Rāgs Around the Clock E-Book

David Clarke

• Herausgeber: Open Book Publishers
• Kategorie: Lebensstil
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2024

Beschreibung

Rāgs Around the Clock is a rich and vibrant compendium for the discovery and study of North Indian classical music. The theory and practice of rāg are explored through two interlinked resources: a handbook of essays and analyses offering technical, historical, cultural and aesthetic perspectives; and two online albums – Rāg samay cakra and Twilight Rāgs from North India – featuring khayāl singer Vijay Rajput and accompanists.


Extracts from the albums are also embedded into the text to enhance learning and understanding. Each rāg is accompanied by a description of its chief characteristics and technical features, a notation of the song (bandiś) on which the performance is based, and a transliteration and translation of the song text. Distinctively, Rāg samay cakra also includes spoken renditions of each of the texts, helping non-Hindavi speakers to achieve the correct pronunciation.


Sharing insights from both theory and practice, this collection draws on recent scholarship while also showcasing the vocal idiom – the gāyakī – of Vijay Rajput, a disciple of the late Pandit Bhimsen Joshi. It offers invaluable reading for students and researchers of Indian classical music, world music and ethnomusicology, and a rich repository for teacher and student practitioners of the khayāl vocal style. The combination of an aural and written exploration of rāg will appeal to anyone drawn to this form of music – whether newcomer, student (śiṣyā) or aficionado (rasika).

Leseprobe

RĀGS AROUND THE CLOCK

Rāgs Around the Clock

A Handbook for North Indian Classical Music, with Online Recordings in the Khayāl Style

David ClarkeMusic by Vijay Rajputwith Murad Ali, Imre Bangha, Mahmood Dholpuri, Fida Hussain, Shahbaz Hussain, Jonathan Katz and Athar Hussain Khan

Dr Vijay Rajput (Hindustani vocal) accompanied by Prof. David Clarke (tānpurā), Recital Room, Newcastle University, 25 April 2024. Image: John Donoghue (www.jdphotographer.co.uk). Licence held by Newcastle University.

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©2024 David Clarke. ©2024 Music by Vijay Rajput.

This work, including the music, is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike (CC BY-NC-SA).

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David Clarke. Music by Vijay Rajput, Rāgs Around the Clock: A Handbook for North Indian Classical Music, with Online Recordings in the Khayāl Style. Cambridge, UK: Open Book Publishers, 2024, https://doi.org/10.11647/OBP.0313

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All external links were active at the time of publication unless otherwise stated and have been archived via the Internet Archive Wayback Machine at https://archive.org/web

Any digital material and resources associated with this volume is available at https://doi.org/10.11647/OBP.0313#resources and is archived at https://research.ncl.ac.uk/ragas/

Every effort has been made to identify and contact copyright holders and any omission or error will be corrected if notification is made to the publisher.

ISBN Paperback: 978-1-80064-807-4

ISBN Digital (PDF): 978-1-80064-809-8

ISBN Digital ebook (EPUB): 978-1-80064-810-4

ISBN HTML: 978-1-80064-813-5

DOI: 10.11647/OBP.0313

Cover image: Companion Persuading Radha as Krishna Flutes, folio from the “Lambagraon” Gita Govinda (Song of the Cowherd). India, Himachal Pradesh, Kangra, ca. 1825. Opaque watercolour and gold on paper. Gift of the Michael J. Connell Foundation (M.71.59.7), Los Angeles County Museum of Art. Wikimedia, public domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Companion_Persuading_Radha_as_Krishna_Flutes,_Folio_from_the_%27Lambagraon%27_Gita_Govinda_(Song_of_the_Cowherd)_LACMA_M.71.49.7.jpg

Cover design by Katy Saunders.

Contents

Online Albums: Track List

Rāg Samay Cakra

Twilight Rāgs from North India

Preface and Acknowledgements

Biographical Notes

Transliteration and Other Textual Conventions

Prologue: First Encounters

Introduction: Origins, Overview, Contexts

1. CONCEPTS, CONVENTIONS, HISTORY AND CULTURE

1.1 Elements of Indian Classical Music

1.2 Sargam Notation

1.3 Rāg

1.4 Tāl

1.5 Tānpurā Drone, Svar

1.6 Rāg and Time: Samay Cakra

1.7 Khayāl: Stylistic and Performance Conventions

1.8 Khayāl: Ornamentation

1.9 Khayāl: Origins

1.10 V. N. Bhatkhande

1.11 The Guru-Śiṣyā Paramparā

1.12 Riyāz

2. A CYCLE OF RĀGS: RĀG SAMAY CAKRA

Performers:

