The Music of Hindostan c10.24

c10.24

If we could treat it as in D minor, with a mere D drone without harmonies, we should be happier; the last bar would then have finality. But the drone is G, and for us this leaves the tune in the air. It takes a long time before we become accustomed to this queer way of looking at things, and can take it as it presents itself. We keep wishing to accommodate the tune by appropriate harmonies at this or that point, and do not easily realize that these introduce subsidiary modes (which we can, however, in virtue of those harmonies, subsume under the main one), but that a change of drone (without harmonies), by introducing a subsidiary mode, merely destroys the principal mode.