One has to be aware that Indian music generally discourages (if not completely prohibiting) transition from one scale to another in a performance; that would usually amount to changing the raga. As our old masters (ustads) say, “if you lose the beat, you lose a breath (literally, a hair); if you lose the raga, you lose your life”! But there are experiments with what is known as raga-mala, or a chain of ragas, where the singer adroitly moves into other ragas and comes back to the main raga without missing a beat or making the jointing unpleasant.
The base raga is one that uses a sub-set, usually 7, of the standard notes, but innovation is allowed by convention; these ragas are often termed mixed, (mishra) ragas, as opposed to their pure, shuddha, parent of the same name. Another sub-genre or specialisation in Hindustani music is murchhana, scale-transposition. Here the singer shifts his “tonic” or base note, sa, from note to note of his base raga, thereby generating successively different ragas. He has to also change the names of the notes when he sings his sargam, solfege, giving the name sa to each base note in turn. Pandit Jasraj has even developed this into a performance genre for two voices, called Jasrangi jugalbandhi, where each sings a different raga, but both use the same notes, by the mechanism of using different notes as their basic sa. These are the beginnings of the use of harmonisation in Indian classical music. But it would still be true to say that Indian music is ‘monophonic’ (for one main voice) and unimodal (sticking to one scale, i.e. raga), and does not really use harmony of many voices or key-shifts to produce effects. Perhaps this is what makes it sound repetitive and monotonous (literally – a tonal system is like a raga) to the Western ear. A basic shift in approach is required when listening to such a different system of music.
Having started off recognising a few ragas or melodic themes in this fashion, one can then listen more carefully to performances by classical singers to catch the names of the notes – the sargam (from the names of the notes, sa re ga ma pa dha ni SA). All would have been well if only our forebears had given a unique name to each note; but with the usual perverseness of the scholarly, they have ensured an amount of confusion by giving the same name to more than one note. The octave consists of the notes sa re ga ma pa dha ni SA; like do re mi fa so la ti DO. If one keeps the first sa and the middle pa fixed, there is a choice of two re, flat (komal) and the ‘normal’ (shuddha); two ga, komal and shuddha; two ma, the normal (shuddha) and the higher or sharp (tivra); two dha, komal and shuddha; and two ni, komal and shuddha. This makes for a total of 12 notes (swara) in an octave, excluding the higher “tonic”, SA.
Our ancient musicologists, however, maintained that there were at least 22 clearly discernible notes, which we call shruti, “that which is heard”, as against swara, that which is sounded or used in practice. It is a moot point whether any one can actually work with more than 12 notes and still remain musical. It is maintained that in some cases the same note (say, a flat re) has a distinctly different frequency or pitch in different ragas. Perhaps one effect is of the influence of the neighbouring notes in a sequence. But whether one can actually distinguish and use two such closely placed shruti or “microtones” is uncertain: Kishori Amonkar, an outstanding and erudite vocalist of the Jaipur-Atrauli school or gharana, is credited with this ability because of her deep study and contemplation of the notes in the context of different ragas. Bhatkande, writing in the 1930’s, has his own doubts whether such traditions reflect either past practice or present reality. This is the case with many other traditions in Indian music, like the belief that a great singer can produce fire by singing raga Deepak, or rain by singing raga Megh (one has to be forearmed with the latter to douse any conflagration started by the former!). Myths and traditions reflect a theme or a sentiment, rather than a scientific or objective fact.
The consequence of this for us is that we have to distinguish the flat notes from the sharp ones of the same name. One could call the higher note of each pair tivra, ‘sharp’, as in Western terminology, and the lower komal, equivalent to ‘flat’; it is a matter of convention that one of each pair is considered the normal, literally ‘pure’, shuddha. One point to be made here is that the names of the notes are not applied in an identical manner in the Karnatik system, and one has to work out the equivalents (this holds true for ragas as well).
While it is broadly correct to say that the Hindustani system avoids sequences with closely spaced notes (called ‘chromatism’ in Western music), it is not a rule. Thus there are ragas which use both the flat (normal) and the sharp ma or both the ni, for instance. There are also ragas which use most of the notes in the octave, though not in a straight up-and-down sequence, thereby avoiding the taint of chromatism. Often one of the pair of notes is touched very occasionally or in passing, giving a different air to a raga; it may even be a variant of the shuddha, ‘pure’, raga, and be denoted by the prefix mishra, ‘mixed’, or a descriptive compound name may be in vogue. Bhatkande has written somewhere that he suspects many such variants have come about because a singer made a mistake in a concert, and had to cover it up as a creative sally! Even an ustad can make mistakes!
This is a good place to explore the distinction between a melodic theme, raga, and a melodic scale. While it is true that a raga is based on a melodic scale, the realisation of that scale may be done in many ways. A straight up-and-down movement becomes quite monotonous: in fact all ragas end up sounding the same, as can be seen in certain styles of singing which rely too heavily on the scale, on the notes themselves, as it were (I will not venture an example of a singer in this style!). There are, however, other traditions and rules which emphasise certain non-linear sequences and sudden “sallies” and variations, which serve to generate different ragas from the same notes. This is especially associated with what is known as ustadi singing: traditions based on innovative prodigies (ustad’s) of the past, who have given their names to new ragas and styles.
The musical scale itself may be approximated by the term thaat or “base”. Bhatkande has put all the 250 or more Hindustani ragas under just 10 such thaat or melodic scales: but the Karnatik tradition has settled on an older system of 72 parent scales which, according to one Western writer, reflects the Oriental’s love of numerology and esoterism! If one uses all the combinations of 7,6,and 5 notes out of 12 swaras, of course, the total number of possible melodic scales will run into the tens of thousands; only a tiny proportion of them have been developed into working ragas, but experimentation is going on. This is to emphasise that Indian classical music is a living, evolving, stream, and not a fixed, ossified, relic.
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