2.1 The Album and Its Supporting Materials

2.2 The Song Texts

2.3 Notating the Bandiśes (and Performing Them)

2.4 Terminology Used in the Rāg Specifications

2.5 The Rāgs

3. EXPLORATIONS AND ANALYSES (I): RĀG SAMAY CAKRA

3.1 Introduction

3.2 How Do You Sing an Ālāp?

3.3 How Do You Sing a Choṭā Khayāl?

4. EXPLORATIONS AND ANALYSES (II): TWILIGHT RĀGS FROM NORTH INDIA

Performers:

4.1 Introduction

4.2 Rāg Bhairav:Texts, Notations and Commentaries

4.3 How Do You Sing a Baṛā Khayāl? Performance Conventions, Aesthetics, Temporality

Epilogue: Laya/Pralaya

Glossary of Terms Used in Hindustani Classical Music

References

Online Resources

Discography

List of Audio Examples

List of Figures

Index

Indexing Policy

Online Albums: Track List

Rāg Samay Cakra

Music

1

Rāg Bhairav (5:06)

2

Rāg Toḍī (5:47)

3

Rāg Śuddh Sāraṅg (5:12)

4

Rāg Brindābanī Sāraṅg (3:53)

5

Rāg Bhīmpalāsī (5:15)

6

Rāg Multānī (4:45)

7

Rāg Pūriyā Dhanāśrī (7:39)

8

Rāg Bhūpālī (7:03)

9

Rāg Yaman (7:22)

10

Rāg Kedār (3:48)

11

Rāg Bihāg (5:30)

12

Rāg Mālkauns (6:57)

13

Rāg Megh (4:32)

14

Rāg Basant (4:47)

Bandiś Texts, Spoken

15

‘Dhana dhana murata’ (Rāg Bhairav) (0:33)

16

‘Laṅgara kā̃karīyā’ (Rāg Todī) (0:23)

17

‘Aba morī bāta’ (Rāg Śuddh Sāraṅg) (0:33)

18

‘Raṅga le manavā’ (Rāg Brindābanī Sāraṅg) (0:41)

19

‘Hamarī kahī mitavā’ (Rāg Bhīmpalāsī) (0:28)

20

‘Runaka jhunaka’ (Rāg Multānī) (0:22)

21

‘Pā̃yalīyā jhanakāra’ (Rāg Pūriyā Dhanāśrī) (0:22)

22

‘Gāīye Gaṇapatī’ (Rāg Bhūpālī) (0:23)

23

‘Śyām bajāi’ (Rāg Yaman) (0:27)

24

‘Bola bola mose’ (Rāg Kedār) (0:27)

25

‘Abahũ lālana’ (Rāg Bihāg) (0:32)

26

‘Koyalīyā bole ambuvā’ (Rāg Mālkauns) (0:28)

27

‘Ghanana ghanana’ (Rāg Megh) (0:24)

28

‘Phulavā binata’ (Rāg Basant) (0:30)

Twilight Rāgs from North India

Rāg Bhairav

1

Ālāp (2:55)

2

Baṛā khayāl in vilambit ektāl: ‘Bālamavā more saīyā̃’ (18:22)

3

Choṭā khayāl in drut ektāl: ‘Suno to sakhī batiyā’ (11:58)

Rāg Yaman

4

Ālāp (3:14)

5

Baṛā khayāl in vilambit ektāl: ‘Kahe sakhī kaise ke karīe’ (19:39)

6

Choṭā khayāl in drut tīntāl: ‘Śyām bajāi’ (10:30)

To students and teachers of Indian classical music everywhere

Preface and Acknowledgements

Rāgs Around the Clock is a compendium for the study and exploration of Hindustani (North Indian) classical music. It comprises the present volume, by David Clarke (henceforth DC), and two albums by khayāl singer Vijay Rajput (henceforth VR), around which the contents of the book are organised. The albums, along with audio examples extracted from them and analysed below, are available to stream and download at https://doi.org/10.11647/OBP.0313#resources, or from the book’s companion website at https://research.ncl.ac.uk/ragas/.

Our title invokes the notion—still very much alive within the Hindustani tradition—that a rāg should be performed at its proper time (samay). This principle is reflected in the recorded performances. Our first album, Rāg samay cakra, is a cycle (cakra) of rāgs, turning through successive phases of the day and night; while the second album, Twilight Rāgs from North India, presents rāgs from particularly evocative times of the diurnal cycle. As well as providing an introduction to Hindustani rāg music in theory and practice, this work offers perspectives on the khayāl vocal style and its musical processes, in pursuit of the question: what is it that khayāl singers do when they perform? We hope the contents will appeal to anyone drawn to such music—whether inside or outside the academy: whether newcomer, aficionado (rasika), student, teacher, researcher or lay listener.

