The History of Indian Music
Indian classical music originated in the most ancient scriptures of Hindu – the Vedas. It was influenced quite significantly by Indian folk music as well as the music of Persia. It is described at length in one of the four Vedas – the Samaveda. Indian classical music is highly elaborate and exquisitely expressive, and is by nature monophonic and based upon one melody line. This melody line is played over a constant drone.
Indian music has been taught orally, by tradition. Until the 20th century, it was not taught or transmitted through any other method. The rules and songs themselves were taught from teacher to pupil in face-to-face lessons. In the 17th and 18th centuries, scholars in Europe became interested in Indian music and began searching for a way to record the sound of it, looking for a system already in existence that would be able to express the sounds. The highly complex sounds of Indian music were hard to record in writing, however.
Indian music has one of the longest continuous histories of any musical tradition in the world. Classical music in the Indian tradition is based upon scales and melodies called ‘the ragas,’ which provides it a solid foundation. While classical music in the Western world tends to be quite set in stone, where notes and performances are concerned, classical music in India allows for a great deal more of improvisation and personalization by the person performing it. This means that each performance of the same piece might be very different. Indian classical music is not composed, per se. It evolves over many years – centuries, in some cases – as performers change and add to a piece. The Hindustani ragas – found in north India – are often correlated with particular seasons or times of the day, and while there exist thousands of ragas, there are six that are considered fundamental – Shree, Dipak, Megh, Malkauns, Hindol, and Bhairav. The Carnatic ragas in south India are based upon 72 fundamental ragas.
Purandara Dasa is considered to have been the founder of the Carnatic school in 1494. This type of music is mainly religious and vocal. It is also played on different instruments than those used to play Hindustani ragas. Carnatic ragas are played on the sitar, table, tambura, and sarod. Hindustani ragas are typically played on the vina sitar, mridangam drums, and ghatam clay pots. The age of Syama Sastri, Mythuswami Dikshitar, and Tyagaraja – around the early to mid 1800s – is considered to have been Carnatic music’s golden age.
Indian music was largely unheard in the Western world until the 1950s, when Bangladeshi musician Ali Akbar Khan played in a New York concert. After this, curiosity surrounding Indian music paired with the hippy phenomenon to become one of the great symbols of the 1960s. His music remained reasonably popular all the way into the mid-90s. One of Ali Akbar Khan’s father’s students, Ravi Shankar, because quite a star in the world of Indian music. Ravi toured the west in the mid-50s and had friends among some of the most popular pop stars of the era, including the Beatles’ George Harrison in the mid-60s. He experimented with the fusion of Eastern and Western music, using everything from the medium of symphonic orchestra to electric keyboards.
Debashish Bhattacharya altered the Hawaiian slide guitar in the 1970s with the addition of droning and resonating strings, as well as a high speed picking technique using three fingers. A young sitar player named Nikhil Banerjee was considered a great virtuoso during this time, as well as Vilayat Khan and Shahid Parvez being thought to be great vocal stylists in Indian music. Hariprasad Chaurasia, a bamboo flute player, and Lakshmiarayana Subramaniam, a violinist were considered instrumental masters in the last 70s and throughout the 80s. In the late 1980s, Ilaiyaraaja experimented with a fusion of Indian music and Bach.
Indian classical music is not purely an instrumental art – it is also vocal. The oldest vocal style of Indian music is called ‘dhrupad,’ which was considered religious as well as aristocratic. A form called ‘khayal’ began to emerge over a few hundred years as a more romantic style that began as the dhrupad, though it was more accessible to the everyday person. It is theorized that sitar and table instruments were introduced to complement the khayal style of singing in the 18th century. Before India and Pakistan were separated, Amir Khan and Bade Ghulam Ali Khan were some of the greatest vocalists in the Hindustani style.
