The Music of Hindostan c10.21

c10.21

The modulation comes at (*a*) in the form of a pathetic flattening of the obvious note, and at (*b*) as a heightening of the meaning by a shift of the melodic centre of gravity. Every musician feels the effect at (*a*) to be quite different from that at (*b*); the first is a difference of scale, the second of mode, and both involve a temporary change of key; the first is like a mechanical, the second like a chemical change. Without some such connecting link as this with our own music we are apt to look on unusual scales and modes, especially when they display such intricacy as the Indian scale (*grāma*) and mode (*mūrchana*) and individualized mode (*rāga*), as merely weird and fanciful. They are, however, formulas which are doing all they can to express the facts of unharmonized melody, if we will let them; and we should approach them in that spirit if we were not hindered by our harmonic preconceptions. For we have to forget a good deal before we hear the beauty in such as this: