CHAPTER VIII
INDIAN AND WESTERN MUSIC
Captain Day, whose example might well be followed by other military men in India, says : —
'Almost every traveller in India comes away with the idea that the music of the country consists of mere noise and nasal drawling of the most repulsive kind, often accompanied by contortions and gestures of the most ludicrous description. But in certainly two-thirds of such cases, the singing and dancing witnessed has been of the commonest, and the performers of the most abandoned and depraved of the city ; and the traveller has therefore received a false impression, which may abide through life, or impede the progress of a more correct appreciation of the real value of Indian music. Bat it is hardly fair that an art so little really understood, even among the natives of India themselves, should be judged by such a criterion and then put aside as worthless, because solitary individuals have been deceived by parties of outcast charlatans whose object is mere gain. For that Indian music is an art, and a very intricate and difficult one too, can hardly be denied. But to appreciate it one must first put away all thought of European music and then judge of it by an Indian standard, and impartially upon its own merits ; of ths ingenuity of the performer, the peculiar rhythm of the music, the extraordinary scales used, the recitatives, the amount of imitation, the wonderful execution and memory of the performer, and his skill in employing small intervals as grace. Then when we hear old slokas and ghazals, songs written hundreds of years a^o, sung with the same sweet dream/ cadences, the same wild melody, to the same soft beats of little hands, and the same soft timkle of the silver cymbals, we shall perhaps begin to feel that music of this kind can be as welcome and tasteful to ears accustomed to it as the music of the West, with its exaggerated sonorousness, is to ui ; and so our contempt will gradually give way to wonder, and upon acquaintance possibly to love. For this music, let us remember, daily gives pleasure to as many thousands as its more cultivated European sister gives to hundreds. There is hardly any festivity in India in which some part is not assigned to music, and for religious ceremonies its use is universal.'
In judging of Indian music one must enquire whether it contains those musical qualities which ensure an artistic appreciation from the cultured. When discussing this matter with an acquaintance once he said to ms, There ought to be something in all good music which any cultured ear and mind can artistically appreciate.' He was of course referring to the best examples of either western or eastern music and to cultured minds on both sides of the world. The question naturally arises here as to whether it is possible for any one to appreciate the music of the other side without some special education of the musical faculty. We know how difficult it is for people who have had no musical education at all to appreciate classical music in the west, and we know too that all classes can be educated to appreciate it. It is a fact that many musical artists of the west have revealed a very keen appreciation of Indian music, and some of them have learnt to use it with real distinction. Some may think that this is a rare occurrence, and not a possibility for every-one who has a soul for music. This book should at any rate reveal the fact that Indian music, whether fully developed or not, is at least founded on sound musical principles, and that it does contain possibilities of appreciation by all truly musical people.
There are many reasons which prevent people from giving that appreciation to the music of the other people which it merits. There are some to whom the music of the other is simply a noise more or less disagreeable, or perhaps 'the least disagreeable of noises.' There are some who like Aurangzeb would have Indian music buried so deep that ' neither voice nor echo shall issue from the grave.' Various causes may conduce to this lack of appreciation. A writer in the Madras Mail sometime ago gave expression to one of these. He wrote :
'I own that Indian music, though it interests me, does not appeal to me in the least. I have tried again and again to catch some comprehensive idea and grasp a beginning or an ending, to discover whether the music is pathetic or sublime, erotic or religious, and I have never yet succeeded.'
He goes on to say with impartial fairness :
'The conclusion to be drawn is not that the art is inferior or that it does not exist. It is the ears of our musical understanding which are deaf to those sounds, which have so powerful an effect upon our neighbours.' There are also those who are repelled by the grotesque exhibitions, which so often accompany the rendering of Indian music even by some of the best artists, though this is not a trait which is altogether confined to Indian artists. I remember a story which will illustrate this point very well, and which incidentally shows that cultured Indians as well find them grotesque. A foolish shepherd became suddenly rich, and one day a musician came and sang before him, shaking his head, eyes and hands in time with the music as he did so, and making the most grotesque faces. The shepherd not having seen that kind of thing before thought that he had fits and took him inside and had him branded. The musician was glad to get away. Still he went on with his art, and one day, when singing before a king, the king was so pleased that he went away to get him a valuable present. The musician thinking of his former experience ran off. Then the king sent to his house and asked what was the matter, and was informed of the treatment he had formerly received. The king replied, 'A fool may acquire riches, but does not therefore become sensible.' Another story on the same theme tells of a musician singing before a shepherd, with similar strange gestures. The shepherd wept copiously all the time. The musician, being unable to understand the cause of his weeping, stopped and asked him why he was weeping. The shepherd said, 'Last night one of my sheep had the same disease and swelled up and died. When I think that you too will die in four watches, it makes me sad to think of one so young suffering from such a dire disease.' This story shows that it is not only the European who can look upon these things with a sense of humour. To allow this kind of thing to prevent our appreciation of the music is to lose the substance because of its covering. One may hope that it will not be long before in India itself these grotesque contortions will be condemned as bad form by the best people.
