The Music and Musical Instruments of Southern India and the Deccan c9.7

c9.7

Very little of the good or classical music of India is heard by Europeans. What is usually played to them consists, as Colonel Meadows Taylor very truly remarks, of modern ditties, sung by ill-instructed, screaming, dancing women, at crowded native durbars, marriages, and other ceremonials. And when this is the case, it does not cause much surprise to hear native music often described as abominable, and devoid of all melody. But music of great intrinsic beauty nevertheless exists, and only requires to be heard by an unprejudiced ear to be appreciated. Throughout India music and poetry go hand in hand. Their influence may be seen and felt in almost every phase of native life, from the palace of the râjah to the humble dwelling of the ryot. Music has there been developed to a degree far greater than has been generally recognised in Europe. It is there felt to be a means of passionate expression, such as is apparently unknown amongst nations farther East. And indeed the very soul of all Indian music may be said to be râga—which in its literal sense means *that which creates passion*. And that this has been fully appreciated in Europe would seem to be evident, for a musical reviewer writing in the *Athenæum*, and contrasting the music of India with that of Japan and Siam, recently wrote: “In the Indian Peninsula we are really in another world. We exchange a music in which noise and dry executive skill prevail for one vibrating with sentiment and passion, and that combines a refined execution with the highly nervous organization that makes the poetic artist. Such a one was a Jeypore been player (*been*—a kind of vina), who was to be heard, but we fear was not much heard, at a little exhibition called ‘India in London,’ in 1886. To go from one of the clever Siamese ranat players of the Inventions Exhibition the year before to this man, was to quit the atmosphere of a desert for one redolent of sweet air and flower scents. The Hindu chromatic scale, from which the numerous modes and melody types are selected, does not appear to differ from our own. As there is no harmony, slight differences may pass without notice. Very much of Hindu music impresses the European as being in the minor scale; but deflections in the stringed instruments, and possible accommodations in the wind, introduce an enharmonic elaboration that defies notation.² And here it might be interesting to quote the opinion of a learned native gentleman:³ “Many of the Hindus themselves,” he writes, “labour under a false impression concerning the difference between Indian and European music, even as to the employment of tones and semitones. The opinions held by so many natives, that pieces played upon the piano or harmonium are to them discordant, can be easily accounted for thus: they are simply confused—being unaccustomed to anything but simple melody—when they hear five or six notes played in chords. The chief difference seems to me to be that the Hindus prefer melody simply, while to European ears melody is preferred when clothed, as it were, with harmony of some sort.”