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HINDUSTANI CLASSICAL MUSIC

Hindustani Classical Music – What is it?• One of the two main traditions in

Indian traditional / classical music

• Hindustani Classical Music belongs to North India

• Carnatic Classical Music belongs to South India

Hindustani Classical Music

Instruments in Hindustani Classical Music• Tambura (providing the drone)

• A four-stringed, long-necked lute with a large gourd body.

• Player simply plucks the four strings (which usually reinforce the two most important pitches - “do” (I) and “soh” (V)) throughout the music.

• Usually the one that creates the “buzzing sound” in the beginning and throughout the music, where the background buzz could be likened to aural incense permeating a room.

Instruments in Hindustani Classical Music• Tabla (providing the rhythm)

• Consists of a small cylindrical wooden drum with a single head called tabla and a larger, round metal drum with single head called baya.

• Each drum stroke has a name and tabla players memorise the stroke names as part of learning process

Instruments in Hindustani Classical Music• Sarod (providing the main melody)

• Long-necked lute, around forty inches long and has a large wooden body covered with calfskin.

• Six main strings of metal running over a fretless metal fingerboard.

• Eleven to Fifteen “sympathetic” metal strings which are tuned to vibrate “sympathetically” with the main strings, providing a background of ethereal ringing.

Instruments in Hindustani Classical Music• Sitar, the more popular alternative to Sarod

• Long-necked lute and has a large body made of gourd as resonator.

• Six or seven main strings of running over a movable fretted fingerboard.

• Similar to the sarod , there are “sympathetic” strings which are tuned to vibrate “sympathetically” with the main strings, providing a background of ethereal ringing.

• Ravi Shankar plays the sitar.

• The sitar sound is the most

recognisable export of

Indian Classical Music

to the world.

Hindustani Classical Music

• Raga

• Organised set of pitches, similar to the concept of scales in Western music

• Unlike Western music, ragas also dictate the hierarchy of strong and weak notes, sets of typical melodic figures and a set of extra-musical associations with things such as moods, times of the day etc. Sometimes, ragas are represented pictorially as individual human beings.

• Can be seen as a “skeletal tool” which performers use to create the melody “on-the-spot”.

Hindustani Classical Music

• Tala

• Fixed cycle of beats which can be subdivided into few sections (you may imagine our 4/4 time-signature, subdivided into four sections).

• The number of beats in each cycle ranges from 3 to 128.

• Unlike Western Music, talas end on the first beat of the cycle.

Hindustani Classical Music

• Form

• Raga performances typically start out very slow and increase in tempo gradually until they reach a breathtakingly rapid climax.

• The structure of a performance varies somewhat from school to school and even artist to artist.

• Usually, it starts with the main melodic instrument (sarod or sitar) and the drone instrument (tambura) in an unmetered manner and very slowly, “teasing out” the notes of the raga. This is known as the alap section.

Hindustani Classical Music

• Form (cont’d)

• When the rhythmic instruments (tabla) comes in with the tala, the music becomes metered. The tempo may then increase and reach a climax with virtuosic display from both the sarod (or sitar) and tabla players. This is known as the gat section.

Hindustani Classical Music – Musical Essentials

• Western Music – Focus is on Harmony

• Recall 12-bar blues – Bass progression (foundation of Harmony) is the “identity” and “driving force”

• Hindustani Classical Music – Focus is on the scale (raga) used and the melodic improvisation based on the scale used.

• Recall how the music starts with the alap section to slowly reveal the characteristics of the raga with only the main melodic instrument and the drone, followed the improvised main melody (gat) and its improvisation.

• However, like western improvised music, such as jazz, exciting and complex rhythm (tala) may be incorporated to create excitement in the course of improvisation.