Then, as Captain Day says, there are many who condemn Indian music without having made any genuine attempt to understand or appreciate it. They take all their ideas of it from the indifferent barber's band, or the wandering troupe with its noisy instruments. They are encased in their prejudice, which forms a tough skin and prevents them from feeling any sense of the beauty and charm of the music. One can only hope that some day they will wake up to the fact that prejudice is farthest removed from discrimination, and that it has resulted not only in their loss but also in a loss to all, inasmuch as it has hampered a real appreciation of things Eastern. Strange though it may appear, there are many Indians who feel just the same about western music. An Indian gentleman in Lahore remarked to me that western music to him was like 'the howling of a jackal in a desert.' One is glad to know that there are to-day an increasing number of both westerners and easterners who are learning to appreciate the charm and the art of the music of the other.
It would be well now to gather together some of the important distinctions between Indian and western music.
1. The dominant factor in Indian music is melody, while that of western music is harmony. In the one case notes are related to definite notes of a raga, and in the other case to varying chords. Indian melody is produced by the regulated succession of concordant notes, while western harmony arises from the agreeable concord of various related notes. As a result of this differentiation, Indian music has developed solely along the lines of melody, while the greatest development of western music has taken place in the region of harmony. Does the fact that western music has developed a second dimension, so to speak, make it more advanced than Indian music? Can we call Indian music thereby inferior or primitive? Indian music has taken one line of development, that of melody; and, in order to add to its charm and variety, has developed every phase of it, including time-measure, in ways that have never occurred to the western mind. These are two lines of development, and perhaps one has travelled as far along its line, as the other upon its line. There has been far more development in Indian music, than even many Indian musicians were aware of; as until recently there was no opportunity for the different lines of development to converge or to co-operate with each other, owing to the enormous distances, the absence of the habit of wide travel, and the lack of facilities for intercommunication. However, things are rapidly changing, and to-day we have a permanent all-India organisation, which will undoubtedly gather together the scattered lines of development and bring them to bear upon Indian music as a whole. It is only recently that musical associations have been formed in India, and that music lovers have had opportunity to get together and compare their work. All this must be remembered in judging the progress that has been made by Indian music. Another thing that has greatly hampered this progress has been the absence of an adequate and universal system of notation. This too is being remedied, and it will be possible soon to judge the relative progress of western and Indian systems of music on a basis of equality.
2. Then again, Indian melody is cast in one definite mood throughout, and both time and tune are wrought into one homogeneous whole. Variations are not allowed to alter that mood, which persists with the raga. The balance of the music is obtained partly by time-variations and partly by grace. 'In western music mood is used to articulate the balance of the whole piece.' The particular times for singing the different ragas, the r^ga pictures and the emotions associated with them all fit into this idea of the Indian melody.
3. Then again, and perhaps most important of all, in Indian music the salient notes are fixed by long association and tradition, and any alteration of such saliency is not as a rule possible in a melody. The relation of the individual notes to one another is settled by ancient tradition. In western music, on the other hand, the salient notes are made by the momentary impulse of the harmony or of the counterpoint, and it is the cluster of notes rather than the individual note which has special value.
'In Indian music the notes are members of a form already supplied by tradition, and the newness is created by their arrangement and graces, while in western music they create new forms as the music proceeds.'
'In Indian music the notes stand out from each other as clearly as do the faces of our friends in our mind.' 4. Further in Indian composition the melody is dependent upon the relation to certain fixed notes which vary according to the raga. It sets no store by any progress through notes which suggest harmony, whereas western melodies tend to circle round the notes which are harmonically related to the tonic. As a result imitation at different levels, so common in western music, is very rarely found in Indian music, and the two tetrachords are seldom identical in the character of their constituents.
5. As we have seen Indian music lays great stress on grace-gamaka — 'curves of sound.' These are not mere accidental ornaments as in western music, but essential parts of the melodic structure.
