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Indian Music

  
 
Tuna Ghost: Pratt knot hero
15:13 / 11.09.02
So the other day I was in my world religions class, all set to take a nap while a video on hinduism played (I had already seen most of it, so don't give me crap about wasting money sleeping in class). Just before I nodded off, I heard a small bit of indian music playing during the credits.

I don't know what the instruments were, except that they were some sort of wind instrument. Just two of 'em, and it was one of the greatest songs I have ever heard. One instrument just played what I took to be the root note and the other played the melody. Simple setup, right? Except the melody seemed to be in three different keys at once. And not in the sense that one can play a song in C major and it will technically also be in A minor. I mean it sounded like a single key that had three or four different keys included in it. It was trippy.

My professor wasn't able to tell me much about it, other than that India has it's own original musical setup, wholly different from the West (by which I mean, of course, Europe) or even China or Japan.

"Setup? Johnny, you tool, music is music. It's all just compressed air vibrating at certain frequencies, right? How different can it be?" Loads different, my friend. The notes are all the same, but different parts of the globe put them together differently. Listening to the song on the video, I heard the melody go places I had never before seen or heard melodies go. It sounds corny, I realize, and unless you have a reasonably well trained ear it would sound like trash to you. I heard the melody hit easily spotted intervals like fifths and thirds (the tones used to make a major chord. FOr instance, in a G major scale, G B and D), and then scamper off to wacky intervals that I could tell made sense, but not in any system of music I had ever learned. It was beautiful, and I know that the system of arrangement I have learned since I was a child would never be able to express what I heard in that song.

"But Johnny, why? You just said it was all the same notes, just arranged differently. Maybe it's because you're trapped by your long years of formal music education." Ha! Nice try, but no. I suspect the song dealt with tones that don't technically exist in the Western tradition, tones that lie between half-steps (tones that lie between C and C# or whatever). I have heard about these tones, but have never dealt with them. I suspect this because I could not follow the melody in my head. At times it would drop off my map of known tones. I have a very-well trained ear these days, and I recognized something that, while beautiful, is completely alien to my ears. If this music from the video is what I think it is, then I have to go purchase Indian instruments, because none of mine can produce a tone that lies between B and B flat. Those notes don't exist on a fretted guitar, or any wind instrument I've ever seen or heard of.

SO: please help me. I need to learn all I can about Indian music. How is it set up? I need to know. Where can I learn?
 
 
tSuibhne
15:30 / 11.09.02
As far as not being able to use "western" instruments. I think it's been done, or at least tried. A lot of jazz musicians tried to infuse Indian styles with western instruments. Coltrane's stuff shortly before his death (his really weird stuff, that purest completly ignore, and so is harder to find) is an example of this. I think Monk might have been trying to do this as well. If you want some album titles, let me know and I'll ask around. Though, not having any musical training, I can't tell you how successful they were.

You deffinetly aren't nuts though in your reaction. First year at UMBC, I happened to take an Intro to Music of the World class. The teacher alerted us to the fact that a local group used one of our theaters for an annual Indian Music and Dance competition. So I got to spend a Friday night listening to the pros, and a Saturday afternoon listening to the students. Both sounded purely beautiful and other worldly to my untrained ears. I left the theater feeling like I'd been meditating for hours.
 
 
Jack Fear
15:42 / 11.09.02
This looks like a good resource, explaining basic concepts.

This looks a little more scholarly.

A Stanford course, called "Fundamentals of Indian Art Music."

I'm no expert, but here's some basics:

Classical Indian music is almost entirely improvisational: rather than improvising on a melody, as in jazz, the musicians establish a mode and a cycle of beats, and use that as the basis for improvisation.

You are correct in your assumption that Indian music uses microtones--pitches that fall between the 12 notes of the even-tempered Western scale. Also, the pitches will vary depending on whether you are ascending the mode, or descending it--so a C-sharp and a D-flat will be two different pitches accordingly. (Actually, it wasn't too long ago, with the introduction of mathematically-determined even temperament, that Western music abandoned this tradition. Do some research on that some time, and listen to some pre-17th century Western music: it'll blow your mind.)

Many indigenous stringed instruments use drone strings or sympathetic strings--extra strings that are not struck by the player but suspended within the instrument's body, vibrating when the player strikes a like note on his own strings. These sympathetic strings are what gives a sitar, in particular, its distinctive drone and twang.

That's a start, I guess.
 
 
Tuna Ghost: Pratt knot hero
18:02 / 11.09.02
Fabulous! How incredibly facsinating. I have got to get my hands on a sitar. I don't suppose anyone has any idea how much they cost...

Do some research on that some time, and listen to some pre-17th century Western music: it'll blow your mind.

No doubt. Do you have any idea how it's scored? I mean, is it written in a similar style as that of post-17th century music?

Many indigenous stringed instruments use drone strings or sympathetic strings--extra strings that are not struck by the player but suspended within the instrument's body, vibrating when the player strikes a like note on his own strings.

This idea raises several questions in my head. For instance: these strings inside the instrument, are they set up in the same way as the plucked strings? If you pluck a single string, is it just the like string inside that resonates with it? Or is it like on a guitar where if you pluck the E you can hear the A vibrate along with it? I don't know what pitches a sitar's strings are set at, so I don't know what strings or how many would resonate with a single plucked string, but the implications are mind boggling. Imagine if you could get several harmonizing drone strings to resonate with a single plucked string. I suppose dissonance is a constant danger, but if you do it right, I'll bet it's fantastic. Good god! I have to try this stuff.
 
 
Jack Fear
18:29 / 11.09.02
You'll pay anywhere from $600 on up for a playable sitar.

If you pluck a single string, is it just the like string inside that resonates with it?

Yup. "Each vibration awakens all other vibrations of its particular pitch," as Alesietr Crowley said in a different context.

You find this construction in lots of "folk" instruments, even in Western culture--the Norwegian Hardanger fiddle, f'rinstance, or some early European lutes.

Do you have any idea how [early music] is scored? I mean, is it written in a similar style as that of post-17th century music?

There were a variety of methods, some of them more recognizable to the modern eye than others.

This is your first venture into scales and theory outside of Western classical notation? Man, in the next few weeks your head is just gonna crack, in lots of interesting ways.
 
 
Tuna Ghost: Pratt knot hero
19:49 / 11.09.02
You find this construction in lots of "folk" instruments, even in Western culture--the Norwegian Hardanger fiddle, f'rinstance, or some early European lutes.

Outstanding. Am now thinking of playing Renaissance music with a sitar, but transposing it would probably kill me. I remember playing violin parts on a saxophone and just going from a Bflat instrument to a C instrument was hell (and I wasn't about to re-write the whole damn book, so most of it was on the fly).

"The Norwegian Hardangers": a good band name, or just a waste of time?

This is your first venture into scales and theory outside of Western classical notation? .

Basically, yeah. One of my instructors once explained to me some concepts behind Japanese and Chinese music, and played a few selections, but I wasn't interested at the time. And it's only recently that I've become very interested in even the Western system of arrangement and music theory in general. It's a bit of a shame, seeing as how I've been playing since second grade and am only now becoming really interested in it, but at least I've got plenty of experience to mess around with.
 
 
Jack Fear
19:56 / 11.09.02
Hardanger Fiddles.
 
 
grant
20:01 / 11.09.02
I built a sitar a while ago, but it never worked right. Looks cool as hell.

Just earlier today, a friend emailed me about an auction on eBay - there's an import outfit in Central Florida that seems to do a lot of sitar/tambur/sarod/vina business (four related instruments - the tambur does the drone, a sarod has a metal body, a vina or veena has two gourds and is usually fretless).
So do an eBay search and you'll find 'em.
As of this posting, you've got five hours to snag one for $255.

There are other, similar instruments here.

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On a sitar, there are seven strings you play and 13 resonating strings, which react to the dominant note and incidental harmonics. You can also get a nice trill by strumming those strings gently (where you can get at 'em, I don't know), but it's not proper form. Sitars have big-ass frets so you can bend notes by just squeezing in on them.
The one I built was fretless.

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If you want to know a bit about Indian scales, do a search on "sitar tuning." Unlike classical guitars (but like bluegrass banjo and Sonic Youth), they don't really have standard tunings - just some that are more popular than others.

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There's a beautiful Armenian instrument called a duduk - sort of a bagpipe/flute with a drone. Your description sounds like a duduk, except it's not really Indian. Peter Gabriel's soundtrack to "Last Temptation of Christ" used a duduk player named Djivan Gasparian. I have a taped copy of album by him that's wonderful. Something Garden. Sorry for memory holes, but there are leads there. And samples here.

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Recently, I heard an interview with a brilliant Arabic violinist whose name escapes me. He told a story of playing for some big names in America - not Zubin Mehta, but some conductor of equal renown - and after he played some Western Classical pieces, he played an Arabic piece. And the conductor, seemingly quite impressed, said something like, "That was very beautiful - but why did you hit some of the notes wrong?"
Because he had no clue that the dude was playing in a different scale, one with more notes.

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More recently, I was reading the liner notes to Yo Yo Ma's Simply Baroque album.
The deal was, this group in Holland said, "Hey, Mr. Ma, you're like really good, and we really want to help you do a record. So what do you want to do?"
And he said, "Hey, I've never done anything baroque with period instruments!"
And they said, "Cool! Come on over! We'll line up your band!"
So Ma, he had these dudes in London fuckin' re-engineer his Stradivari cello. They put on a flatter bridge and took out the end-pin, so he had to be more careful about which strings he was playing, and had to hold the cello between his legs while playing.
But he said the hardest part was getting used to playing slightly "out of tune," because that's how they did it back then.
It sounds fabulous, by the way. Samples at the link.

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Beware of falling into the microtonalism hole.

Many who go there never return.

No, really.
 
 
Jack Fear
20:26 / 11.09.02
Recently, I heard an interview with a brilliant Arabic violinist whose name escapes me...

Simon Shaheen.
 
  
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