In addition to embracing the samay concept, RāgsAround the Clock, through its commentaries and analyses,distinctively showcases the vocal idiom—the gāyakī—of a single artist, VR. In so doing, it offers a window onto the Kirānā gharānā, a stylistic lineage of Indian musicians that goes back several generations. Vijay ji was a disciple (śiṣyā) of the late Pandit Bhimsen Joshi (1922–2011), one of the gharānā’s most revered latter-day exponents and a bearer of India’s highest civilian award, the Bhārat Ratna. Among Bhimsen Joshi’s gurus was the equally renowned Sawai Gandharva (1886–1952), who in turn was taught by the founder of this branch of the Kirānā gharānā, Abdul Karim Khan (1872–1937). This lineage (paramparā) continues into the present day through the teaching of artists like VR, with DC numbering among his students.

Which brings us to a further distinctive feature of this project: the musical relationship of its principal collaborators, namely that of guru and śiṣyā. Although our subject is not that relationship per se (the topic perhaps of future, autoethnographic work), it nonetheless subtly conditions much of the content. At one point or another, VR has passed down all of the featured rāgs to me, DC; and much of what I understand generally about rāg and the performance of khayāl comes from the experience of taking instruction(tālīm) from my guruji.

In its very grounding as oral/aural culture, that experience encompasses knowledge of a kind that eludes complete capture by concepts or theory. This ineffable dimension is perhaps an aspect of Indian music’s acknowledged spiritual content. Western philosophy might couch this as a dialectic between theory and practice, between mind and body, between the subjective experience of the performer and the objective properties of the musical material. Either way, the question of the limits of theory and the subjective experience of what lies beyond it becomes a running theme in the later stages of Rāgs Around the Clock.

Another aspect of subjectivity acknowledged here is the heart connection between teacher and disciple and between fellow students—manifested also in their collective devotion to musical tradition. These are important, anthropological facts about the music, and although this book is not principally a work of ethnomusicology, such themes are reflected within its narratives—most explicitly in the (auto)ethnographic vignettes of its Prologue and Epilogue, which seek to draw wider cultural understanding from the stories of people and their relationships.

In the same vein, we should note that, despite its focus on the individual artist, Indian classical music is a fundamentally collaborative enterprise, sustained by interlocking—and these days international—networks of gurus, disciples, friends, fellow artists and contacts. So too, Rāgs Around the Clock would not have been possible without our numerous collaborators and supporters, to whom we are deeply indebted. Not least among these are the consummate accompanists on our albums—Murad Ali (sāraṅgī), Athar Hussain Khan (tabla) and Mahmood Dholpuri (harmonium) on Rāg samay cakra; Shahbaz Hussain (tabla) and Fida Hussain (harmonium) on Twilight Rāgs from North India. No less important have been our language advisers, Jonathan Katz and Imre Bangha, who provided scholarly translations of the song texts and offered invaluable guidance regarding the finer points of language. Sudipta Roy (who appears in the Epilogue) also helped with translation and read earlier versions of the text. David de la Haye recorded and mastered the spoken song texts of Rāg samay cakra, and John Ayers was the sound engineer for Twilight Rāgs. Behind the scenes, Richard Widdess generously commented on earlier drafts of the book, and has been a much-valued supporter and critical friend. We are grateful too to the second, anonymous peer reviewer of our original proposal, whose suggestion that the book be expanded led to additional chapters that have, we hope, given the book greater heft. I (DC) of course take responsibility for the final contents and for any unconscious remnants of my culture’s colonial past.

Thanks are also due to Newcastle University, whose Institute for Creative Arts Practice (NICAP) provided financial support for the initial development of the book, and whose School of Arts and Cultures provided a grant towards the costs of publishing it in open access form. Financial support for the recordings was provided by the Centre for Excellence in Teaching and Learning (CETL) for Music and Inclusivity, funded by the Higher Education Funding Council for England between 2005 and 2010, and led by the International Centre for Music Studies (ICMuS) at Newcastle University.

Last but not least, an enormous thank you to Alessandra Tosi and her team at Open Book Publishers—for themselves being open to the idea of this book; for their commitment and their editorial and technical professionalism; and, especially, for their patience.

