to understanding Indian music, suggests that it is
much like Indian society; a group of individuals not working
together but every once in a while meeting at some common point.
Western music is analogous to Western democratic societies,
a group of individuals 9the orchestra) who each surrender part
of their freedom to the harmony of the whole.
Although Indian classical music has one of
the longest continuous histories of any musical form, the music
had never, until quite recently, been recorded in any written
notation. Furthermore, within the basic framework set by the
tala and the raga, the musicians improvise-providing variations
on the basic melody and rhythm.
Best known of the Indian instruments are the
sitar and the tabla. The sitar is the large stringed instrument
popularised by Ravi Shankar in the West-and which more than
a few Westerners have discovered is more than just slightly
difficult to tune. This is the instrument with which the soloist
plays the raga. Other stringed instruments are the sarod (which
is plucked) or the sarangi (which is played with a bow). The
tabla, a twin drum rather like a Western bongo, provides the
tala. The drone, which runs on two basic notes, is provided
by the oboe-like shehnai or the tampura.