II. MUSIC

A concert in India—Music and the dance—Musicians—Scale and—forms—Themes—Music and philosophy

An American traveler, permitted to intrude upon a concert in Madras, found an audience of some two hundred Hindus, apparently all Brahmans, seated some on benches, some on a carpeted floor, listening intently to a small ensemble beside which our orchestral mobs would have seemed designed to make themselves heard on the moon. The instruments were unfamiliar to the visitor, and to his provincial eye they looked like the strange and abnormal products of some neglected garden. There were drums of many shapes and sizes, ornate flutes and serpentine horns, and a variety of strings. Most of these pieces were wrought with minute workmanship, and some were studded with gems. One drum, the mridanga, was formed like a small barrel; both ends were covered with a parchment whose pitch was changed by tightening or loosening it with little leather thongs; one parchment head had been treated with manganese dust, boiled rice and tamarind juice in order to elicit from it a peculiar tone. The drummer used only his hands—sometimes the palm, sometimes the fingers, sometimes the merest finger-tips. Another player had a tambura, or lute, whose four long strings were sounded continuously as a deep and quiet background for the melody. One instrument, the vina, was especially sensitive and eloquent; its strings, stretched over a slender metal plate from a parchment-covered drum of wood at one end to a resounding hollow gourd at the other, were kept vibrating with a plectrum, while the player’s left hand etched in the melody with fingers moving deftly from string to string. The visitor listened humbly, and understood nothing.

Music in India has a history of at least three thousand years. The Vedic hymns, like all Hindu poetry, were written to be sung; poetry and song, music and dance, were made one art in the ancient ritual. The Hindu dance, which, to the beam in the Occidental eye, seems as voluptuous and obscene as Western dancing seems to Hindus, has been, through the greater part of Indian history, a form of religious worship, a display of beauty in motion and rhythm for the honor and edification of the gods; only in modern times have the devadasis emerged from the temples in great number to entertain the secular and profane. To the Hindu these dances were no mere display of flesh; they were, in one aspect, an imitation of the rhythms and processes of the universe. Shiva himself was the god of the dance, and the dance of Shiva symbolized the very movement of the world.*

Musicians, singers and dancers, like all artists in India, belonged to the lowest castes. The Brahman might like to sing in private, and accompany himself on a vina or another stringed instrument; he might teach others to play, or sing, or dance; but he would never think of playing for hire, or of putting an instrument to his mouth. Public concerts were, until recently, a rarity in India; secular music was either the spontaneous singing or thrumming of the people, or it was performed, like the chamber music of Europe, before small gatherings in aristocratic homes. Akbar, himself skilled in music, had many musicians at his court; one of his singers, Tansen, became popular and wealthy, and died of drink at the age of thirty-four.¹¹ There were no amateurs, there were only professionals; music was not taught as a social accomplishment, and children were not beaten into Beethovens. The function of the public was not to play poorly, but to listen well.¹²

For listening to music, in India, is itself an art, and requires long training of ear and soul. The words may be no more intelligible to the Westerner than the words of the operas which he feels it his class duty to enjoy; they range, as everywhere, about the two subjects of religion and love; but the words are of little moment in Hindu music, and the singer, as in our most advanced literature, often replaces them with meaningless syllables. The music is written in scales more subtle and minute than ours. To our scale of twelve tones it adds ten “microtones,” making a scale of twenty-two quarter-tones in all. Hindu music may be written in a notation composed of Sanskrit letters; usually it is neither written nor read, but is passed down “by ear” from generation to generation, or from composer to learner. It is not separated into bars, but glides in a continuous legato which frustrates a listener accustomed to regular emphases or beats. It has no chords, and does not deal in harmony; it confines itself to melody, with perhaps a background of undertones; in this sense it is much simpler and more primitive than European music, while it is more complex in scale and rhythm. The melodies are both limited and infinite: they must all derive from one or another of the thirty-six traditional modes or airs, but they may weave upon these themes an endless and seamless web of variation. Each of these themes, or ragas* consists of five, six or seven notes, to one of which the musician constantly returns. Each raga is named from the mood that it wishes to suggest—“Dawn,” “Spring,” “Evening Beauty,” “Intoxication,” etc.—and is associated with a specific time of the day or the year. Hindu legend ascribes an occult power to these ragas; so it is said that a Bengal dancing-girl ended a drought by singing, as a kind of “Rain-drop Prelude,” the Megh mallar raga, or rain-making theme.¹³ Their antiquity has given the ragas a sacred character; he who plays them must observe them faithfully, as forms enacted by Shiva himself. One player, Narada, having performed them carelessly, was ushered into hell by Vishnu, and was shown men and women weeping over their broken limbs; these, said the god, were the ragas and raginis distorted and torn by Narada’s reckless playing. Seeing which, we are told, Narada sought more humbly a greater perfection in his art.¹⁴

The Indian performer is not seriously hampered by the obligation to remain faithful to the raga that he has chosen for his program, any more than the Western composer of sonatas or symphonies is hampered by adhering to his theme; in either case what is lost in liberty is gained in access to coherence of structure and symmetry of form. The Hindu musician is like the Hindu philosopher; he starts with the finite and “sends his soul into the infinite”; he embroiders upon his theme until, through an undulating stream of rhythm and recurrence, even through a hypnotizing monotony of notes, he has created a kind of musical Yoga, a forgetfulness of will and individuality, of matter, space and time; the soul is lifted into an almost mystic union with something “deeply interfused,” some profound, immense and quiet Being, some primordial and pervasive reality that smiles upon all striving wills, all change and death.

Probably we shall never care for Hindu music, and never comprehend it, until we have abandoned striving for being, progress for permanence, desire for acceptance, and motion for rest. This may come when Europe again is subject, and Asia again is master. But then Asia will have tired of being, permanence, acceptance and rest.