Biographical Notes

Born in New Delhi, Vijay Rajput started learning music at the age of eight. He acquired his initial training in the khayāl vocal style from Pandits M. G. Deshpande, Vinay Chander Mudgal and Madhup Mudgal. Subsequently, he studied for several years under Bhārat Ratna Pandit Bhimsen Joshi, one of India’s most eminent vocalists. Vijay gained his PhD from the University of Delhi in 2003 with a thesis on the life and works of Sawai Gandharva. He is in demand as a performer in India, the UK and on the wider international stage. He has sung at many festivals, including the Sawai Gandharva Bhimsen Mahotsav in Pune. He has been based in Newcastle upon Tyne since 2004, and since 2006 has taught students from many musical backgrounds at Newcastle University.

David Clarke is Emeritus Professor of Music at Newcastle University. His wide-ranging musical and academic interests include music theory and analysis, music and philosophy, and Hindustani classical music. His musicological publications include articles, books and book chapters on twentieth-century western music, music and consciousness, and Hindustani classical music. He has studied the khayāl vocal style with Dr Vijay Rajput since 2004, and has undertaken study and participated in workshops with Pandits Rajan and Sajan Misra, Ramakant and Umakant Gundecha, Smt Veena Sahasrabuddhe and Pandit Uday Bhawalkar.

Athar Hussain Khan is a highly regarded tabla player who began learning with his uncle, Ustād Shane Ahmed Khan, at the age of seven. He subsequently studied with Ustād Manu Khan of the Ajrara gharānā, which ranks among India’s principal tabla lineages. He has performed at major festivals throughout India as well as internationally.

Murad Ali is one of the best-known contemporary exponents of the sāraṅgī, and has played an important role in the resurgence of the instrument. He inherits a family tradition of sāraṅgī playing that goes back six generations, having studied intensively with his grandfather, Ustād Siddique Ahmad Khan, and his father, Ustād Ghulam Sabir Khan. He has accompanied many of the world’s greatest exponents of Indian classical music, and is esteemed as a solo performer, composer and fusion artist.

The late Mahmood Dholpuri began his musical training under his grandfather, the sāraṅgī player Buddha Khan, going on to learn harmonium from various gurus, including Nasir Ahmad Khan of the Delhi gharānā. Mahmood Dholpuri became a highly respected and well-loved accompanist to many of the tradition’s greatest vocalists, including Pandit Bhimsen Joshi, Pandit Jasraj and Begum Parveen Sultana. He was awarded the civilian honour Padma Śrī in 2006.

Shahbaz Hussain is a UK-born tabla virtuoso. He started learning from his late father Ustād Mumtaz Hussain, a prominent vocalist, at the age of five. He is a disciple of Ustād Faiyaz Khan of the Delhi gharānā. He studied further and gave major performances with Ustād Shaukat Hussain Khan and Ustād Allah Rakha Khan. Shahbaz Hussain performs internationally, giving solo performances and accompanying many of the most acclaimed masters of Hindustani classical music.

Fida Hussain is a cherished harmonium accompanist to many world-class soloists, including Lakshmi Shankar, Ustād Fateh Ali Khan and Sharda Sahai. He is also a vocalist and former theatre performer.

Dr Jonathan Katz is Lecturer in Classics at Brasenose College, Oxford, Emeritus Fellow at St Anne's College, Oxford, and Quondam Fellow at All Souls College, Oxford. He is a scholar of ancient Greek, Latin and Sanskrit, and researches South Asian music through Indian-language sources. He is a practitioner of Hindustani classical music and an accomplished western-classical pianist.

Prof. Imre Bangha is Associate Professor of Hindi in the Faculty of Asian and Middle Eastern Studies, University of Oxford. He specialises in early Hindi literature and has expertise in a range of languages including Braj Bhāṣā, Urdu, Bengali and Hungarian.

Transliteration and Other Textual Conventions

Western readers may be aware that the languages of the Indian subcontinent deploy writing systems other than the Latin/Roman alphabet—for example, Hindi and Sanskrit are written in Devanāgarī (देवनागरी) script. In transliterating text from these and other languages (such as Braj Bhāṣā) into Roman/Latin font, I have followed the conventions of the International Alphabet of Sanskrit Transliteration (IAST), closely related to ISO 15919. This involves the use of diacritics—for example, a line (macron) to indicate lengthened vowels, a tilde (~) to indicate nasalised vowels, and underdots or overdots to indicate retroflex consonants or nasalisation of a preceding vowel. Such a formalised system may be unfamiliar even to South Asian speakers, who, in everyday writing, would be more likely to transliterate ‘Rāg Toḍī’ as ‘Raag Todi’. But IAST is favoured in scholarly practice because it makes for more precise and rigorous representation of spoken—and indeed sung—sounds (explained further in Section 2.2).

The front matter of most academic books on Indian music customarily details preferences regarding a host of further issues surrounding transliteration, orthography and other conventions. Here, briefly, are mine:

Italics are generally used for non-English technical terms (for example,

bandiś

), but not for proper names (for example, of instruments, musical genres and

rāgs

).

