The Music of Hindostan c12.3

c12.3

MUSIC has been called a universal language, and no doubt, in the deepest sense, it is. But just as no one language can really be common to all peoples because it will be pronounced differently in different mouths, so the very same notes will be sung by different throats in such a way as to be unrecognizable to us. This is conspicuously the case with Indian singing, in which all the distinctions of colour which we should get from notes in simultaneity has to be extracted from notes in succession. A note, G, has for us hundreds of different colours according to its harmony, such as, for instance: