Music has always been something of a mystery to me. Not because it is rare, but more so due to its abundance. It is found in everything, from the living to the non living to the abstract. It is a powerful tool, and has an ability to bring out emotions which only few other art forms manage to bring out in me. And it is no surprise, that people all over the world have tried to understand and unravel the depths of this great art form.
My knowledge is very restricted, and very biased, coming from an Indian family where music is being played at every moment. Music was an answer to everything, and also the perfect excuse to just about anything. I could easily skip studies, work on the pretext of listening to music. And this came from the understanding that listening to music or being somehow connected to music was better than anything else I might have been doing.
Overtime, as the music taste evolved within me, I tried to listen to more and more different types of music. And somehow for some reason, I just kept falling back to Indian classical music. And I may have tried to be the rebellious child by trying to listen to some different music genres just so that I don’t become one of the typical Indian people who will always say that everything Indian is better than anything else in the world, but I seem to have no other option but to come back to this. I have come to realize that with whatever little I understand about music, no one else has made such a deep and vast study of music in general and its implications with respect to mood, emotions and human behavior as the stalwarts of Indian classical music have.
I think that is all I will say about the “why”.
Let me now directly jump into the “what”. So what is Indian classical music? I would say, it is a collective study of probably 2000 years or so of music and the science behind it. Why Indian? Well, that is because it originated within the Indian subcontinent. And this has nothing to do with present day India. Indian classical music has contributions from the whole of the continent, and has a lot of input right from Urdu, Pashto, Arabic, Hindi, Sanskrit languages. Which region wise would cover regions from Persia, Afghanistan, Pakistan, India and Sri Lanka.
Over the years, two major forms of music evolved, with each form giving precedence to some details in music over the other, and thereby basing the whole study on those features. I can think of Carnatic and Hindustani Classical music as the two main branches. And since my exposure to Carnatic music is almost equal to zero, I will elaborate only on Hindustani classical music.
Hindustani classical music is based off of 3 major pillars, which make up the music within it.
Sur (swar) - Is the musical note. (can be further broken down into Shruti).
Taal – This is the beat, or the clock which binds the music piece.
Laya – This is the tempo.
Together, with these tools, you can formulate any musical piece. After all, a musical piece is nothing but musical notes bound together in a cyclic beat structure, bound by a natural tempo to make it sound melodious.
It could be something as simple as humming a tune, the heart beating, snoring, or the chirping of birds.
Now without further ado, I will step into the Raag or the Raaga. I don’t want to be a know-it-all, and hence what I intend to do is to post Raag examples over a period of time. And that should make things easier for me to put, and for the reader to understand as well.
As a simple definition, a raag is a combination of swaras. And that implies that the raag can then move only within the boundaries of the notes it is made up of. But that’s not all there is to it. There are rules on how to move from one musical note to another. And rules on how to apply a musical note while playing it or singing it. What that means is that a Rishabh (Re) (D in western) played in Raag Yaman will not be the same as that in Raag Bhoop. And its small intricate details such as these, that make the whole system complex and spell bounding at the same time.
As an introduction, the swaras (notes) are:
Sa – Shadja
Re – Rishabh
Ga – Gandhar
ma – Madhyam
Pa – Pancham
Dha – Dhaivat
Ni – Nishaad
These are the 7 main notes (shuddha), and then there are 5 other notes, which are
Komal re – Soft Rishabh
Komal ga – Soft Gandhar
Teevra Ma – Sharp Madhyam
Komal dha – Soft Dhaivat
Komal ni – Soft Nishaad
As a rule, every Raaga always has Sa (this is because it is the starting point of the Raag, and hence it can’t be avoided. It is the note with whose help the other notes are defined).
To make this clear, it essentially sets the benchmark for the frequency of the notes. Once the Sa is defined, you can say that Re will be 1 note above it, Ga will be 2 notes above it and so on. Without the Sa, you have nothing to base your note off.
Another rule is that you have to have one of Ma or Pa within your raag. Yet another one is that you can’t skip more than 4 notes when defining a raag. And the last rule (well there maybe more) is that the raag should have atleast 5 notes. You can’t have a raag with just Sa Re Ga Ma.
For notations, we will use Sa Re Ga ma Pa Dha Ni for the shuddha swaras, and re ga Ma dha ni for the rest of the komal and teevra swaras.
For the octave below (Mandra Saptak) the usual (Madhya Saptak) , we will use a underline below the note, and for the octave above (Taar Saptak) the usual, we will use an overbar.
Well, that was for starters. I shall keep posting something on Raag as and how I find time.