Quotations from non-English texts are generally presented un-italicised in quotation marks.

Indic words that have entered common western usage have been left in their westernised versions—hence ‘sitar’, not ‘sitār’; ‘tabla’ not ‘tablā’.

Similarly, I have retained commonly anglicised versions of place names and languages, etc.—for example, ‘Delhi’ not ‘Dillī’, ‘Hindi’ not Hindī’.

I have omitted diacritics from names of people—thus, ‘Bhatkhande’, not ‘Bhātkhaṇḍe’; and the honoric

jī

is rendered as ‘ji’—for example, ‘Vijay ji’, ‘guruji’.

In general, I have used the Hindavi (i.e. Hindi/Urdu) terms

rāg

,

tāl

and

ras

, rather than their Sanskrit counterparts

rāga

,

tāla

and

rasa

.

The suppression of the implicit vowel ‘a’ (aka

schwa

), which occurs under certain circumstances in spoken Hindavi, is normally reflected in transliteration—hence, ‘

tān

’ not ‘

tāna

’. However, this is a difficult principle to apply entirely systematically (see Choudhury et al. 2004; Dhore et al. 2012), and occasionally I have adopted alternative, commonly recognised transliterations, such as ‘Devanāgarī’ rather than ‘Devnāgarī’. Moreover, in the transliteration of

song

texts, I have, on the advice of our translators, followed the complementary norm: showing the ‘a’ that would be suppressed in speech—for instance, ‘jhanakāra’ not ‘jhankār’. This is because that vowel

is

pronounced when sung and is essential to musical and poetic metre. I expand further on this matter in

Section 2.2

, where readers will also find a guide to essentials of pronunciation.

Finally, a note on geographic terminology is warranted. While our chief concern is with North Indian—Hindustani—classical music, some of the principles under discussion are not totally distinct from those of South Indian—Karnatak—classical music; hence I use the more general term ‘Indian classical music’ when wanting to reflect shared aspects of this heritage. More generally still, I tend to use the term ‘Indian Music’ to refer to aspects of culture and practice that extend beyond the classical sphere; and ‘South Asian music’ when the context pertains more specifically to the period following the Partition of 1947.

Prologue: First Encounters

The date of Vijay ji’s arrival in the United Kingdom is etched indelibly in his memory: ‘2004, September tenth’, he will tell you without a moment’s hesitation. I (David) have heard his story several times (this version comes from a dialogue we had in November 2022): a chance conversation with a friend in New Delhi who alerted him to a newspaper advertisement for a teacher of Indian classical music in—of all places—Newcastle upon Tyne in the North East of England; the decision to quit a comfortable administrative post in the armed forces entertainment wing of India’s Ministry of Information and Broadcasting; the experiment of going West, like so many South Asian musicians before him. Vijay’s musical career was already on the rise: he was gaining repute in his own country as a Hindustani vocalist; he had been a disciple of one of India’s most famed khayāl vocalists, Pandit Bhimsen Joshi (1922–2011); and before that had studied with several esteemed teachers at the Gandharva Mahavidyalaya in New Delhi. Now here was an opportunity to ‘just see’ what might be possible in a different climate and in a professional role explicitly to do with making music.

Ethnomusicologist Philip Bohlman writes of the significance of first encounters in the experience of world music (2002: 1–5). My own first encounter with Vijay came not long after his arrival in Newcastle from New Delhi. I remember introducing myself to him at the home of Dr A, a local general medical practitioner (GP), of Indian heritage, who, with his then wife, also a GP, was seeking to re-launch a working musical gurukul within their own house, complete with a new resident guru (Vijay). From Vijay’s side, this was his first encounter with any country outside of India, and as we said Hello that Saturday morning in 2004, he looked a little overwhelmed by the momentousness of the step he had taken; it was a hard decision, his wife, Noopur, still in India, a baby on the way (they would join him a few months later). I also remember he looked young, in his early thirties; if this meant he didn’t conform to the traditional image of a guru as an older paternalistic figure, it did mean that he had the optimism and energy of someone in the first half of life to seize an opportunity and make something of it—‘destiny’, he told me, many years later.