6. The use of microtones in Indian music and the general absence of the tempered scale gives a very distinct flavour to it. To those whose ears have always been tuned to certain fixed intervals, this occurrence of quite different intervals, some of them most strange to western ears, alters the whole feeling of the music. Mrs. Mann says, 'Western music is music without microtones, as Indian music is music without harmony.'
7. We have already noticed the difference in time- measures and this is accountable to a very considerable extent for the strangeness of Indian music to so many. Varieties of duration do not come naturally to ears which are habituated to varieties of accent.1[1]
8. Another difference that has a great deal to do with our appreciation or otherwise of music, is the matter of emphasis upon certain external qualities. Western music rightly has come to lay very great emphasis upon tone and timbre, whereas Indian music passes these by on the other side and gives all attention to execution and accuracy. The melody is not determined by canons of charm or pleasure, but by adherence to certain fixed standards ; and the quality of tone in which the melody is sung or played does not have the importance that it does in the west. 'The Indian singer is first a musician and secondly a voice-producer. He is not singing from some set piece, but extemporizing according to some definite rule, which almost unconsciously models the form of his song.' This accounts for the frequent occurrence even in the best songs of difficult sol-fa passages which have no musical beauty whatever. A short time ago while talking with an Indian musical friend about a certain singer, I said, 'He has not got a very good voice.' 'Oh,' said my friend, 'That is nothing. The great thing is for him to sing correctly and skilfully. The tone does not matter at all.' In a note in the Adyar Bulletin, Madras, somewhat recently, Mr. Tagore, in discussing the singing of an Indian lady, who had received training in Europe, said that in India any finesse in singing is regarded with contempt, no trouble being taken to make either voice or manner attractive. He goes on :
'They are not ashamed if their gestures are violent, their top notes cracked, and their bass notes unnatural. They take it to be their sole function to display their perfect mastery over all the intricacies of times and tunes, forms and formalities of the classic traditions.'
A commentator adds, 'In Europe we listen for the tone, the sweetness of the voice, of the instrument. In India they listen only for the tune — the melody and the rhythm.' It must, however, be added that to-day many Indian music-lovers are coming to realize the importance of tone, and are placing very much greater emphasis upon it.
One thing which often depresses the western listener is the harsh nasal tone of the Indian singer. It is interesting to find that, while many Indians are trying to get away from it, the nasal tone still has its defenders. Mrs. Mann says that it is a degraded form of a very fine tradition, to the effect that the yogi could obtain the power to go on singing without breathing, and it is the desire to attain to this power which is responsible for the cultivation of the habit of singing at the back of the nose.
Sir Rabindranath Tagore goes down to the fundamental causes of the difiference between the music of East and West:
'At first, I must admit your Western music jarred upon me. I heard Madame Albani sing a song in which there was an imitation of the nightingale. It was so childishly imitative of the mere externals of nature that I could take little pleasure in it.'
'And what food for musical inspiration would a Hindu find in the song of the nightingale?' asked the questioner. 'He would find the soul-state of the listener; he would make music in the same way that Keats wrote his ode. It seems to me that Indian music concerns itself more with human experience as interpreted by religion, than with experience in an everyday sense. For us, music has above all a transcendental significance. It disengages the spiritual from the happenings of life; it sings of the relationship of the human soul with the soul of things beyond. The world by day is? like European music; a flowing concourse of vast harmony, composed of concord and discord and many disconnected fragments. And the night world is our Indian music; one pure, deep and tender raga. They both stir us, yet the two are contradictory in spirit- But that cannot be helped. At the very root nature is divided into two, day and night, unity and variety, finite and infinite. We men of India live in the realm of night; we are overpowered by the sense of the One and Infinite. Our music draws the listener away beyond the limits of everyday human joys and sorrows, and takes us to that lonely region of renunciation which lies at the root of the universe, while European music leads us a variegated dance through the endless rise and fall of human grief and joy.'
On the same subject Mr. Fox Strangways says :
'One shows a rejection of what is transient, a soberness in gaiety, endurance in sorrow, a search after the spiritual ideals of life. The other shows a vivid insight, an eager quest after wayside beauty and the dexterous touch that turns it to account. The one seems to say, 'Life is puzzling, its claims are many, but we will hammer out a solution, not by turning away from ugliness, but by compelling it to serve the ends of beauty.' The other, 'Life is simple and beauty close at hand at every moment, wherever we go; the mistake is in ourselves if we do not train our eyes and ears and hearts to find it.' (F.S. pp. 339, 340).