When Vijay notes that his journey west followed in the footsteps (or, more accurately, the flightpath) of many South Asian artists before him, he points to a bigger historical context of outward migration from the Indian subcontinent, and the emergence of Indian music within an increasingly internationalised world during the twentieth century, and especially since the 1960s. The big names who have criss-crossed the globe—including Ravi Shankar (1920–2012), Alla Rakha (1919–2000), Zakir Hussain, Hariprasad Chaurasia—are only part of the story. To this we can also add a much larger population of working musicians who have settled abroad or who practice as artists of second- or third-generation South Asian heritage. In the UK, these individuals have helped Indian music take root not only in London, but also in regional cities such as Leeds, Birmingham, Leicester, Manchester, Liverpool and, of course, Newcastle upon Tyne. Since arriving in Newcastle, Vijay has not only been responsible for growing Indian music in his adopted home, but has also established networks as a teacher and performer across those other regional and metropolitan centres, as well as continuing to build his artistic reputation in India.

That wider global movement since the late twentieth century has in turn been decisive for Westerners’ first encounters with Indian music. My own happened many years before meeting Vijay: an all-night concert at Dartington Hall in the mid-1980s, which featured world-class Indian artists resident at Dartington, or domiciled elsewhere in the UK, or on tour from the subcontinent. ‘First encounters with world music are never isolated, passing events’, Bohlman reminds us; they engender a new awareness that ‘seldom leaves us untouched, rather it transforms us, often deeply’ (2002: 2, 1). True: that night opened me up to Indian music in a way that I never expected and that would never leave me. I was then a doctoral student researching the music of English composer Michael Tippett (1905–98), and it would be another fifteen years before I would take up Hindustani classical music as a practice; and then only tentatively while I developed my career as a lecturer in western music theory and analysis at Newcastle University. My first teacher was a guru from the earlier incarnation of Dr and Dr A’s Gurukulproject in Newcastle—a highly versatile Bengali musician (both vocalist and tabla player) called Arun Debnath. But not long after I got off the starting blocks, the venture folded, and our emergent community was without a teacher for a couple of years, until the doctors put out feelers to India and Vijay was hired.

Soon after our introduction, I took my first lesson with him. ‘You know Rāg Yaman?’, he asked. ‘Yes’, I replied. And so we began—‘Piyā kī najariyā …’. I realised from the start that Vijay’s teaching was going to involve a step change from what I had previously encountered—even closer to the face-to-face guru-śiṣyā paramparā in which knowledge is transmitted orally. My notebook, into which my previous teacher had neatly written compositions, exercises, sequences of tāns and so on, was now my responsibility should I want to continue using it. It quickly became strewn with my own chaotic jottings as I struggled to make on-the-fly notations of what Vijay was singing to me. But I have welcomed this as part of a different dialogue, which we have evolved over some twenty years on and off. As from my previous guruji, I have learned from Vijay a range of rāgs and compositions; but also, because we have had more years together, an ever-stronger sense of gāyakī—vocal style—and of the deeper learning culture of Indian classical music.

Our relationship has been a complex one: not quite the straightforward guru-śiṣyā model, partly because I am about a decade older than Vijay, partly because of our different personalities and cultural standpoints, and partly because of my own professional position as a university professor of music. At the same time, when I take tālīm from him, I sit at his feet like any other student, and submit to his guidance, encouragement, and sometimes chastening judgements. My periodic experiences of learning with other gurus, during workshops or field trips to India, have only deepened our connection, because those activities have deepened my relationship with the culture of Hindustani music, and ultimately this is of a piece with the bond between guru and śiṣyā.

We have become friends and collaborators, Vijay and I. Among other things, we have worked together to introduce Hindustani classical music to students at Newcastle University. Rāgs Around the Clock, which comes out of this experience, is perhaps our most significant joint venture to date, as well as being a document of our guru-śiṣyā relationship. Although there is in one sense a clear division of labour within this project—with Vijay the lead artist on both of the accompanying albums, and myself the author of this book—much of what I write here channels his knowledge and insights, and I trust his presence will be sensed throughout much of the following text. For my own part, this venture has been an important milestone in a re-versioning of myself—an internalised cultural dialogue that contains something of ethnomusicologist Mantle Hood’s notion of bimusicality (Hood 1960). For, I now realise, I have had to become a musician and a musicologist twice over: once in the western classical sphere, and once again in the domain of Hindustani classical music. If that journey has been elicited by something bigger than both Vijay and me, I nonetheless offer praṇām to my guruji for everything he has so generously given his at times wayward śiṣyā.

Introduction: Origins, Overview, Contexts

©2024 David Clarke, CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 https://doi.org/10.11647/OBP.0313.00

This book has been a long time coming. Its roots go back to a teaching initiative implemented by myself (David Clarke, henceforth DC), Vijay Rajput (henceforth VR), and tabla maestro Shahbaz Hussain, at Newcastle University in the late 2000s.Since that time, we have together offered short courses—modules, in UK higher-education parlance—to Music students, under the banner Indian Music in Practice. Our aim is simple: we offer students the opportunity to ‘learn about Indian music by doing it’. To elaborate, and to pinpoint the spirit of the present compendium: we seek to cultivate two-way traffic between practice and theory: between practice informed by technical, historical, cultural and aesthetic knowledge, and knowledge experienced through embodied musical engagement. The practice in question is the guru-śiṣyā paramparā (master-disciple lineage), in which students learn face-to-face from teachers steeped in their musical heritage. Our own students do this not to become professional performers (which would take vastly more than a module or two), but rather to learn through a lived encounter with the music and its cultural and historical situation.

Rāgs Around the Clock develops resources produced during this venture, putting them into the public domain where they may be used and adapted under their Creative Commons licence by students, teachers and practicing musicians—indeed by anyone who enjoys and would like to know more about Hindustani classical music in general and the khayāl vocal style in particular. Further, these materials are supplemented with analytical writings offered as a contribution to research in the field. The compendium is designed both as a set of resources from which readers can select as they wish, and as a monograph which can be read in a sequence essentially progressing from simpler treatments to more complex ones.

As the first word in our title suggests, a key concept is rāg—arguably the fundamental notion in Indian classical music. Rāg elusively denotes a number of things: the way melody in general is organised and shaped; a kind of modal system; a corresponding world of feeling and imagination. Musicians also talk of performing particular rāgs—from a corpus of hundreds (some claim thousands), each with its own name. And an essential part of a vocalist’s or melody-instrumentalist’s training is to acquire a repertoire of rāgs and associated songs or compositions. In the Hindustani tradition, musicians need to know rāgs suitable for various times of the day or night—for each rāg has its appropriate time, or samay. Hence, RāgsAround the Clock. Hence also the title of the book’s first companion album: Rāg samay cakra. Here, VR sings a cycle (cakra) of rāgs according to their performing times, from dawn to the small hours; he also includes two seasonal rāgs—Megh, for the rainy season, and Basant, for the springtime—illustrating a further connection between rāg and cyclic time.

While rāg performances often last the best part of an hour, and sometimes longer, an accomplished musician can capture the essence of a rāg in just a few minutes. On Rāg samay cakra, VR presents fourteen rāgs in capsule performances lasting around five minutes each. The inspiration here was The Raga Guide, a scholarly introduction to Hindustani rāg in book form by Joep Bor (1999) and fellow scholars, with attached CDs comprising concise performances by internationally renowned artists. The musicians follow the example of the earliest recorded performers of Indian music, who, working within the limitations of 78 rpm (revolutions per minute) gramophone technology, showed themselves ‘capable of bringing out the essence of the ragas in just a few minutes’ (Bor et al. 1999: 5). Our initial motive was to curate an album for VR’s students, comprising rāgs he commonly teaches and particularly cherishes. While our own collection is less epic (featuring fourteen rāgs rather than seventy-four), it is more explicitly focused on the particular gāyakī (vocal idiom) of a single artist and on the khayāl style. Despite their brevity and didactic purpose, the performances are fully idiomatic—intended to be musically satisfying in their own right.

To complement these compressed renditions, we also include a second album, Twilight Rāgs from North India, which presents two concert-length performances lasting around thirty-five minutes each. Here, we showcase two rāgs fundamental to Hindustani classical music, and redolent of the passage from night to day and vice versa: Rāg Bhairav, sung at sunrise, and Rāg Yaman, sung after sunset. The long-form presentation gives VR time to explore the musical depths of each rāg through the many facets of the khayāl style.

These two albums, then, form the unifying focus around which the four parts of Rāgs Around the Clock are organised. Part 1 comprises a series of essays that introduce readers to relevant theoretical concepts and contexts, and that illustrate how musical practice is permeated by convention, culture and history. These accounts are mostly short, mirroring the compression of the performances on Rāg samay cakra. Like those recordings, the essays may be imbibed in any order, though they are similarly organised in a meaningful sequence. They present selected concepts that are part of the common working knowledge of musicians. Traditionally, this knowledge has been transmitted within a learning culture shaped by myth as much as scholarship, and no less entwined in ideology than any other musical practice, from whichever corner of the globe. This is not to say that the myths and ideologies of Indian classical music have not been productive or enabling; indeed, they are inseparable from its history and discourses. But it is to point to the need for commentary and analysis also informed by critically aware research—a principle we have sought to uphold by drawing most of our information from peer-reviewed scholarship, and by distinguishing this from the tropes and narratives of the tradition.