Mrs. Mann says in the same strain :
'While western music speaks of the wonders of God's creation, eastern music hints at the inner beauty of the Divine in man and in the world. Indian music requires of its hearers something of that mood of divine discontent, of yearning for the infinite and impossible.'
Another writer remarks :
'An Indian banquet with its vast variety of dishes of every taste and savour, is bewildering to the European who enjoys eating one thing at a time, with his whole gastric soul concentrated on it. Similarly the European's multiplicity of sounds in music bewilders the Indian, who likes to elaborate one particular melody to what seems to the western tedious lengths.' (I.S.R., Sept. 21.1920.) One can only say further that it is not impossible for every one who has an ear and heart for musical beauty to learn to appreciate the charm of Indian music and in some measure to understand it ; and that this attitude is far more productive of joy to oneself and to others, than the more common attitude of insular prejudice which refuses to think that there is any possibility of finding something worth appreciating in the music of India. While a good deal of training would probably be required before one could appreciate all the niceties of the classical style, it should not be difficult for any westerner to appreciate heartily the beautiful songs and melodies of good Indian musicians. We would also urge that Indian musicians should make a point of studying the principles and history of western music. The experience of the west will be of immense help to musical progress in India.
The deeper spirit of nationalism and religion shows itself in music as much, if not more than in other things. Music has a sacred purpose connected with the regeneration of the human heart, and plays an important part in almost all our dealings in the world. If, however, Indian music is to advance and to become the vehicle for the expression of the highest ideals and feelings of modern India, it needs men like Bach and Beethoven, to lead it forward and to organize it, and to give of their best to its study and application. When people are too occupied with the sciences and arts which lead to worldly prosperity, devotion to the cultural arts finds no place. Maharaja Tagore, at a lecture in Calcutta, asked those who would do something for Indian music to give more attention to the grammar of music, to the proper theory of raga and tala, and not simply to churn out of their minds anything which appeared to them to be music, in accordance with notions derived from street singers or from tradition. The science and practice of Indian music, if it is to advance, needs a great deal of original research, as well as very thorough education. Such research and cultivation of Indian music means the giving up of time and energy now spent on money-making to musical culture. It needs also the daring which, while based on a thorough knowledge of the science as it exists to-day, refuses to be handicapped by traditions which belong to yesterday.
There are various practical ways in which enthusiasts can help in the progress and development of Indian music. The first thing to do is to study and practice it for oneself. There are books to-day, both in English and the vernaculars, which will help in this. Then it is good to make a habit of training the children in Indian music, and to see that they can play at least one Indian instrument. Every cultured family in the west aims at this, and in the large towns of India at any rate it is becoming quite possible to-day.
It is possible also to render aid to the different musical societies which are growing up. Princes and wealthy men can liberally help the All-India Music Conference and the Academy of Indian Music now established in Delhi with its ambitious programme.
We can also help in a great extension of musical knowledge among the people generally. There was in the last half of the nineteenth century a great growth of musical knowledge in England, largely through voluntary associations, which grew up all over the country. The different musical festivals which were organized also contributed much to this; and there seems no reason why, in association with some of the annual festivals of India, there should not be organized musical festivals, which would attract artists and choirs from all over the country.
The ancient Greeks are said to have made a point of teaching their children music, because they believed that it made them more unselfish, and helped them to see better the beauty of order and the usefulness of rule. Lord Lamington, Governor of Bombay, at the opening of the Gandharva Mahavidyalaya, said :
'Music has in the past played a part in the education of the people of India. I believe that it may do much more in the future if it is made an object of reverential study, and thrown open to far greater numbers than at present, and if it is allowed to take its proper place as an elevating influence.'
In music, as in all other things in India, co-operation and real comradeship between East and West is needed, if the greatest possible progress is to be made. The words of Lord Ronaldshay, Governor of Bengal, apply to culture as well as to government in India. 'The future of the land we live in may be likened to a splendid edifice built up on a firm foundation of pillared arches. The pillars are the two great races, whose lot has been so strangely intertwined by the fingers of Providence — the Indians and the British. The keystones of the arches are the will on the part of both races to understand and co-operate with one another in this task.'
The morning will surely come, the darkness will vanish, and thy voice pour down in golden streams breaking through the sky.
Then thy words will take wing in songs from every one of my birds' nests, and thy melodies will break forth in flowers in all my forest groves.
- ↑ 1 See page 73.