Part 2 presents supporting materials for Rāg samay cakra: a commentary on each rāg; a notation of the song (bandiś) chosen for its performance; and a transliteration and translation of the text, produced in collaboration with Jonathan Katz and Imre Bangha. On the one hand, these materials serve as a resource for students wanting to learn (or learn about) these rāgs and their bandiśes. On the other hand, this collection adds to numerous other published examples of rāg curation in online and offline formats. The most eminent of these include not only The Raga Guide, but also Suvarnalata Rao and Wim van der Meer’s website, Music in Motion(https://autrimncpa.wordpress.com/), which presents annotated transcriptions playable in real time of commissioned rāg recordings by world-class artists. To these we may add Patrick Moutal’sA Comparative Study of Selected Hindustānī Rāga-s (1997/1991) and its related website (http://www.moutal.eu/); and Nicolas Magriel and Lalita du Perron’s magisterial The Songs of Khayāl (2013), whose second volume presents painstaking transcriptions and sound clips of numerous bandiśes from historic recorded performances. Valuable examples of non-academic online collections include Ocean of Ragas by Sudhir V. Gadre (http://www.oceanofragas.com/) and Tanarang by Prakash Vishwanath Ringe and Vishwajeet Vishwanath Ringe (http://www.tanarang.com/).

In Parts 3 and 4 of Rāgs Around the Clock, I (DC) offer detailed commentaries on the book’s two companion albums in a series of article-length essays that explore the different stages of a rāg performance. Part 3 revisits Rāg samay cakra: in separate sections, I explore the questions ‘How do you sing an ālāp?’ and ‘How do you sing a choṭākhayāl?’ These are questions of obvious practical relevance to performers; and this way of couching things similarly invites listeners to understand the music from the singer’s perspective. It also seeks to abstract some of the deeper principles of khayāl through close analysis of VR’s performances. In what is one of the book’s main research strands, I attempt to codify these principles as a set of theoretical rubrics in order to formalise what gurus convey orally and demonstrate musically to their students. At the same time, this inquiry builds in its own critique of the status of such rubrics. On the one hand, they tantalisingly point to a possible performance grammar that Hindustani musicians might unconsciously imbibe during their long training. On the other hand, when tested against practice, such rubrics sometimes become fuzzy or provisional; their status tends toward the heuristic—a term I use a lot in this book, appropriately enough, given that pedagogy is among its subjects.

These and other ideas are pursued further in Part 4, which considers the second album, Twilight Rāgsfrom North India. In Section 4.2, I extend the analysis of choṭākhayāl principles from Part 3, this time looking at VR’s extended drut khayāl from his Bhairav performance. Among other things, I explore the phenomenology of the khayāl performer as they respond to the perpetual question: what do I do next? In an adaptation of ideas from Daniel Dennett’s multiple drafts theory of consciousness (1991), I conjecture whether every rubric or principle of performance might not vie for selection at any given moment within a pandemonium of possibilities operating below the threshold of consciousness.

To dramatise a little: what begins to emerge here is the thought that to perform khayāl involves a negotiation between the forces of order, regulated by convention, and the energy of the inchoate, simmering in the unconscious of the individual performer. I speculate about this phenomenology further in a dialogue with my fellow śiṣyāSudipta Roy in the Epilogue of this book; but before this, in Section 4.3, I thematise similar tensions in an analysis of VR’s baṛākhayāl from his Yaman performance on Twilight Rāgs. I seek to do justice to this, the weightiest stage of a khayāl performance, by showing how its essence lies in a deep-rooted tension between metrical and anti-metrical orderings of time—as captured in the terms nibaddhand anibaddh.

It is in the nature of Indian classical music that no artist is an iconoclast; rather each adds their personal voice to the panoply of their forebears and contemporaries. So too with Indian-music scholarship—including the present collaboration between VR and myself: what is new is not a paradigm-shifting reset of known parameters, but rather a re-synthesisof received understanding shaped by our individual backgrounds and by our longstanding guru-śiṣyā relationship. Viewed within the wider musicological landscape, RāgsAround the Clock joins a growing tradition of collaboration between Indian and western musical and musicological investigators. Our predecessors (and their works) include Neil Sorrell and sāraṅgīplayerRam Narayan (1980); Martin Clayton and khayāl singer Veena Sahasrabuddhe (1998); sarodplayer Ali Akbar Khan and George Ruckert (2021/1998); and dhrupad singer Ritwik Sanyal and Richard Widdess (2004). Such cross-cultural collaborations matter. They matter in the wider global dissemination of one of the world’s significant classical traditions, and they matter in signifying a maturation of the western reception of Indian music; each work enriches that tradition by creating new knowledge and perspectives. We hope that the musical and intellectual contribution of Rāgs Around the Clock will in its own way play a part in this continuing inter-cultural dialogue.